'101i bicycle' by Vesa Jääskö for Helkama Velox (2005)	'Aki Choklat for Lahtiset' by Aki Choklat for Huopaliike Lahtinen (2009)

What is luxury today? Design Forum Finland’s summer exhibition studies modern varieties and phenomena of luxury. “Luxury” has traditionally referred to opulence, abundance and rare expensive products and designer brands. Today's luxury products emphasize above all good design and their focus is shifting from the objects as such to their different, and even surprising, contexts.

'Nokia Ltd Edition city rubber boots' by Nina Auren & Nokian Jalkineet team for Nokia (2007-2008)	'Puro bathtub' by Arup Product Design for Durat (2007)
'Sense Light Swing' by Alexander Lervik for Saas Instruments (2005)	'Suunto Lumi Florette wristop computer' by Elizabeth Salonen for Suunto (2006)

The concept of luxury has become enmeshed in our everyday lives, while at the same time it is continuously changing. Luxury is being associated more and more with personal choices and traditional, time-consuming skills of the hand and natural, ecological materials but also with new technological applications. Information on the designer and maker, and the working process, makes products unique and desirable.

'X-Frame coffee table' by Tapio Wirkkala for Artek (1958, relaunch 2008)	'Koti dining table' by Saara Renvall for Lundia

Luksus 09
Exhibition from June 12 to - August 30 2009
Design Forum Finland, Erottajankatu 7, Helsinki

StudioDesk is a traditional workspace with a modern twist. It is specifically designed to offer laptop users a clutter-free working environment. Its sliding top surface uncovers a large easily accessed storage compartment that completely conceals all one’s peripheral hardware and their accompanying cables.

Designed by Bluelounge, a multidisciplinary design studio founded in 1999 by designers Dominic Symons and Melissa Sunjaya, with offices both in Los Angeles and Jakarta, Indonesia.

The Ontario College of Art & Design (OCAD) has announced the winners of its collaborative industrial design competition with 3M Canada. Third-year Industrial Design students were asked to create new Scotch tape and Post-it Note Pop-up dispensers.
The competition was incorporated into the curriculum of OCAD’s Industrial Design program, and all students in this field were required to create at least one of the two products. To do so, they worked with representatives from 3M Canada throughout the course of the past semester, mimicking the marketplace's back-and-forth dialogue between designers and their clients. These advisors came to check in on the students every two weeks or so, offering their advice and helping students focus their ideas. They also provided the designers with a brief that covered subjects such as cost requirements and the products' target markets, and they told the students that their designs had to integrate an environmental component into the manufacture, life, and user cycles.

Once the designs were complete, approximately fifteen of them were selected to move on to the final round of judging.  After some serious deliberation and some narrowing down of the finalists, Matthew Pacione and Scott Currie were declared the winners of the Scotch tape and Post-it Note contests, respectively. For winning, they each received a $3,000 cash prize (second-place prizes of $1,000 were also given to Catalina Navarro and Arash Sadr).
Pacione and Currie’s final products may not seem that detailed at first glance, but each took many hours of deliberation and numerous variations of their models.

Scotch Tape dispenser by Matthew Pacione (photo: Lino Ragno)
To build his Scotch tape design, Pacione used a starch-based biological plastic and finished it with a biodegradable paint, but he says that his product can easily be made out of aluminum or cork. Despite the stringent requirements that the design brief laid out, the work looks vastly different from many of the other designs. According to Pacione, this occurred because even though 3M Canada “gave us a very narrow, focused demographic…within that, there’s still a range of users, so there was some freedom in that sense.”

Post-it Note Pop-up dispenser by Scott Currie (photo: Lino Ragno)
Unlike Pacione’s model, Currie’s Post-it Note dispenser offers a much more basic aesthetic—but it certainly took as much work to create. “It seems simple,” he said, “but it took a lot of prototypes.” His model is built with an aluminum top and a cork base, and it took him quite some time to find a cover weight that wasn’t so heavy that it prevented notes from getting out but also wasn’t so light that it came off every time a Post-it was taken from the holder. When explaining his product, he notes that his simple design was a conscious decision that was chosen because it allows 3M Canada to use whatever material they want for the base. “I was trying to keep it simple and at the same time let 3M decide what they want to do with aesthetics,” he said.

On top of their cash prizes, both Pacione and Currie’s designs will be manufactured by 3M Canada—quite the reward for a class project. Although the launch of these isn’t expected until 2010, those who were able to check out OCAD's Graduate Exhibition this past weekend were able to get a sneak peek of them in person, as well as some of the other final-round designs.

Via Torontoist

Interview Magazine has just posted online a few interviews they did with Marc Newson, Konstantin Grcic, Ron Arad, Shigeru Ban and Alasdhair Willis for their May Issue.

From David Coggins' interview of Konstantin Grcic:
"Design is a serious thing—it’s not just fun. It demands concentration, and it’s about responsibility. At the same time, for me, the hard reality is sometimes so comical because it’s about life, isn’t it? Everyday life, and how all of us struggle with life, and in this material world we struggle to come to terms with objects—something we have to sit down on, or open a latch on, or all of these essential kinds of things. I’ve always been fascinated by observing the relationship between human beings and objects. And, really, how do we come to terms with them? How intelligent are we? Is there a category of objects that are helpful and accommodating and accessible? Because there are objects that are totally the opposite and they are here to make you look like a fool, or they make you uncomfortable. I guess there is a certain form of humor in my work. It’s not that I just want to be funny. It’s not something I do deliberately. But when you accept the world with all its perfections and imperfections, and tragic and comic sides, then somehow this humorous aspect is part of it."

Umbrella - Muji (2006)	Lunar - Flos (2008)

Read Peter M. Brant's interview of Marc Newson

Wood Chair - Cappellini (1988)	Bicycles - Biomega (1999-2000)

Read Anthony Haden-Guest's interview of Ron Arad

Restless Shelves (2007)	Well-Tempered Chair (1986)

Read Judith Benhamou-Huet's interview of Shigeru Ban

Seikei University Information Library (2006)	Centre d'Interprétation du Canal Bourgogne (2005)

Read Suzanne Slezin's interview of Alasdhair Willis

Stack by Shay Alkalay (2009) Established and Sons	Track Desk by Mark Holmes (2009) Established and Sons

What qualifies as a crisis? Royal College of Art Design Products students’ Sold Out Shop will offer the stimulus to rethink what a crisis actually is...

George Fereday - Perpetual Crisis Manifesto	Krystian Kowalski - Something out of Nothing

During the Milan Salone 2009, a team of young design students from Platform 10, one of six teaching units within the College’s department, will be taking up residence at the prestigious Seves glassblock showroom in the heart of the city.

Claire Ferreira - Rush Bag	Billur Turan - Crisis Chocolate

The fourteen postgraduate student designers will stage a makeshift Crisis Shop, exhibiting a range of crisis products. The shop layout will embody the very nature of a potential crisis - a canopy, attached by suction pads, hooks and grommets will stretch across the glass surfaces of the showroom. Under extreme tension, the canopy serves to communicate a sense of urgency, a material under stress and physical tension.

The Shop isn’t about making a commodity out of a crisis but investing in the means to respond to crises at large. One man’s crisis is another man’s opportunity. All products in the Crisis Shop are examples of opportunities in disguise.

Maciek Wojcicki - Snooking Corner	Florie Salnot - Plastic Bottle Jewellery

The collective response to this state of alert can be broken down into two clearly defined product categories: those that require an ‘Immediate Response’ and those that opt for ‘Mutations’. The group have deliberately emphasised the ‘closeness’ in crisis and consequently closeness to the body. Subsequent incarnations frequently deal with this through solutions of wear-ability.

Exhibition from April 22 to 27 2009
Showroom Seves glassblock - Via Lodovico il Moro 25/27 -  20143, Milan, Italy

Core77 and Greener Gadgets invited designers to explore the concept of "Greener Gadgets.
The top 50 entries are published online for voting and commenting, and from these the judges will pick the Top 10 to be judged live at the Greener Gadgets Conference in New York City on February 27th.
Voting ends February 20th. Click, get inspired, and vote!

'VE09 Blister Radio' by Klaus Rosburg (United States) The VE09 Blister Radio is made from PLA, a biodegradable, thermoplastic, aliphatic polyester derived from renewable resources such as cornstarch (in the U.S.) or sugarcanes. The solar panel in the back of the clear blister pack recharges the batteries allowing the user to operate the radio without ever opening the clamshell package.
'Blight' by Vincent Gerkens (Belgium) This solar blind creates a link between indoor and outdoor, taking the daylight during the day and giving it back at night. The advantage of the Venetian blind is to have a large surface exposed to sunlight in a small, cumbersome object. With the revolving blades we can follow the course of the sun in order to catch a maximum of energy. Moreover we can adjust the position of the lamp to obtain various lighting effects. The produced energy can be used to supply a computer or other devices, by means of an inverter.
'Power-Hog' by Mathieu Zastawny, Mansour Ourasanah, Tom Dooley, Peter Byar, Elysa Soffer, Mathieu Turpault (United States) Power-Hog is a power consumption metering piggy bank designed to sensitize kids to energy cost associated with running electronics devices. Plug the tail into the outlet and the device into the snout; feed a coin to meter 30 minutes of use.
'eMetric' by Jason Deperro (United States) eMetric is an office power management system that allows teams of conscientious workers to control and learn about their electronics' energy consumption - saving energy and money.