Top Down/Bottom Up

• Jasper Morrison's Basel Chair. Supernormal, super gorgeous.
  
  
• Morrison's aforementioned chair reminded me (on a visceral level) of the iconic Thonet Chair. I had no idea that it was designed in 1859, as a flat pack (almost 100 years before IKEA existed), and has sold over 30 million to date. Michael Thonet was bentwood, before bentwood was even cool.
  
  
• Joris Laarman's Wirepod decorative power strip, the first in a series of Artecnica products called Wiremore, which will make electrical cables more, rather than less, visible. Interesting concept, even if more than a bit idealistic.
  
  
• I love this song off the first Wackies Sampler: Wayne Jarret "You and I"
  
  
• "Nah pop, no style." Uptown Top Ranking by Althea & Donna is such a tight tune. Ever tighter is watching these two classy ladies perform it live.
  
  
• Summer 2008 is the summer of mankles.
  
  
• Fuck the pig away.
  

• Brilliant new work from Aaron Koblin (& Takashi Kawashima): "Ten Thousand Cents" is a digital artwork that creates a representation of a $100 bill. Using a custom drawing tool, thousands of individuals working in isolation from one another painted a tiny part of the bill without knowledge of the overall task. Workers were paid one cent each via Amazon's Mechanical Turk distributed labor tool. The total labor cost to create the bill, the artwork being created, and the reproductions available for purchase are all $100. The work is presented as a video piece with all 10,000 parts being drawn simultaneously. The project explores the circumstances we live in, a new and uncharted combination of digital labor markets, "crowdsourcing," "virtual economies," and digital reproduction.
  

• Allstreets by Ben Fry is, of course, a gorgeous visualization. However it's also a depressing documentation to the car-obsessed culture that America has fetishized since WWII.

  5/02/2008

  Anyone can be free.

It's been awhile since we've talked about design.

• Paris-based designer/artist Arik Levy gave a lecture at the MCA last night, and it turns out he coincidentally has a show opening at Wright this Friday, entitled "Absent Nature". As well as a Martino Gamper (?!!?!!) exhibition in May. Very nice to see global design talent being exhibited in Chicago galleries. Up next: the Bouroullecs at Monique Meloche gallery?
  
  
• Chen & Karlsson's "trash can" is one of those products that's so simple, so obvious and so painfully smart that it makes me want to quit. Fucking brilliant.
  
  
• Maarten Baas: Plastic Chair in Wood. I'm so glad Maarten is able to take his crazy furniture dreams and make them a reality. I'm just happy his pieces can exist.
  
  
• Parisian hipsters 5.5 Designers made a broom from a branch. (detail view) Nice.
  
  
• Sawed-off USB key. Brilliant. The USB key is the new designer-staple-- everyone is designing one and formal and conceptual possibilities are most likely endless.
  
  
• Wästberg. A new Swedish lighting company with a great opening 'manifesto' on how man overilluminates his spaces, as well as 4 remarkable new lamps. Sublime minimal forms from James Irvine and Claesson Koivisto Rune, but an especially notable lamp from Ilse Crawford... oddly awkward and strangely beautiful.
  
  
• Twine Table by Wis Design. Cute as a button. (Sorry)
  
  

  4/23/2008

  Toughguy

  4/07/2008

  Deadliest Catch

On a recent flight back to Chicago from Virginia I sat next to the most inspiring and interesting dude. We were flying on Southwest, a budget airline that boards with a first-come-first-served method as opposed to a seat assignment. Luckily we get our own row, but near the end of boarding a twenty-something guy takes the aisle seat next to me. Right away I can tell he's a total Virginian gentleman: in a mild Southern accent he asks if he can take the seat, and he offers to grab some pillows from the overhead bin for Emily (who was still getting over the flu). What a decent dude, I think. I also noticed he had a sleeve of sailing-related tattoos on his arm, but I wasn't sure how that played into his obvious Southern-Virginian persona.

After he starts to strike up some conversation, (the typical 'where ya headed, whattaya do' stuff) it turns out he's from Lynchburg, VA but actually makes his living as a commercial fisherman on a boat in the Bering Sea. I was seriously impressed-- the guy's a real-deal fisherman on the high seas! He was on his way to Seattle, where he'll board a vessel and fish for halibut and black cod in the Pacific, all the way up to Alaska (and dungeness crab when the fish season's over). Not only is this one of the worlds most dangerous jobs, it's also quite lucrative, apparently. He's been doing it for 6 years-- spending the majority of the year on the sea and coming back to VA at the end of the season-- and says he's well on his way to 'retire' someday soon and buy a house in Virginia with cash. Brilliant. At this point, I'd never seen the show Deadliest Catch, but I began to get a sense of how seriously dangerous the job is-- as he said it, "It's not if the boat will sink, it's when". In fact, he lost some friends last year when their boat, The Ocean Challenger, when down-- he was actually a member of of the majority-Virginian crew mere weeks before the tragedy, but had decided to take a week off, since it was the end of the season. While he was getting some work done on his tattoo, the boat he just left was hit hit by a storm and capsized in 3-story-tall waves. Truly chilling.

What inspired me was the realness and honesty of his profession, but also interesting was his ability to talk about his career choice in almost a philosophical manner-- not only was he a hard working guy, but he had really figured out his philosophy on life. It was the most interesting airplane conversation I have ever had, and I'm still inspired. Best of luck Jeff, may you stay safe on your future voyages, and may the fishing season treat you well.

  4/07/2008

  Whispered secrets

• I love the emptiness captured in Peter Baker's photography.
  
  
• Carlo Rossi bottles = furniture.
  
  
• Do this.
  
  
• Band name of the week: PUNCH YOU IN THE FACE BIG!
  
  
• Pole's latest podcast set for Resident Advisor is an absolute must-download. A brilliant blend of classic dub reggae & chest-crushing dubstep, all blended within Pole's minimalist echo-chamber.
  
  
• Naz of Weightshift + GB (and a friend as well) uses Pinch as an example in his recent South By Southwest presentation on "Design is in the Details". I'm flattered!

  3/25/2008

  Bike Lock 2.0

Core77.com's One Hour Design Challenge: Design a better bike lock in one hour or less. I figured that since hipsters love to post pictures of their bikes on the web, why not let them post pictures of the thieves that steal them?

This image has been resized. Click for the full version.

  3/19/2008

  Slink & Stop

• The Design Trust for Public Space is "dedicated to improving the design, utility, and understanding of New York City's parks, plazas, streets, and public buildings." I'm obsessed with the idea of doing design for the public space, so this organization hits right in the sweet spot for me. Their most highly profiled project thus far has been the research and redesign surrounding the NYC Taxi Project-- an amazing project (involving many designers, including Smart Design) that they have published entirely online in PDF format. It's quite a read-- theres a lot of sharp insights and smart recommendations in that document! The work and ideas on this site are so prolific and interesting, that I'm a bit overwhelmed at trying to sum it up in a micro blog post-- just click the link and see how design can actually affect peoples lives in a non-consumer context. I hope that someday I can use my passion for design-thinking to focus on public spaces.

• BARACK OBAMA IS YOUR NEW BICYCLE.
  
  
• Nicholas Felton is an amazing communication designer who does gorgeous info graphics for publications like Metropolis and the New York Times (as megafone), and creates really sharp "Annual Reports" about his life every year. I love it.
  
  
• I'm addicted to Bee Comix-- specifically Motel Art Improvement Service.
  
  
• Garfield Minus Garfield: "Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolor disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life? Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against lonliness in a quiet American suburb." A sheer genius concept.
  
  
• Album of the month: Pole - Steingarten. Pole's first three albums have always been favorites of mine-- crackling and hissing, barely-there, minimal dub that's always entranced me with its nuanced textures. This album builds on those days-- it's definitely influenced by minimal dub-- but now it has a discernible backbone. One of my favorite tracks is the album closer- Pferd: Massive sub-bass, a tight snapping rhythm line, delicate synth tinkles, and droning loops build over time... with melodica, distorted bits, and snippets of-- (could it really be) guitar form a mild feeling of paranoid tension. Brilliant.
  

  3/05/2008