On the Forum

If you are familiar with Design Addict, you surely noticed that there are a lot of talented people who express their opinion and questioning in our Forum. We have decided, every now and then, to draw your attention on subjects which seems to us worthy of interest.

So here are the subjects of this week:

Real Estate and Design

Is High Concept Engineering Eclipsing Design in Architecture?

And another one just for fun: laughably crap replica

 Picture by Brent

tags: modern architecture, contemporary architecture, forum, furniture, essays
add comment print send del.icio.us digg technorati

New David Report bulletin

The David Report Bulletin is a quarterly trend report with a design perspective and a humanistic approach. The latest issue is called 'The Sustainable Wheel':
It’s important to have a holistic mindset when talking about sustainable design. Quite often ecological matters are overbalanced. In this bulletin David Report is describing an imaginary wheel (created by Designboost) which could work as a tool for designers, companies and organisations when defining sustainable design. You will also find an interview with designer researcher Jennifer Leonard.

tags: sustainable, essays
add comment print send del.icio.us digg technorati

Arne Jacobsen

Text by Koen De Winter


 

 

Between his birth on February 11th 1902 and his death on March 3rd 1971 Arne Jacobsen had a most remarkable life and professional career. He became not only Denmark's most prominent architect and prolific designer but also one of the most well-known functionalists in the world.

Only 37 years before reaching this unique status a Danish newspaper, commenting on the newly finished "Stelling" house, had written that he should be banned from building for life and one of his masterpieces the SAS Royal hotel (1958-1960) in Denmark's capital Copenhagen won on it's inauguration a public competition for "the ugliest building in the city".

Read More...

tags: Arne Jacobsen, essays, Koen De Winter
designers: Arne Jacobsen, Koen De Winter
1 comment print send del.icio.us digg technorati

On Seeing Design as Redesign

An Exploration of a Neglected Problem in Design Education
 
By Jan MICHL
Department of Industrial Design, OSLO SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE, Norway
Jan Michl's website | Jan Michl's e-mail
 
 
“… every picture owes more to other pictures painted before than it owes to nature.”  E.H. Gombrich, art historian, 1954
 
“… one of the most important properties of all fields of production [is] the permanent presence of the past of the field, which is endlessly recalled even in the very breaks which dispatch it to the past.”  Pierre Bourdieu, sociologist, 1984
 
“Any new thing that appears in the made world is based on some object already in existence. (…) each new technological system emerges from an antecedent system, just as each new discrete artifact emerges from antecedent artifacts.”  George Basalla, historian of technology, 1985
 
“ if anybody were to start where Adam started, he would not get further than Adam did…”  Karl Popper, philosopher, 1979
 
We talk of design day in and day out – but is design really the right word for what designers do? This article [1] is based on a sense that we lack a perspective encompassing more than the individual designer’s creative activity and more than merely the most recent designer’s contribution – in other words, more than the term design is able to embody. We also need a perspective that will capture the fundamental incompleteness of all design activity, the fact that, contrary to what the word design is normally seen as implying, no solution will ever be the ultimate solution.

Read More...

tags: essays
add comment print send del.icio.us digg technorati

Thoughts on originality

An essay by Koen De Winter

Many people, both on the active and on the consuming side of the design community, share a restless fascination for "originality". This fascination is more than the usual form of design entertainment provided by design magazines and exhibitions. For nearly a century, originality has been closely linked to creativity. It is often seen as the inevitable result of that creative process. As in other creative activities like writing, composing and sometimes cooking, it has also become the ultimate criteria for the use of creativity in the development of products. There is little doubt about the fact that even in Western culture this longing for originality is a relatively recent phenomena. Tracing its origins is a task for social anthropologists and not the purpose of this essay. One constructive hypothesis is that the willingness of the modern movement to establish new standards and break with the past "at any cost", has not only generated new standards but also a new vocabulary in which "new", "original" and "innovative" have been redefined. Instead of defining the character of an object, they started to define original as a quality. To some extend art historians have re-written Western European art history in function of the innovative role different artist played in their times, but there is not much evidence that this was indeed the real motivation at the time.
Skill and craftsmanship, mastering perspective and depth, conformity to the requests of the patron and professional competitiveness were more important motivations than the search of originality. Even in the early XXth century originality did not play a role in the relationship between Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso when they both were the pillars under the cubist movement. In fact their collages and paintings of that period are almost identical.
Over the past thirty five years, which coincides with my years of practicing industrial design, I have been intrigued with our continuous search for originality, our fascination and admiration for its results, and with the fact that reaching an "original" result has never been questioned against the real aim and goal of our profession: user satisfaction. In fact, promotion of design, originally intended to enlighten the public on the benefits of useful and beautiful products, has slowly become a promotion of originality at any cost including the neglect of one of the pillars of the modern movement: making good and beautiful industrial products accessible to all; along with the neglect of informing the users about good, useful and environmentally responsible products.

Read More...

tags: essays, Koen De Winter
designers: Koen De Winter
add comment print send del.icio.us digg technorati

great dane furniture
Helen, 3 days ago:
"The Egg Chair was designed by Arne Jacobsen in 1958 in his typical style, where there was no fear of..."

william-holden-caulfield, on April 30:
"Whenever I see one of these clever-idea folding bikes, I say to myself, "Clever idea, perhaps s..."

Riv, on April 28:
"I'd really like to see the brief that he was using. There are lots of interesting concept bikes, ve..."

olive, on April 28:
"Wow, that is really cool looking, what an excellent design! I just wonder aboutthe comfort of the s..."

Jessica, on April 24:
"Very nice and interesting film on the felting process"

Heath, on April 23:
"yes, to do something new with a cantileverered chair like this astounds me. I wonder if the designe..."

Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
    123
4 5 6 7 8 9 10
11 12 13 14 15 16 17
18 19 20 21 22 23 24
25 26 27 28 29 30 31
accessories artifort auction audio awards books ceramic charles eames competitions conference contemporary architecture electronic essays events exhibitions fabric food forum furniture herman miller ingo maurer kids koen de winter konstantin grcic lighting modern architecture music new products new technologies news outdoor project ray eames sport sustainable tableware timepieces toys transportation
Click here to subscribe to the RSS feed of this blog (what is a feed?).
Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog.



MOODERN - Design for every mood
Droog Design, Moooi, Tom Dixon, Carl Hansen and more.
eRoomService - DESIGNER MODERN FURNITURE
Contemporary Furniture from world's most renowned designers for modern home.
CONCEPT FURNITURE
modern European furniture online.