Things can always get better

Norwegian Coppers

2009-11-02T01:48:00.000-08:00

If you happen to be near St. Louis, don’t miss the exhibition ”Lost in Nature” about Jarmund Vigsnaes, one of Norway’s most interesting architectual practices, at the Steinberg Hall Architecture Gallery, Washington University. On display until Nov 29. If not, have a look anyway, here or here.
During 2010 the exhibit will be at the State University of New York (Buffalo, NY, USA), the Museum of Nordic Heritage (Seattle, WA, USA), the Carleton University (Ottawa, Canada) and in Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia).
Image: Svalbard Science Center. In copper.

Textile Times

2009-09-30T06:02:00.000-07:00

Have I told you about Hedvig? She’s an industrial designer, specialized in textiles. And, sadly, that’s far more controversial than you might think. We’re in the year of 2009 and live in country famous for its attempts to achieve equality between men and women. Still, textiles are considerad a “female” material in the “male” industrial design business.
Although this is about to change, according to Hedvig, who wants to give a softer and more human touch to common household devices like radiators and vacuum cleaners.
Her ”Knitted radiator” is made by textile heating cables usually intended for floor heating. And ”Collapsible hoover” is an all textile vacuum cleaner. The fact that the plastic shell is stripped away make it much less energy-intensive to produce than the typical vacuum cleaner. Not to mention that it’s more flexible and lightweight.
These times, there are a lot of reasons to cut the crap. In the design business and elsewhere. And that´s exactly what Hedvig did.

Summer promises

2009-07-03T09:21:00.000-07:00

Green vinyl might seem like a contradiction in terms, as vinyl is a plastic and plastics traditionally are based on oil. But Swedish manufacturer Bolon, who is into woven vinyl flooring, now claim that they will become the first company in the world to switch entirely to using plasticizers based on renewable resources. Sounds promising. I’ll come back to this. But first I’m off for summer holidays. Back in August ➽ September!

Green roof invasion

2009-06-12T07:36:00.000-07:00

Green roofs seem to be in every architects mind for the moment, judging not only from the ongoing exhibition “The Future of Architecture is Green” at Louisiana Museum outside Copenhagen. And of course green roofs do a lot of good, for the climate as well as for the people in the building, who get their own green spot. But are green roofs always for the better? Or are they being used as a form of "greenwrapping" to put buildings where they shouldn't be? Look at Treehugger under slideshows and judge for yourself.

Image: The building hiding under this green roof is the Nanyang University School of Art in Singapore.

House warming

2009-06-07T12:54:00.000-07:00

The world’s first zero carbon emisson house lives in Denmark. The Active House, as it’s called, was developed to be a more comfortable and user-friendly response to the Passive House, which has set the standard for sustainable living in the last decade. Passive houses rely on incredibly effective insulation, plus a heat exchanger that warms fresh air on the way in during winter. A true Passive House has no conventional heating system because, in theory, it doesn't need one. In practice, owners tend to install back-up systems, because it's no fun even to risk being cold.
Rikke Lildholdt, project manager for the Active House, says "This is about living a comfortable life in a house that produces more energy than it uses."
Solar panels warm underfloor heating. Fifty square metres of solar cells generate electricity. Computer-controlled windows automatically regulate internal temperature.
British journalist Andrew Purcell doesn’t believe his eyes. In The Guardian he writes: “This is the last place you would expect to find the solar-powered home of the future. Lystrup, a suburb of Denmark's second city, Aarhus, is grey from street to sky. The spring sun, hidden behind a bank of clouds, barely seems strong enough to run a pocket calculator, let alone meet the energy needs of a family of four. But it is here that a dream of zero-carbon living is being realised.”

Flower Power

2009-06-03T01:08:00.000-07:00

A lamp that “burst into blossom” when your energy comsumption has been low for some time, isn’t that a great way to increase energy awareness? The Flower Lamp, developed in the research project Static! at the Interactive Institute in collaboration with Front Design, is now included in the collections of Centre Pompidou, Paris, and will be exhibited at elles@centrepompidou until May 24 th 2010. Now all there’s missing is a producer.

What a waste

2009-05-29T05:46:00.000-07:00

Students Petter Thörne’s och Anders Johnson’s easy chair Mold looks like a piece of art made by the Brasilian Campana brothers, but is actually ment to be massproduced in Sweden. Developed to be made out of veneer waste from different kinds of wood, it not only saves the waste from it’s usual destiny – that of being burnt despite it’s low energy value – but uses it in a much more constructive way: to make new furniture. By their work the designers have converted the disadvantage of the small format veneer-waste slivers into a constructive advantage that has facilitated the double-curved surface. And the variety of veneer in terms of wood type and format make each individual piece of furniture unique. Let's hope this chair will soon find its producer.

Made in the hood

2009-05-19T04:35:00.000-07:00

There must be 1000 ways to work as a designer. Take the Finnish-Korean couple behind Helsinkibased designproducer Company for example. They chose a starting point very far from the usual international-designer-as-a-star-concept: they produce their own design and only work with local manufacturers. Aamu Song and Johan Olin talk about their ideas in terms of “seeds that make the local factories grow” and describe the “recipes” of 70 of their products in their “Company Cookbook”. Since 2008 they also run their own shop Salakauppa (the Secret Shop) close to the Kiasma museum of modern art in the center of Helsinki. The dancing shoes “Tanssitossut” for father and daughter are made of Finnish felt and rubber in Jämsä, Finland.

Puzzle furniture

2009-05-07T06:57:00.000-07:00

By the way, “puzzle furniture” seem to be in every designer's mind for the moment. Here’s a Norwegian contributor: Petter Skogstad showed his all textile d i y-sofa "Hay" in Milan's young department Salone Satellite. And yes, it's inspired by hay piles. But the big question is: do people want to fit all the pieces together themselves? And do they prefer flexibility to commodity? After the age of 25, I'd say "No".

The question is "How?"

2009-05-07T02:12:00.000-07:00

Nowadays it's not only the "What?", it's the "How?" that counts. How things are being produced luckily seem to become a hotter topic every week. Thanks to climate change YouTube can now add a new kind of film to their broad supply: production porn. In a few weeks time I’ve seen films about the production of the Danish chair Nobody, the Swedish chair Papuru and the Swedish stool Cow Stool. But production films are not always about high tech procedures. Form Us With Love’s “Man–size Mekano” is a kind of puzzle d i y-product with a production process you might as well visualize in a few images. But have a look anyway.

The weight of light

2009-04-30T00:42:00.001-07:00

Nicolas Cheng, a Singapore-born student at the University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm, showed a poetic take on energy awareness at the Salone del Mobile in Milan last week. Light is by definition something hard to quantify or experience by human hands, but by associating light to weight, Nicolas provide the user with the neccessary tools. Combinations of simple mechanisms utilize gravity resistance to transfer light to a bulb. For every 100 grams of weight, a corresponding 10 watts of light is produced. Good thinking.

High tech cow stool

2009-04-27T05:07:00.000-07:00

A stool called "Milk", made in ash tree. Could things get more nostalgic? If you ask the Swedish designer Staffan Holm the answer is yes. The stool he showed in Milan's Salone Satellite is not the handicraft piece it looks like, but rather the opposite. Look for your self, here's a film showing the production process.

Simplicity rally in Milan

2009-04-20T11:53:00.000-07:00

1.Swedish style
2.French style

These days, a lot of designers are striving to come up with the simplest, smartest idea. According to the British journalist Alice Rawsthorn in International Herald Tribune utilitarianism will be the dominant style during the Salone del Mobile in Milan this week. But how far can you take simplicity? Swedish architects TAF will show this parcellike furniture collection at the design gallery Rossana Orlandi. And I like the idea. But I liked it even better the first time I saw it. Already in 1997 French designer Matali Crasset wrapped soft cubes into the kind of big shopping bags that immigrants in Paris use to carry things around in. Sometimes a simple solution is just too simple.

“We've got a chair, god damn it!”

2009-04-20T02:59:00.000-07:00

It feels like paper, but is hard as steel. Swedish architects Claesson, Koivisto, Rune will launch a children’s chair made of pulp at the Milan Furniture Fair starting Wednesday.
Together with the Swedish forrest company Södra Cell and the research company STFI Packforsk they’ve been working on the chair for one and a half year. The material is a special pulp combined with PLA, a biodegradable plastic made from maize starch and cane sugar. In other words, a good alternative to plastic.
“Papuru” (the japanese word for paper) is durable and waterproof, recyclable, stackable and colourful. Now there's only the machine for massproducing it that’s missing... Look at films showing the production process here and here. (Am I spotting a new “production porn” trend here?)

Cow dung lamp

2009-04-17T05:42:00.000-07:00

Talking about "new", recyclable materials a Swedish lamp made of cow dung(!) will be shown during next weeks Salone del Mobile in Milan. It was while experimenting at the University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm that students Karin Frankenstein and Tomas Auran found that a certain mixture of peat, Mongolian papier maché and adobe actually make a suprisingly durable material once dried. The frame of the lamp is partly welded and covered with the material. The foot of the lamp is sculptured and the shades are the result of originals sewed in textile, moulded into plaster negatives and then made in the peat-mixture. The lamp will be shown in the school exhibition ”Collection/selection” at Spazio Rossana Orlandi.

Pine personality

2009-04-13T13:21:00.000-07:00

Almost everything designed by Swede Daniel Franzén is made out of pine. Ever since he left design school ten years ago he has developped his preference for this the most Swedish of woods (except for spruce, ok, ok): not only did he design the barn houses for Arvesund that I recently wrote about, but other houses, bars and furniture. He even made a “self portrait”-chair made out of pine details exactly as tall and skinny as himself.
"Pine tree is soft and easy to work with. It smells good and I also like the fact that it's knotty. That way you can actually see it's made out of trees", he says.
Recently Daniel designed a table top out of the kind of turned pine tree columns that usually hold up the roof of a porch. He just splitted them up lengthwise and let the round part face the floor. And had this "patterned" table as a result. It's still a prototype.

Springtime in Stockholm

2009-04-08T07:05:00.000-07:00

Product development or not: This dandelion graffiti, placed on a functionalist building in the centre of Stockholm, made me almost as happy as gerilla knitting!

THE QUOTE OF TODAY/"The higher the fence, the better it gets"

2009-04-02T06:14:00.000-07:00

I talked to Johan Huldt the other day. He's a Swedish furniture designer in his sixties, who has run his own furniture producing business, Innovator, since 1970. A few years ago he was the CEO of the Swedish Society of Crafts and Design, these days he's mostly involved in the House of Design in Hällefors. And he claimed: "The higher the fence, the better it gets.These are wonderful times for designers. Our work is about problem solving and the need for solutions has never been as big as it is today".
Do you agree?

Old barn, new barn

2009-04-01T06:52:00.000-07:00

You might have seen architecture like this before. Quite a few architects have made their contribution to the modern barn, or the "Monopoly"-house, the last few years. But this one has got a point that others don't. The Swedish company behind "Bringåsen", Arvesund, have an unusual and somewhat controversial business idea: They take over old, forgotten barns in northern Sweden and transform them into modern, Scandinavian architecture and design. A collection of 21st century barn houses will be launched at the upcoming furniture fair in Milan in April. "Bringåsen" is designed by Daniel Franzén.

All you need is Mormor

2009-03-28T08:09:00.000-07:00

Despite the retro look mormor.nu (grandma.now) is a business idea of the future. This Danish webshop selling hand knitted children's clothes made by organic alpaeca has no employee younger than 68. Suddenly older growing populations and higher getting unemployment rates seem like problems with solutions.

9 gram toilet

2009-03-25T01:50:00.000-07:00

Resignation is a word that doesn’t appeal to Swedish architect Anders Wilhelmson. It was while listening to Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas during a seminar that he made up his mind. When Koolhaas told about a helicopter travel over Lagos and said that architects can only look at the world, not change it, some kind of rage started to grow inside of Wilhelmson. ”There must be something beyond this resignation”, he thought, and that was the start of "Peepoo", a sanitarian solution for the poorest.
Architects usually want to solve problems by building. But people in the slum build their houses themselves and have more urgent needs. Like toilets. "Peepoo" is a nine gram mini sewage treatment works which has being tested in Kibera in Nairobi, Kenya. It’s a little plastic, biodegradable bag which transforms the faeces into fertiliser with a market value. Way to go, Wilhelmson!

Photo: Peepeople/Camilla Wirseen

Ray of light

2009-03-19T03:27:00.000-07:00

A traditional quality producer get hold of an innovative designer. Then things like this happen. Candles are candles, you might say. More or less, I would argue. These ones could easily pass for table figurines. “Aurora” is a self introduced project by Swedish designer Monica Förster, who sometimes likes to get away from all the restrictions connected to her usual job as a furniture designer. The candle producer Liljeholmens exists since 1839 and admit they had to think twice before making these candles. The wick has to be placed exactly in the middle of the candle, to make the candle burn without dripping. The first limited edition sold out in two days. But there will soon be other opportunities.

Material world (chapter 1)

2009-03-13T08:44:00.000-07:00

Products using sustainable, non-polluting materials is the vision of Biobiq, a Danish material company established in 2007 by designer icon Arne Jacobsen’s nephew Jacob Jacobsen. Biobiq is a biologically based sandwich composite consisting of thermoplastic biopolymers and nature fibres such as jute, flax, sisal and hemp. According to the company a kind of semi-manufactured product that easily applies to the production of 3D-designs: shell chairs, for example. A chip that, when heated up, softens allowing moulding by pres. The technology is developed by Risø National Laboratory of Sustainable Energy at the Technical University of Denmark and the Biobiq team has big plans for the United Nations Climate Change Conference “Cop 15” In Copenhagen in November.

Grand danois

2009-03-12T02:04:00.000-07:00

Interested in the “how:s?” and “why:s?” behind furniture classics? Check out this site (in Danish), describing the processes behind products like the Ant by Arne Jacobsen, the PH-lamp by Poul Henningsen and the Panton Chair by Verner Panton.

Lisa Larson’s cookies

2009-03-04T02:14:00.000-08:00

If Lisa Larson’s figurines aren’t sustainable craft, I don’t know what is. Ask the Japanese, they’re crazy about this Swedish ceramist in her seventies. So crazy they will even bake cookies in her honour. These will be sold at an upcoming book release and exhibition in Daikanyama, Tokyo, March 20th to April 1st. Go, Lisa, go.

The Swan as we know it

2009-03-03T06:00:00.000-08:00

You might think you’ve seen a lamp like this before. But you haven’t. “Disc”, designed by Dos Architects and produced by Örsjö, is not only the first electric fitting in Sweden, but the first in Scandinavia, to get the ecolabel The Swan . It is, of course, made for low-energy bulbs, and part of the metal and glass it is made of, is reused. “Disc” is also designed to simplify the process of separating the glass from the metal once it’s ready for the garbage dump. Or rather, once it’s ready to become a new product.

From plastic bottle to Nobody chair

2009-02-27T04:09:00.000-08:00

In case you wonder how they did it. Click here.

Future proof furniture

2009-02-24T12:32:00.000-08:00

“Wooden workplace” by TAF Architects started out as an exhibition concept for the Swedish office chair company RH-stolen. But who knows where it will end? TAF’s attempt to draw “a kind of comic strip-furniture so basic that nobody could take it seriously” ended up as one of the more interesting contributions to the Stockholm Furniture Fair. Raw pine plank, regular beams and screws. An open source-concept soon to be?

Playing with petroleum

2009-02-23T11:40:00.000-08:00

If you’re based in Stavanger, Norway, you’re close to offshore oil production. The architects Helen & Hard, who have long been into using local resources, decided to make it an advantage. They applied the petroleum industry’s geological and technological expertise, production methods and materials to create an activity park aimed particularly at children. It’s called The Geopark and it’s organized around an artificial landscape which recreates the topography of the Troll field in a scale of 1:500. Surfaces and installations are constructed out of recycled and reshaped elements from the petroleum sector, taken from abandoned fields, offshore bases, equipment suppliers and scrap heaps. For more info on Helen & Hard and their recycling of both material and knowledge-related assets of the oil industry, look here.

Shechair

2009-02-17T13:04:00.000-08:00

Products “especially designed for women” usually makes me very sceptical. I’ve never been into pink razors with rounded corners. But the office chair “Lei” by Swedish designer Monica Förster is something else. It’s about using the woman as a norm. And it’s product development by the book. A collaboration between the designer Monica Förster, the ergonom Ellen Wheatley and the textile engineer Sandra Karlsson, initiated by the office furniture dealer Officeline. It’s their first try as a product developer, which doesn’t make it less impressive.
Women usually want to sit in a more upright position than men, prove the ergonomic studies made by Ellen Wheatley. It has to do with the fact that women have more tenacious muscles than men. To offer support to the lumbar vertebrae and the curve of the spine Monica Förster designed a part in the middle of the back of the chair which follows the body when leaning forward. The system is now patented.
The textile used is a polyester developed especially for the chair by Danish textile company Kvadrat. It consists of three different layers with air in between, which makes it both elastic and a good humidity transporter.
“Lei” might not win the price for most beautiful office chair, but for a woman 1, 68 m, normal weight, it’s definitely the most comfortable.

Masscraft carpet

2009-02-06T17:24:00.000-08:00

Why chose between handicraft and massproduction? The Swedish designer Karin Welin paints with woolen fibre on industrial needle felt. The dry needling technique came up when she was experimenting at the felt producer Nordifa in the south of Sweden, and the result is a kind of carpet you’ve never seen before. Every carpet has unique patterns and the designer is involved in the whole process, from choosing which sheep to use to painting the carpets in the factory.
– The painting process is a fast one, says Karin, I work in the same way as a glass painter.

Image: The carpet “It’s Alive”, painted with wool from sheep at a farm outside Stockholm.

How a dead, Russian communist got into the Stockholm Furniture Fair

2009-02-03T16:06:00.000-08:00

Knitsbythemetre is a young Swedish textile company, owned by designers Ulrika Mårtensson and Margot Barolo. Their goal is to include more (”female”) textiles into the (”male”) architecture and this is one of their latest creations. ”Monument over the third international” might look as something made for Madonna by Jean Paul Gaultier in the nineties. But the main inspiration came from the Russian artist and architect Vladimir Tatlin and his (never constructed) building from the beginning of the 20th century. A great example of women underwear taking a step into transparent architecture, if you ask me. And the 3D-shape of it makes it a soundswallower, too.

Dressing up for the Stockholm Furniture Fair

2009-01-30T10:39:00.000-08:00

Making a new product by adding something to an old one is an often used theme these days. But that doesn't make it less sympathetic. Swedish designer Fredrik Färg combined it with his interest in well tailored fashion and it all turned out like this: ReCover is an old chair dressed up in a coat made by moulded felt. Not a bad idea at all, considering that the moulded felt in its turn is made out of felt fibres and old soda bottles.

Textiles by you in pioneering net store

2009-01-27T16:53:00.000-08:00

Finnish Bon Bon Kakku is a net store that gives the customers the opportunity to design their own fabrics and sometimes even see them being produced. Everything takes place online at www.bonbonkakku.com where you can submit and rate designs. When a fabric receives enough votes from the web site visitors, it is put into production and can be bought directly from the site. A great way to give new designers and patterns a chance, if you ask me. And a great way to modernize an old company: Bon Bon Kakku is owned by the Finnish fabric and interior manufacturer Vallila Interior, a 70 year old, family owned company that once started as a textiles mill.

Depression design

2009-01-26T11:47:00.000-08:00

Great ideas are often born during hard times. Just look at this example from the last recession, made by the Swedish architects TAF. When they didn’t have the money to print several business cards they solved the problem like this. Brilliant!

Smart textiles make people feel better

2009-01-23T18:51:00.000-08:00

The Swedish School of Textiles in Borås goes from strength to strength. It has not only transferred Sweden into one of the world’s most interesting textile research nations in just a few years time, it has also recently managed to raise money from the Swedish government for the next eight year to come. The school is mainly into smart textiles, which basically means weaving metal threads into fabrics. As metal leads electricity smart textiles can do anything from transmitting light to change pattern when they get warm, grow, to then shrink again and generate energy that they can later give off.
Smart textiles can also make you feel better while you’re in the hospital, as master student Marie Ledendal recently showed. She launched a project whereby movements in the hospital are tracked by sensors in corridors and entrances and triggers subtile colour changes on textile panels in the patients' rooms. When someone passes a sensor, signals are sent to a computer program that steers the electricity on to threads of copper embroided in the textiles. These then changes colours.
Marie says she likes to think of the textiles as a kind of subtile conversation between the patients and the movements in the hospital. I say I would much rather look at these changing textile walls than the usual white walls of a hospital.

Look at a film visualizing the project here. Or read the article I wrote (in Swedish) about the Smart Textiles project in Dagens Nyheter a few months ago here.

Nobody's perfect

2009-01-13T10:42:00.000-08:00

Nobody's a great idea. The chair Nobody, that is. Made out of mouldable felt, the chair designed by Danish-Russian duo Komplot Design and produced by Danish furniture company Hay, has caused quite a stir. Not only because it’s probably the first completely self-supporting textile chair that’s ever existed, and therefor light, sound proof and easy to recycle. But because it is something as unusual as a chair carefully created from fiber to product – in the same place.
The mouldable felt is produced in Halmstad, in the south of Sweden, by Nordifa, the same manufacturer that thermo-press the material into a chair. It contains felt fibres mixed with polyester fibres from old soft drink bottles and is a material that has been used for ages in cars luggage lockers and other such low- glamorous places. But nobody ever thought of using it for making a chair. Until Komplot Design, who had been collaborating with the Nordifa for a long time, happened to hear about the machine that can mould felt in the same way one usually mould wood… Now, that’s the kind of thing that would never have happened if the chair had been produced in China. The shape of the chair was born in the same minute the designers understood about the machine opportunity.
Swedish designers are now standing in line to work with the material. At the up-coming Stockholm Furniture Fair (Feb 4th-8th) there will be several new products in mouldable felt. I'll come back to this.