Every year I’m hosting a rose event called Rosor på Falsterbonäset (Roses at the Falsterbo Peninsula) in my hometown Falsterbo. I’m doing it together with the local nature preservation organisation (where I’m the vice president) and it concerns old roses, one thing I would not like to live my life without. This years event takes place June 26th at 5pm and we start in my own garden.

We will also visit a couple of other gardens which concentrates on old and English roses. The Scania Rose Society is co-organising the event and Monica Bäckström will talk about (and answering questions) concerning roses and cultivation.

If you are not able to come I’m adding some snapshots from my garden which I took this morning. Just let me know if you are in Falsterbo during the rose season (June-July) and a will happily show you my garden.

p.s My cat’s name is Måns…

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Andra bloggar om: rosor, gamla rosor, trädgård, odla

The essence of what Ilse Crawford and her Studioilse does is identity. They create the the big idea behind a brand its emotional values, and then make them visible and tangible through design.

The Olde Bell Inn encompasses a 16th century Tudor barn for big parties, a Malt House for medium gathering and dining rooms for a dozen or more, with parts of the building dating back to 1135.

Now The Olde Bell Inn has been gently transformed and is the first in a family of modern coaching Inns. Using locally sourced food cooked simply; eating drinking and lodgings. Ilse’s line is ‘Local chairs, local cheese’. 25 minutes drive from Heathrow and within hour of central London. You can say that Ilse is re-inventing the traditional English Inn.

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Andra bloggar om: hotell, ilse crawford, design, inredning, möbler, england

APOCALYPSE is a new company founded by industrial designers Petra Lilja and Jenny Nordberg. Based in Malmö, Sweden, they are designing sustainable products and services. The first product, The Soap is made from recycled cooking oil from the numerous Falafel stands around Malmö.
“We look at waste as materials with a history and with a potential new life as a new product”, says Jenny Nordberg. The method of Apocalypse takes the complete life cycle of a product in consideration. “In The Soap we combine the old tradition of making cold processed soap with the use of a modern waste material of our home town”, says Petra Lilja.

The sound track for the release of The Soap is composed by artist Andres Corazon who turned the oil barrels into oil drums.

Here’s the link to the soundtrack. You should definitely listen to it.
andres-corazon-apocalypso-now

Finally a picture from the APOCALYPSE lab!

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Andra bloggar om: hållbar design, malmö, design, falafel

I just read some comments to the latest David Report bulletin called “I shop therefore I am” in “The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption”. It’s a year-long book-as-a-blog experiment in why we choose to consume, or not, written by India based Gaurav Mishra. In a very clear and comprehensible way he is putting together a couple of important trends that in one way or another describes how our consumption pattern are about to change:

- From conspicuous consumption to conscious consumption.
- From brand-consciousness to background-consciousness.
- From synthetic to organic.
- From mass-produced to hand-crafted.
- From global to local.
- From short-term to sustainable.
- From fashionable to durable.
- From valuing things to valuing insights.
- From fitting in/ standing out to being.
- From buying more to buying less.
- From doing more to doing less.
- From multi-tasking to down-shifting.
- From buying to sharing/ exchanging.
- From owning to experiencing.
- From having to giving.

Sounds quite attractive to me… What do you think?

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Andra bloggar om: shopping, konsumtion, trender, kultur

Here follows a couple of image of different projects presented by Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec at the Milan Design Week. The products are Alcove love seat highback for Vitra, Rocs for the Vitra Edition, Steelwood collection for Magis, Pebble for Tectona and Papyrus chair for Kartell.

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Andra bloggar om: design, möbler, inredning, milano, mässa, bouroullec

When the tourist office and the city museum in Ulricehamn, Sweden grew to large for their facilities the municipality asked Kjellgren Kaminsky Architects to design a new building combining the two programs. The building will be a passive house, making it the first museum in the world built with this technique.

SITUATION
The site for the new house is situated in a park next to lake Åsunden. It used to be a railway station before traffic was shut down in the 1980’s. The only remainder of this time is a 15m wide circular hole; the ruins of a dummy plate for locomotives.

PLAN
The circular plan of the building both refers to the context of the site, maximizes the view for the neighboring apartments and is a good starting point for an energy efficient house. The first floor is public with a museum and tourist office, on the second floor there are offices for the staff. In the centre of the house there’s a workshop room with double roof height and skylights.

THE FACADE
Ulricehamn is known for its beautiful wooden architecture, it is also the centre of a historical textile industrial area. We wanted to show this heritage in the building, therefore we developed a facade system with weaved wooden planks.

DESIGN WITH CARE
The project has been part of the “Design med omtanke”-concept, a working method introduced by the region of “Västra Götaland”. The concept helps both architects and builders to design more environmentally and user friendly buildings.

WORLDST FIRST PASSIVE HOUSE MUSEUM
As a part of the environmentally friendly approach the house will be built as a passive house, making it the first museum in the world being built with this technique. No heating system will be used, instead the heat produced by the people and equipment already available in the building will be used for to cover almost all the heating. Part of the energy used for water and electrical equipment will be provided by solar cells installed on the roof.

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Andra bloggar om: arkitektur, hus, hållbarhet, boende, miljö, ulricehamn

Now you can make your green design concepts even greener by sourcing for sustainable building and interior materials at a new material library located in San Francisco and Providence, USA.

Initiated by Matt Grigsby and Joe Gebbia, two graduates from the Rhode island School of Design, Ecolect is a free on-line library that hosts an impressive selection of awareness material, as well as being the portal to a sustainable community. So you can easily discover new solutions for your projects and just as easy share the inspiring result once you are done.

This is a post by New York based David Report contributor John-Michael Ekeblad.

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tags technorati : ecolect material sustainability awareness

Andra bloggar om: hållbarhet, miljö, material, usa

Here follows some images from the Designboost activites during the Hem & Villa fair in Malmö 6-9 February. All in all we produced 21 lectures, 17 workshops, 13 exhibitions, 1 concert. On top of this also a sustainable children’s house. The different activities by Designboost were based on “sustainable design” and took place as an “design orienteering” with a number of stops where the visitors got different kind of knowledge based experiences. Participants included Eero Koivisto, Thomas Sandell, Jan Boris-Möller, Stefan Nilsson, Mats Theselius and Jacques Werup among others. Partners included Alcro, Apple, Artek, Audi, Brio, City of Malmö, Electrolux and Iittala. One of the ideas behind Designboost is to help companies and organisations to conceptualise sustainable design. The different events we are performing, side by side with more regular consulting on the subject, is delivering on our vision: sharing design knowledge.

Further info at the Designboost at Hem and Villa campaign site (unfortunately only in Swedish). If you would like to see more images you can click here.

The Designboost main stage called “at home with Designboost”. It was built as a 50 meter long bamboo kitchen.

Lina Sellgren talking about Feng Shui.

The sustainable children’s house.

The exhibition “sustainable design” in the garden of the children’s house.

The power of play with Brio.

7 small environments as visualisations of the “spokes” of the “sustainable wheel”.

Presentation of the two concepts “against throwawayism” by Iittala and “2nd cycle” by Artek.

Audi as a visualisation of the holistic thoughts behind the “sustainable wheel”.

Presentation of Malmö as a sustainable city.

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tags technorati : design sustainability designboost seminar lectures

Andra bloggar om: design, hållbar utveckling, miljö, mässa, inrending

Next Friday, April 4, issue nine of the David Report Bulletin will be released. The title will be “I shop therefore I am” and it will concern future consumerism and consumption culture. Among other things you will be able to find interesting texts from Kristina Dryza, freelance strategist and designer and Sante Poromaa, teacher at The Zenbuddhist Society in Stockholm. There will also be an interview with Mathilda Tham, guest professor at Beckmans College of Design in Stockholm. Here’s a short introduction text by Sante Poromaa:

“In the future luxury goods will be methods that bring us back the power of our own attention: the power to choose ourselves what we want to notice or not. And there lies the true luxury of the future, to be able to resist shopping and still be happy.”

To be sure to get a notice when “I shop therefore I am” is released please go to the David Report home page and sign up for a subscription. And the best of all, it’s free!

Image by Barbara Kruger.

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tags technorati : david report future consumerism future shopping trends future consumption

Andra bloggar om: david report, trender, framtid, shopping, konsumtion, design

I was reading an article some weeks ago in the Swedish business magazine Dagens Industri which made me a bit confused. The theme was branding (and design). In the article, Stefan Ölander from the branding agency Rewir says; “Today most products and services are exchangeable, it’s branding and communication that make the difference.”

I have a few objections.

My first questions is - could Apple exchange the iPod or iTunes? Could Fritz Hansen exchange the Ant chair? Could Omega exchange the Speedmaster?

My second question is - does he mean that a company can exchange most products without changing the company and its values itself? Like changing into products with bad design, of poor quality, without authenticity which are bad for the environment? Or disposable products that we are not emotional connected to? Or just some smoothed average design that are not iconic and timeless at all? Products made by child labour? And so on…

If we hold for true that a brand is (only) a perception in a consumers mind, the physical deliverance of great products will be even more important; the smell, taste, feel, look and sound. Everything that actually has to do with design. Design is like a “visualization of a business strategy” and products are the true messengers of a brand. Nothing you just replace by snapping the fingers.

Today you can’t diminish the importance of good design. Business executives (and marketers…) that don’t understand the power of design in general and sustainable design in particular will have serious problems in the future. Design is one of the strongest competitive weapons. It can give strong business advantages. Why are so many companies still neglecting the importance of design. Is it just lack of knowledge?

History wise, products were everything during the industrialisation. Later, in the middle of the last century marketing/advertising grew really strong. Then, from the eighties and onwards branding was suddenly the overall solution. I think that we in a way are coming back to where we started. With products, but this time based on the knowledge of the power of design. As an important tool to create the future. Design is even more important in a time when climate changes and injustices are growing. Design can make a difference. It’s sustainable. I don’t think you can say that about marketing or branding…

Maybe you were able to sell anything with simple marketing in the past. Even “canned porridge” as we use to say in Sweden. But it is not like that any longer. You don’t build a brand from only advertising or marketing these days. Because no one believes it any longer, they would even like to pay you to be free from it… Today people are wise and connected. You can only sell a bad product once. Then the rumour is all over. Isn’t that a better world? With the consumers behind the steering wheel?

At David report we believe in building brands with design. We have written about it in two earlier issues of our bulletin called The Credibility Loop and Communication Through Product. Both were released during 2006 but is still as accurate. Read it if you have a minute, or two…

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tags technorati : design branding marketing iconic

Andra bloggar om: design, reklam, marknadsföring, varumärke, varumärken, företag, entreprenörskap