It’s either the most grown up hanging mobile, or the most secretly playful piece of high end design. The Counterweight Mobile light mixes polished white oak with brass, tone, and kiln-formed glass diffusers--all of which simply hang from a thread-like cord and sway in midair, once in place.

Just think of a see-saw, Gregory Buntain, one half of the Fort Standard design duo, tells Co.Design. “If the hanging point--or ‘fulcrum’--was even half of an inch in either direction, the balance of the lights would be totally offset.”

Most designers start with a project brief. The Fort Standard team, whose portfolio includes chic toys and magnets and the like, and retail spaces like the Warby Parker showroom, started differently in this case. They worked backward, selecting materials first: the kiln-formed glass came from an old glass facility that works in their building in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn. And the white oak wood? “At the time we were experimenting with the process of steam bending wood in order to make bows for archery, and we decided this would be a great way to create beautifully gestural designs.”

The Counterweight concept is also available in a pendant light, a floor light, and a sconce. All are available through Roll & Hill.

It’s either the most grown up hanging mobile, or the most secretly playful piece of high end design. The Counterweight Mobile light mixes polished white oak with brass, tone, and kiln-formed glass diffusers--all of which simply hang from a thread-like cord and sway in midair, once in place.

Just think of a see-saw, Gregory Buntain, one half of the Fort Standard design duo, tells Co.Design. “If the hanging point--or ‘fulcrum’--was even half of an inch in either direction, the balance of the lights would be totally offset.”

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Just spotted this cool series of playing cards put together by UK based art magazine, Ammo. The Poop Deck Project is a nautical themed set of illustrated playing cards featuring the work of 52 artists.

It’s cool that, unlike normal playing cards the suits in this pack include the Pirate Crew, Cursed Pirates, Royal Navy Officers and Mythical Sea Creatures. Each suit has it’s own colour scheme and icons.

Check out the website for artist profiles, card artwork and the option to purchase packs of cards or individual character prints.

Here are just a few of my favorites.

Electrified transport is key to a lower carbon future. According to the International Energy Agency, three-quarters of new cars need to be EVs by 2050, if we’re to stay within "safe" global warming limits (generally said to be 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels).

To give you an idea of how many sedans that is--it’s a lot. The IEA’s goal is 5.9 million new EVs a year by 2020. And, we’re a long, long way from that at the moment. Only 113,000 EVs hit the road last year across 15 countries signed up to the IEA’s Electric Vehicles Initiative. And those 15 account for 90% of EVs overall.

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Is your local (U.S.) hospital more expensive than others? And how does its mortality rate stack up against others?

Hospital Costs [kitware.com] developed by visualization and imaging company Kitware, contrasts statistics about hospital-specific charges of more than 3,000 U.S. hospitals with the mortality rate, for the conditions pneumonia and heart failure.

While the bar chart and scatter plot techniques are kept relatively simple, a rich set of interactive features are offered, such as the of filtering specific conditions or setting the variables of the 2 axes, to highlighting smaller subsets within the dataset.

So what is the least expensive hospital with the lowest mortality rate?

Just a quick apology regarding the polls on the B-Side: For the past week or two weeks, many logos that would normally have a majority of "Bad" votes have been appearing as getting more "Great" votes than they deserve. Some have expressed in the comments that it is the result of bots, or people from that company coming in and voting en masse. It's not. It was my fault. I'm the dumbass. If you care to know: For every post there is an XML text file that gathers the votes. In theory these text files start out with 0, 0, 0 counts for Great, Fine, and Bad, respectively. But for some reason, the file I have been using as a template for the last week or two had 186 already logged under Great, so that's why the polls are off. I'll see if I can fix the old ones.

Don't forget to cast your vote about this post online

The interactive visualization Men's Eights 1980 - 2012 [feathersquare.com] by Feather and Square provides a complete overview of the "Oxford Summer Eight" bump race results.

Individual teams can be selected to explore their historical performance between 1980 and now

A bumps race is a form of rowing race which is particularly practiced at the University of Cambridge and the University of Oxford, at which boats try to catch up and "bump" the boat in front of them. Winning bumpers then move up in the next year statistics.

London firm Tony Fretton has sandwiched two rows of brick houses between a pair of canals in the town of Den Helder in the Netherlands (+ slideshow).

Tony Fretton Architects collaborated with Dutch firm Geurst en Schulze Architecten to design 16 houses for the Molenplein site, as part of a wider masterplan by West 8 that centres around the redevelopment of the town's former navy base.

Three-storey houses stretch along the front of the site, facing out across the dockyard, while a row of smaller two-storey residences run along behind and are separated by private gardens.

Drawing inspiration from canal houses of the early twentieth century, the houses feature a mixture of linear and gabled profiles, and present both exposed and painted brickwork facades.

Bright yellow doors and ornamental marble panels mark the entrances to each house, plus the windows come with chunky wooden frames.

Each of the 16 houses has one of four standard layouts. There are few internal partitions and finishes, as the architects wanted to give residents the opportunity to design their own interiors.

Tony Fretton Architects is led by Fretton alongside partner James McKinney. Past projects by the firm include a Stirling Prize-nominated museum of fine art in Denmark and the Vassall Road housing project in south London. See more architecture by Tony Fretton Architects.

Photography is by Christian Richters.

Read on for more information from Tony Fretton Architects:

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Houses in Molenplein, Den Helder, the Netherlands

Tony Fretton Architects has completed a new development of houses in the Dutch town of Den Helder.

Commissioned by Dutch developer Proper-Stok the development comprises 2 and 3 storey houses designed by Tony Fretton Architects and Dutch practice Geurst en Schulze Architecten configured within a masterplan designed by West 8.

Site plan - click for larger image

Molenplein occupies a long site between two canals, the Helderskanaal and Werfkanaal, where it looks out onto Den Helder's former Napoleonic naval yard. The development is part of a regeneration strategy by the municipality to attract middle-income people to the area following the relocation of the Dutch navy base. The Napoleonic dockyard has also been redeveloped, providing places for business and culture.

West 8's masterplan for Molenplein preserves the character, scale and diversity of the city fabric along each canal; the plan comprises large three-storey houses facing the dockyard and compact two-storey houses to the rear, with private gardens in between, and intersperses designs by Tony Fretton Architects with those of Geurst en Schulze Architecten.

East elevation - click for larger image

Houses designed by Tony Fretton Architects are distinguished by a simple profile and generously proportioned windows and entrance doors. The designs are abstracted versions of typical canal front and back houses and aim to reproduce the generosity of scale and abstraction seen in Dutch architecture from the Golden Age and early Dutch modernism. Materials comprise wooden window frames in facades of white painted brick or rose coloured brick with white pointing. A measure of ornament is given through the use of discreet panels of Belgian marble at eye level. In contrast the Geurst en Schulze houses have finely elaborated detail and provide punctuation in the terrace.

Inspired by the openness and energy that the practice observed in an earlier development they designed - De Prinsendam in Overhoeks, Amsterdam - where owners radically personalised their interiors, the houses are presented with unplanned interiors and carefully positioned service risers, fenestration and staircases that support a wide range of possible internal configurations.

West elevation - click for larger image

Location: Den Helder, The Netherlands Client: Proper-Stok Gross external area: 2,300 sq m approx Internal area: 3,200 sq m approx

Architects: Tony Fretton Architects Design team: Tony Fretton, James McKinney, David Owen, Chris Snow, Chris Neve Project Associate: David Owen Project Architect: Chris Snow Executive Architects: Geurst en Schulze Architecten Masterplan & landscaping: West 8 Structural Engineers: Ingenieursbureau Dijkhuis bv Services Engineers: Wolf Dikken adviseurs Main Contractor: Tuin Den Helder bv

The post Houses in Molenplein by Tony Fretton Architects appeared first on Dezeen.

While the rest of Washington has been brought to a standstill by scandals and partisan gridlock, there’s one issue our nations leaders are making real progress on: cured meats.

NPR reports that at the end of May, the USDA will lift its 40-year ban on the import of Italian salumi from areas that were once restricted due to the presence of swine vesicular disease, including some of the country’s most famous meat-curing regions of the North. The U.S. has upheld a ban on all Italian pork products except for prosciutto di Parma, prosciutto di San Daniele, and mortadella since the 1970s.

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Paper Boat Studios, based in St. Louis and Seattle, drew me right in with its celestial-themed invitation and zodiac notecards. (I have a thing for the night skies.) A peruse of their Etsy shop once I was back home turned up these adorable decorative paper boats and a gorgeous geometric themed 2013 Calendar, too. Well done, ladies. [...]

Designed by Italian company Mussi, this chair is more than just a comfy place to sit. Not only does it adapt to your body, Kangura’s base folds out to become a reclining chaise lounge. I’d say this is the perfect napping solution!

The removable covers come in any of the Mussi collection fabrics and leathers on an oval steel revolving base.

You may have collected coins, stamps, or baseball cards as a kid. If you’re Jay Leno, you’re fortunate enough to collect cars. If you’re Angelina Jolie, you hanker after Renaissance knives (at least during the Billy Bob era). Part of the thrill of tracking down trinkets are the stories behind them.

Those stories are the focus of anthropologist and photographer Diana Zlatanovski’s body of work. “Objects are wrapped in stories and meaning,” she tells Co.Design. “I can bring out a collection of objects that at first glance appear mostly identical. As you keep looking, the differentiations between objects become more and more evident.” It’s appropriate, then, that Zlatanovski has named her work The Typology. In the same way that different letters have nuanced variations in shape--and communicate a larger meaning when strung together--so do the collections in her photographs.

Zlatanovski first began photographing object collections when she stumbled upon a batch of rusty old wrenches at an antique mall. Since then, she has documented a collection of cigarette holders, blue mussel shells, and vintage pieces of paper, among other objects.

Memories are the refrain in each assortment. The cigarette holders hail from the private collection of a woman who inherited them from her mother. Zlatanovski gathered the blue mussel shells herself, during her first trip to Maine’s Acadia National Park.

The scraps of paper were shipping forms from 1889, for the now defunct Grand Rapids and Indiana Railroad. Zlatanovski found them in a wooden box; they were being used to carefully wrap a collection of shells. “I’m left to wonder how these dozens of shells that were collected from a river in Tennessee ended up in scraps of shipping papers from a railroad that only operated between Michigan and Indiana,” she says.

Up next are iron eel spears and other collections from Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology.

Forget body language--the most effective, ultra-modern way to show someone that you’re into them, you respect them, or you genuinely enjoy their company is to keep your darn hands off your darn phone when you’re hanging out. Period. There’s always a little sinking feeling when you’re sitting across from someone who, mid-sentence, feels the need to fidget: To fact-check how tall Channing Tatum is in real life (Google sez 6’1”); to see if your buddy wants to get ice cream and a beer later (yes); to surreptitiously see if it’s your turn in Words With Friends (not yet). Even when you’re in on the search--or doing the search--there’s something distracting, and a teensy bit deflating, about the act.

Blokket, by Chelsea Briganti and The Way We See The World, is a simple pouch that blocks cell signals, and part of the MoMA Store’s new Destination NYC collection of Big Apple-designed, USA-produced goods. The smart material is a nylon-and-silver--actual silver--weave, like a "soft Faraday cage" which will also protect your chipped credit cards and passports from data theft. “I know law enforcement fields use it to prevent cell phone access, but I haven’t seen any products like ours on the market,” Briganti tells Co.Design. Basically, once you slip your smartphone in, there will be no calls, texts, or notifications to alert you to activities happening outside arm’s reach.

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Forget body language--the most effective, ultra-modern way to show someone that you’re into them, you respect them, or you genuinely enjoy their company is to keep your darn hands off your darn phone when you’re hanging out. Period. There’s always a little sinking feeling when you’re sitting across from someone who, mid-sentence, feels the need to fidget: To fact-check how tall Channing Tatum is in real life (Google sez 6’1”); to see if your buddy wants to get ice cream and a beer later (yes); to surreptitiously see if it’s your turn in Words With Friends (not yet). Even when you’re in on the search--or doing the search--there’s something distracting, and a teensy bit deflating, about the act.

Blokket, by Chelsea Briganti and The Way We See The World, is a simple pouch that blocks cell signals, and part of the MoMA Store’s new Destination NYC collection of Big Apple-designed, USA-produced goods. The smart material is a nylon-and-silver--actual silver--weave, like a "soft Faraday cage" which will also protect your chipped credit cards and passports from data theft. “I know law enforcement fields use it to prevent cell phone access, but I haven’t seen any products like ours on the market,” Briganti tells Co.Design. Basically, once you slip your smartphone in, there will be no calls, texts, or notifications to alert you to activities happening outside arm’s reach.

To address the obvious: yeah, there are, of course, a few built-in options for folks who have the willpower to power down. But when’s the last time you actually turned your mobile off when meeting up with a pal, or activated airplane mode on a date? Attention spans are frightfully short, and the sirens’ call of what’s happening online can be tough to wrench yourself away from, no matter how hard you try. “Blokket helps people engage in the present moment by providing interludes of relief from technology,” Briganti says. It’s as much a kind gesture as it is a functional object.

Ultimately, the issue isn’t just about being polite--the team considers Blokket a tool to engender health and happiness, and a potential gateway toward deeper, more meaningful developments. “We’ve had lots of people test it out and the results were astonishing,” she says. In addition to the predictably better convos and stronger personal connections, using the pouch actually helped to create new habits; users found themselves comfortably making the decision to keep interactions face to face and in the flesh. “That was even more fascinating,” Briganti says. “And this is our goal--to facilitate a change in human behavior.”

Purchase Blokket from the MoMA Store here for $38.

(h/t Better Living Through Design)

You may have collected coins, stamps, or baseball cards as a kid. If you’re Jay Leno, you’re fortunate enough to collect cars. If you’re Angelina Jolie, you hanker after Renaissance knives (at least during the Billy Bob era). Part of the thrill of tracking down trinkets are the stories behind them.

Those stories are the focus of anthropologist and photographer Diana Zlatanovski’s body of work. “Objects are wrapped in stories and meaning,” she tells Co.Design. “I can bring out a collection of objects that at first glance appear mostly identical. As you keep looking, the differentiations between objects become more and more evident.” It’s appropriate, then, that Zlatanovski has named her work The Typology. In the same way that different letters have nuanced variations in shape--and communicate a larger meaning when strung together--so do the collections in her photographs.

Read Full Story

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: in our next movie recorded at the MINI Paceman Garage in Milan last month, MINI head of design Anders Warming discusses the design of the new MINI Paceman and design journalist and curator Kieran Long gives us his thoughts on how the current generation of designers compares to the great masters. 

Anders Warming

Warming explains that the idea behind the design of the MINI Paceman was to combine the signature styling of the classic MINI with new features such as four-wheel drive and horizontal tail lights. "When you look at [the car] you feel and you see MINI, but you realise there is so much new to it," he says.

MINI Paceman

He also stresses that a lot of the design of the car was done by hand. "People say cars are just [designed] by computers today," he says. "A car is really done by hand. It's designed with sketches, we choose the lines that we like and we also spend a [lot of] time forming the shapes in clay and then from that make the tooling."

The guest in our Dezeen and MINI World Tour Studio is Kieran Long, senior curator of contemporary architecture, design and digital at the V&A museum in London. He believes the work of the current generation of designers lacks the boldness of the post-modern design Italy became famous for in the 1970s and 1980s.

"I sense a sort of tentative nature in the design that you see - even [work by] the younger designers, students and so on," he says. "There's not much boldness either in formal or colour terms, but also philosophical and ideas terms.

Kieran Long

"It really struck me visiting the exhibition at the Triennale on Italian design, what a big contrast that is from the grand era of Italian design. You see the boldness of those forms and remind yourself of what Italian design was known for and you see now a sort of pastel-y sort of invisible feeling to design."

Haze chair by Wonmin Park

Despite this, Long says there are detectable trends that young designers are exploring. "We've had this fixing, repairing, ad hocism thing now for a couple of years," he says. "This year it's really identifiable that young designers work is occupied by new materials, often sustainable materials, new organic materials in the kind of Formafantasma mould. If somebody would just capture that and make a manifesto about it, it would seem like a real movement.

Salmon stool by Formafantasma

"I think the big problem is that they have no grasp of design history," he continues. "They have no idea of where they sit in relation to anything. It's my observation that most of those designers wish they were taught a formal didactic history of design alongside the freedom that the art school education gives them."

More generally, Long believes that design needs to be less introspective to remain relevant. "I think we've overrated what designers do as the thing that's interesting about design," he says. "What's really interesting is the problem solved, or the relationship made, or the fashion trend started or ended - those cultural currents that design contributes to.

"I think they could learn something from architecture in that sense; when you're an architect, when you write about architecture, you can also write about the city, and the city is everything in it. Design needs to find a category like that. They need to relax and say: 'what I do is not the interesting thing about design, it's what happens after it leaves my office.'"

Our Dezeen and MINI World Tour Studio

See all our stories about Milan 2013.

The music featured in this movie is a track called Konika by Italian disco DJ Daniele Baldelli, who played a set at the MINI Paceman Garage. You can listen to more music by Baldelli on Dezeen Music Project.

The post "Young designers have no grasp of design history" appeared first on Dezeen.

Swiss design firm BERNHARD | BURKARD recently launched a super fun floor lamp that was inspired by the tallest living animal there is – the giraffe. The GIRAFFE | floor lamp adapts to whatever lighting situation you might have by extending its neck out to create a reading lamp or a spot light.

The light sits on four wooden legs and contains a system of metal scissors that expand out in a curved arc or contract back, depending on your preference. The hand crank lets you adjust the lamp.

Celebrities and brand owners have a new, more animated way of cutting through the social clutter with the launch today of Headcast--a new broadcasting and animation platform for smartphones developed by Chris Chapman, a former designer and builder of puppets who once ran the animatronics team at the satirical TV show Spitting Image.

The new platform allows the user to record, produce, and distribute within seconds a short personal message presented by an animated, virtual avatar of themselves which lip-syncs with their voice recording and can also mimic hand movements and facial expressions.

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There is no great shortage of mug shots on the Internet. Criminal photos of 19th-century bank robbers are blogged alongside those of contemporary celebrities, proving that our interest in the guilty is wholly pervasive. And that compelling quality holds through Joanne Arnett’s textiles of woven mug shots.

"Mug shots are taken at a point between conflict and resolution," Arnett explains. "The person being photographed is documented at a time where life has slipped out of control. There is no opportunity to prepare for the picture, and he knows it will be made public. So there is an interesting element of being alone yet also on display." Each textile is titled after the subject’s sentence, such as, Thirty Hours Community Service, and Six Months Probation.

Part of what makes this project so special is Arnett’s social sensitivity. "It seems horribly rude to use someone’s actual mug shot, so I make my own," she explains. Each mug shot is a self portrait, a character that Arnett creates through a fluid process. "The characters are pulled together from items in my make-up case and closet," says Arnett. "I just start by drawing in eyebrows or combing my hair … When the face I see in the mirror looks genuine I take a picture."

The booking information is inserted digitally, as well as repeating background patterns that somehow relate to the person portrayed. "Since the color is seen before the face is visible, I spend quite a bit of time researching colors and putting palettes together for each person." Arnett then hand dyes the yarn before moving over to a 56" TC-1 loom, on which she weaves the textile through rows of wire. Each portrait takes about a month, from start to finish.

"It seems horribly rude to use someone’s actual mug shot, so I make my own."

With a background in fashion and photography, Arnett sought alternative processes to image making, beyond what the camera could offer. While studying at Kent State University, Arnett experimented with the school’s weaving facilities. She didn’t grow fond of the technique until she created her first woven portrait. The process, it turns out, wasn’t too far from what she already knew. "The materials I use are the same ones used in photography, they are just present in another form," Arnett explains. "Cotton paper becomes yarn and the metals in the light sensitive emulsion become wire." The textiles have a photorealistic look.

Through reexamining a common cultural interest like mug shots, Arnett uncovers and explains why these images enthrall us. "They elicit a unique mix of empathy and schadenfreude," she explains. Each of the subjects featured in Arnett’s textiles, peers out at us, challenging our assumptions of a criminal face.

There is no great shortage of mug shots on the Internet. Criminal photos of 19th-century bank robbers are blogged alongside those of contemporary celebrities, proving that our interest in the guilty is wholly pervasive. And that compelling quality holds through Joanne Arnett’s textiles of woven mug shots.

"Mug shots are taken at a point between conflict and resolution," Arnett explains. "The person being photographed is documented at a time where life has slipped out of control. There is no opportunity to prepare for the picture, and he knows it will be made public. So there is an interesting element of being alone yet also on display." Each textile is titled after the subject’s sentence, such as, Thirty Hours Community Service, and Six Months Probation.

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the installations at the atmospheric house of detention are just one of the highlights at this year’s clerkenwell design week, which kicked off today.

you can view the full programme of events for the next few days here.

Dutch graphics studio Experimental Jetset has redesigned the logo for the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York as a slender W that changes shape to respond to its setting (+ movie).

Experimental Jetset developed the graphic identity around the concept of a "responsive W" that forms both a symbol of the Whitney and a framework for accompanying text and images.

"We came up with the idea of the zig-zag line, with the zig-zag being a metaphor for a non-simplistic, more complicated (and thus more interesting) history of art," say the designers.

"We think the line also represents a pulse, a beat - the heartbeat of New York, of the USA. It shows the Whitney as an institute that is breathing (in and out), an institute that is open and closed at the same time."

The designers specified Neue Haas Grotesk - a redrawn version of a 1950s Swiss typeface - for any text positioned alongside the logo, while any images can be positioned underneath.

"We began to explore the possibilities of the W as a frame to put work in, or a stage to place work on," they explain. "The lines [of the W] can be seen as borders, arrows, connections [or] columns."

The new graphic identity replaces the Whitney's thirteen-year-old logo, designed by Abbott Miller of Pentagram, and marks a period of change that will see the museum relocate to a new building by architect Renzo Piano, set to open in 2015.

Other logos designed in recent months include one for the estate of Thunderbirds creator Gerry Anderson and one for Nivea designed by Yves Béhar. See more graphic design on Dezeen.

Photography is by Jens Mortensen.

Read on more information from the Whitney:

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As the Whitney approaches the opening of its new building in 2015, museum staff are taking stock of all aspects of programming and operations. While much of this work is happening behind the scenes, one very visible aspect of this focus is the Whitney's graphic identity. While the museum has changed considerably in the thirteen years since it introduced the word mark designed by Abbott Miller of Pentagram, even more extensive institutional changes will come with the move downtown.

Two years ago, Museum staff began a thoughtful internal dialogue regarding the Whitney's graphic identity and selected the design studio Experimental Jetset to develop an approach which embraces the spirit of the Museum while serving as a visual ambassador for our new building. The result is a distinctive and inventive graphic system that literally responds to art — a fundamental attribute of the Whitney since its founding in 1930. This dynamic identity, which the designers refer to as the "responsive 'W'" also illustrates the Museum's ever-changing nature. In the upcoming years it will provide an important point of continuity for members, visitors, and the public during the transition to the new space.

The post Whitney Graphic Identity by Experimental Jetset appeared first on Dezeen.

Microsoft has revealed the next generation of its Xbox gaming console: Xbox One, a cloud-powered, all-in-one home entertainment system.

At a press event on Microsoft's Redmond campus Tuesday, Xbox chief Don Mattrick said Xbox One is an attempt to answer the question, "Can we improve a living room that's become too complex, too fragmented, and too slow by harmonizing your experiences?"

Console Image via The Verge

Voice Commands Xbox One hinges on powerful voice control features that allow you to easily move between the console's TV-watching, gaming, and Internet-surfing features, starting from the moment you turn it on. Saying "Xbox on" will automatically turn on the console and take you to a customized dashboard screen associated with your Xbox account. Simple commands such as "Watch TV," "Go to Internet Explorer," and "Watch Movie" allow you to seamlessly and quickly rotate between activities, similar to how you would use a TV remote to flip through channels.

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What was already a house with rich history in Winchester, UK, became even more so when AR Design Studio came in to renovate the old servants’ quarters of a larger home they’re a part of. When excavation began, bodies (yes, bodies) were discovered buried underground. Police brought in archeologists who determined that the site had been used for Roman burials. The artifacts and bodies were cleared and taken to a museum for research and The Glass House project was once again back on track.

The servants’ quarters had fallen apart over the years and when the occupants of the larger house decided to downsize, they chose to tackle the project and realize their love of glass. The designers took it from there and created a glass staircase and glass extension sandwiched into an alcove in the rear of the building that opened up into the garden.

They managed to seamlessly add the frameless modern extension on to what appears to be a traditional brick house and did it well. The glass-covered structure allows light to flood the first floor communal spaces, while the original, cave-like spaces remain private for the family.

I’m wondering how much sunscreen they have to wear…

They installed a staircase to connect the ground floor with the cellar.

The light carries through to the double-height entrance space which features that unbelievable glass staircase.

The floors are covered in a ceramic tile that looks like wood instead of a more traditional wood floor because it won’t discolor being exposed to the bright sun so much.

Photos by Martin Gardner.

You can never have too many little bowls around your house, and when they’re as charming as these Mini Latte Bowls ($20 for 8) from Anthropologie, they are impossible to resist. I always make sure to pick up a handful whenever I’m in an Anthropologie shop, and use them for everything from food prep while baking, to organizing craft supplies, and holding jewelry. Check out all the coordinated sets they have to offer right here…and don’t miss out on their full size latte bowls as well. I want at least one in every single color!

The post The Daily Find: Mini Latte Bowls appeared first on Creature Comforts.

Tina Shoulders grew up in the Bronx and ended up as a successful clothing and furniture designer, a career she’d never heard of until college. "The only professionals in our neighborhood were law enforcement, doctors, and social workers," she said. "And the world is so much bigger than that. I want kids to experience it even if only for the day."

But to have a dream and be motivated to achieve it, you first have to know what’s out there. This June, Shoulders is launching Todayships, a website and app that will allow high school students to get a brighter glimpse of their possible futures. By logging into the site, students can arrange to spend the day visiting a company like Nickelodeon, Design*Sponge or West Elm, shadowing a creative professional. The visits give students something to do on the many working days when school is closed, such as Columbus Day, test prep or teacher planning days.

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This week marks the final countdown, so to speak, for die-hard Arrested Development fans, because on May 26th, Netflix will release the long-anticipated fourth season of the cult comedy show. To tide you over until that epic day, we bring every recurring joke on AD in infographic form.

Created by designers at Beutler Ink and Red Edge, Recurring Developments is an interactive chart: Click on a plot detail in the left-hand column (Bluth’s Original Frozen Banana Stand, chicken dance, or “I’ve made a huge mistake”) and lines will connect it to the episodes in which it appeared. Hovering over dots beside the episode title will reveal more specifics--like which character said “I’ve made a huge mistake” in that particular episode.

Don’t inspect Recurring Developments for fine-grained or deeply insightful synopses. You won’t find them. But it’s successful in visualizing how much fun the genius screenwriters had in peppering episodes with recurring themes throughout the previous seasons, rewarding loyal watchers with the pleasure of teasing out all the common threads. We have no doubt that some of these same jokes will pop up in Season 4, so peruse this chart as a refresher before the big day.

Check out the interactive version here.

[Via Co.Create]

This week marks the final countdown, so to speak, for die-hard Arrested Development fans, because on May 26th, Netflix will release the long-anticipated fourth season of the cult comedy show. To tide you over until that epic day, we bring every recurring joke on AD in infographic form.

Created by designers at Beutler Ink and Red Edge, Recurring Developments is an interactive chart: Click on a plot detail in the left-hand column (Bluth’s Original Frozen Banana Stand, chicken dance, or “I’ve made a huge mistake”) and lines will connect it to the episodes in which it appeared. Hovering over dots beside the episode title will reveal more specifics--like which character said “I’ve made a huge mistake” in that particular episode.

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Designer and illustrator Kim Johnson of Buttercup Press sent me a link to her new graphic pillow designs. I love the pastel rainbows that look like blurred digital images of natural phenomenon.

The 18″ x 18″ pillow covers are sold in her Etsy shop. Each pillow cover is printed on 100% natural heavy cotton twill with eco-friendly water-based inks and printed in the USA. She handmakes each one.

The most amazing meals the world has to offer typically aren’t served in restaurants, but in the kitchens of locals. A new, sharing economy-style startup aims to bring those unique culinary experiences to travelers, by creating a new platform that could be called the "Airbnb-for-home-cooked-meals" (if Airbnb analogies are your thing).

The Tel Aviv-based EatWith was founded in 2012 after its founder Guy Michlin connected with a local family in Crete for dinner while vacationing. Between the local cheese, insider tips on places to go, and unique perspective on the Greek financial crisis, the experience became one of Michlin’s most memorable as a traveler. "The best way to break the bubble and enrich your connection to a place is to interact with real people in their own private spaces," he writes on his website.

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Forward-thinking 
designers are using 3D printing to blow architecture wide open, as Dezeen's editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs reports in this extract from Print Shift, our one-off publication dedicated to the developing technology.

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The race to build the first 3D-printed house has begun. Teams of architects in London and Amsterdam are competing to produce the first habitable printed structure, using technology that could transform the way buildings are made. Though they all have the same objective, the teams are investigating very different materials and fabrication methods.

The starting pistol was fired by Dutch studio Universe Architecture, who, in January of this year, unveiled designs for a looping two-storey house that resembles a Möbius strip and will be printed on site, in concrete.

Shortly after, UK architects Softkill Design announced plans for Protohouse 2.0, a single-storey dwelling with a fibrous structure resembling bone growth. It will be made of plastic and printed in a factory, in sections that are then snapped together on site.

Then DUS Architects, also based in Amsterdam, went public with a project to print, room by room, a canal house in the city, using a homemade portable printer located inside an upended shipping container. In addition, a research team at MIT in the US is working on plans to print a small pavilion fashioned by a robotic arm imitating the manner in which a silkworm builds its cocoon.

All these approaches are completely untried at this scale. And there's a certain amount of scepticism regarding the viability of scaling up a technology that, until now, has only been used to make relatively small objects – objects that do not demand the structural or environmental performance of a house. But architects working in this area are convinced it won’t be long before additive manufacturing transforms their discipline.

We might print not only buildings, but entire urban sectionsEnrico Dini

"When we started our research, we were dealing in science fiction," says Gilles Retsin of Softkill Design. "Everyone on the architecture scene was saying, 'It’s only going to be possible in 50 or 60 years.' But when we were sitting at the table in front of one of these 3D-printing companies, these guys were like, 'Yeah, no problem – let's start up the research, let's push it.' So it's not actually that far off any more."

Neri Oxman, architect and founder of the Mediated Matter group at the MIT Media Lab, argues that digital fabrication is ushering in a third era of construction technology. "Prior to the industrial revolution, hand-production methods were abundant," she says. "Craft defined everything. The craftsman had an almost phenomenological knowledge of materials and intuited how to vary their properties according to their structural and environmental characteristics."

But the coming of the industrial revolution saw the triumph of the machine over the hand. "The machine was used to standardise everything. And the things we built – our products, our buildings – were defined by these industrial standards."

Now, however, digital technologies such as additive manufacturing allow craft and industry to merge. "Craft meets the machine in rapid fabrication," says Oxman. "We can generate craft with the help of technology."

The question is, which technologies are best suited to architecture? The results of the above architectural experiments will go some way towards answering that.

Landscape House based on Möbius strip by Universe Architecture

Universe Architecture is collaborating on its Landscape House with Italian robotics engineer Enrico Dini, inventor of an extremely large-format 3D printer that uses sand and a chemical binding agent to create a stone-like material. Dini's machine, called D-Shape, is the largest 3D printer in the world. Located in a warehouse near Pisa, it looks like a stage-lighting rig and works like a laser-sintering machine, but with sand instead of nylon powder, and chemicals instead of a laser.

A moving horizontal gantry first deposits a 5mm substrate layer of sand mixed with magnesium oxide, then, via a row of nozzles, squirts chlorine onto the areas of sand that are to become solid. This resulting chemical reaction creates synthetic sandstone.

The gantry is then raised, another layer of sand is added and the process is repeated. When the D-Shape has completed its printing, the surplus sand is carefully removed to reveal the solid object underneath.

D-Shape prints at a rate of 5cm per hour over a 30-square-metre area, to a depth of up to two metres. Working flat-out, it can produce 30 cubic metres of building structure per week. Dini is a pioneer in the field and the only person to have already printed prototype structures at an architectural scale. In 2009 he worked with architect Andrea Morgante to print a three-metre-high pavilion resembling a giant egg with large holes in its surface. Fabricated in sections and then assembled, it was intended as a scale model of a 10-metre structure that was never built; nonetheless, it can stake a claim to being the first-ever printed architectural structure.

Egg-shaped structure printed by Enrico Dini

Dini worked with designer Marco Ferreri in 2010 to create the first dwelling to be printed in one piece. The resulting "house" – a one-room structure resembling a mountain hut – was printed for an exhibition at the Triennale in Milan. The crude building had a doorway and two square windows; its interior featured a work surface, sink and platform bed.

"It's a very historical piece," says Dini. "It was the first attempt to print a building." Unfortunately, the brittle synthetic stone cracked during transportation, leading Dini to decide that fabricating buildings by section was a more viable use for his technology.

Printing buildings in one go will be possible in the future, says Dini, "but probably not with my technology." Instead, he now sees a role for D-Shape in printing building elements like large façade panels, large diameter columns and double-curvature components.

Machines such as D-Shape could eventually be adapted to work on the move, Dini adds, allowing them to print on an urban scale. "We might print not only buildings, but entire urban sections," he says.

For Universe Architecture's Landscape House, Dini has devised a system that will see two D-Shape printers working side by side inside temporary structures close to the site. The D-Shapes will print a kit of parts that will be assembled to form the looping structure. Each part will be hollow; the superstructure will be filled with fibre-reinforced concrete to give it structural integrity.

There are huge potential time, labour and transportation savings Gilles Retsin

"Before our Landscape House design, you could easily use the printer to print vertical columns," says Janjaap Ruijssenaars of Universe Architecture, "but it was not possible to print something that has a horizontal connection, like a beam. By putting reinforced concrete within a hollow structure, you can have a vertical load on top of a horizontal structure. And that opens the door for all types of designs. It was Enrico Dini's idea."

Because of the fragility of the individual parts, they'll have to be printed with support structures to prevent them from breaking while they're manoeuvred into position; these will be removed after the concrete filling has been poured in. The entire process will take up to a year and cost around €5 million. Universe Architecture doesn't yet have a client willing to put up that kind of money.

Some purists argue that this convoluted process is not "true" 3D-printing. "We actually don't consider that a 3D-printed building," says Softkill Design's Gilles Retsin, "because they’re 3D-printing formwork, then pouring concrete into the form. So it's not that the actual building is 3D-printed."

For its Protohouse 2.0, Softkill Design plans to print the entire building using industrial laser-sintering machines normally used to make prototypes for the automobile industry.

"The existing research always focuses on transporting a 3D printer to the site because they're using sand or concrete," says Retsin. "We're deliberately working in a factory and using laser-sintered bioplastic [plastics derived from biomass rather than hydrocarbons]."

ProtoHouse by Softkill Design

The design itself also bucks convention: instead of columns and floorplates, it has a fibrous structure akin to the trabecular composition of bone. Unlike sand-based structures, which require thick sections to maintain structural integrity, Retsin says these fibres can be as thin as 0.7mm.

This opens up all sorts of new aesthetic possibilities. Traditional steel or concrete structures have a high level of redundancy – material that doesn't need to be there, but which is too difficult or expensive to remove. But 3D printing allows material to be placed only where it is required. "We created an algorithm that mimics bone growth, so that we're depositing material only where it's necessary and most structurally efficient," says Softkill Design's Aaron Silver. "It's not a purely structural object; we've also tried to 'design' with it, to create our own forms."

The single-storey house has a porous exoskeleton rather than a solid envelope. Weatherproofing would be applied inside, lining the cave-like living spaces. Voids would be glazed in the traditional manner.

The building will have a footprint of around 8 by 5 metres and will be laser-sintered in a factory, in pieces. These pieces, each up to 2.5 metres, will be transported by van to the site (although, like Universe Architecture, Softkill Design doesn't have a specific site or client yet) and joined simply by pushing together the fibrous strands "like Velcro". Softkill Design believes the pieces could all be printed in three weeks and assembled on site in a single day.

"The big difference between 3D printing and manufacturing on site is that you're almost entirely skipping the fabrication part," says Retsin. There are huge potential time, labour and transportation savings to be made, compared to traditional construction methods – however, the cost of 3D-printed materials is still far higher than regular bricks and blocks.

Canal house by DUS Architects

"The price of 3D printing is still a big problem for large volumes," says Retsin. "You pay for the amount of material used rather than the volume. So we've developed a method that can generate a large volume with extremely thin and porous structures. It's only now with 3D printing that you can achieve a strong, fibrous structure using less material than a normal structure. That makes it cheaper."

For its canal house project, DUS Architects is using lower technology: a scaled-up Ultimaker desktop machine that it calls the KamerMaker ("room maker") that can print components up to 3.5 metres high. Working initially in polypropylene, the architects hope to experiment with recycled plastics and bioplastics further into the build.

The project is not about exploring new architectural possibilities but rather generating discussion about the future of design and construction. Starting on site this summer, DUS intends to figure out the construction methodology as it goes along and hold workshops and open days in the structure as it is built. "3D printing is not going to replace brick and concrete buildings. I think it's more going to be the case that we'll start printing brick and concrete," says architect Hedwig Heinsman of DUS. "This is something to kick-start a debate about where architects will be in the future."

Over in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Mediated Matter group at MIT is researching a head-spinning array of innovative design and construction processes that integrate, as their website states, "computational form-finding strategies with biologically inspired fabrication". Many of these involve looking at ways of developing 3D-printing technologies for architectural applications.

Buildings may be constructed by swarms of tiny robotsNeri Oxman

"The 3D-printing technology has been developing at a very rapid pace," says Mediated Matter founder Neri Oxman, "but there are still many limitations," such as the range of materials you can use, the maximum size you can print at and the speed of the process.

Oxman and her team are researching ways of getting around such drawbacks, for example experimenting with printers that can produce "functionally graded" materials that exhibit a range of different properties.

Existing 3D printers are only able to produce homogeneous materials that have the same properties throughout. But graded materials would be useful for printing architectural elements – such as beams or façades that mimic bone, which is hard on the outside but spongy on the inside. Or for printing human skin, which has differently sized pores on different parts of the body, allowing it to act as a filter on the face and a protective barrier on the back.

Oxman has developed a process to assign different materials or properties to individual voxels (volumetric pixels) produced on existing printers, creating simple graded materials. But gradients are hard to produce with the current generation of 3D printers, which rely on armatures or gantries that can only move on three axes – back and forward, side to side, and up and down – and which must lay down material in layers, one atop the other. They also require complex support structures to be printed at the same time to prevent the printed objects collapsing under their own weight.

"In traditional 3D printing, the gantry size poses an obvious limitation for the designer who wishes to print in larger scales and achieve structural and material complexity," explains Oxman. She and her team are investigating ways of printing with additional axes of movement, by replacing the gantry with a six-axis robotic arm. "Once we place a 3D-printing head on a robotic arm, we free up these limitations almost instantly," she says. This is because it allows "free-form" printing at a larger scale and without the need for support structures.

Electron microscope image of the surface of a silk moth cocoon. Image by Dr. James C. Weaver, Wyss Institute, Harvard University

Oxman and her team have been looking to the natural world for inspiration, studying the way in which silkworms build their cocoons. Silkworms "print" their pupal casings by moving their heads in a figure-of-eight pattern, depositing silk fibre and sericin matrix around themselves as they go. They're able to vary the gradient of the printed material, making the cocoon soft on the inside and hard on the outside. As well as the silk fibre – which can be up to a kilometre in length – the pupae also excretes sericin, a sticky gum that bonds the fibres together to form the cocoon. Essentially, the silkworm is acting as a multi-axis 3D multi-material printer.

"We attached tiny magnets to a silkworm's head," says Oxman, "and we motion-tracked its movement as it built its cocoon. We then translated the data to a 3D printer connected to a robotic arm, which would allow us to examine the biological structure in a larger scale."

Oxman's team will perform its first large-scale experiment using this research in April, when it aims to print a pavilion-like structure, measuring 3.6 by 3.6 metres, using a robot programmed to act like a silkworm.

Robotic arms can be used to print in traditional materials, such as plastic, concrete or composites, or employed to weave or knit three-dimensional fibre structures. Researchers are also exploring how the high-performance fibres excreted by silkworms and spiders could be produced artificially, and Oxman's team will print the pavilion's structure using natural silk.

In the future, buildings may be constructed by swarms of tiny robots that use a combination of printing and weaving techniques, Oxman says. "I would argue that 3D printing is more than anything an approach for organising material," she says, using the terms "4D printing", "swarm construction" and "CNC weaving" to describe the future of architectural technology. "Today’s material limitations can be overcome by printing with responsive materials," she says. "Gantry limitations can be overcome by printing with multiple interactive robot-printers. And process limitations can be overcome by moving from layering to weaving in 3D space, using a robotic arm."

According to this vision, the construction site of the future will owe more to tiny creatures like silkworms than to ever-larger 3D printers of the type we use today. "Transcending the scale limitation by using larger gantries can only offer so much," says Oxman. "But if we consider swarm construction, we are truly pushing building technology into the 21st century."

The post "In the future we might print not only buildings, but entire urban sections" appeared first on Dezeen.

When the most delicious cheese in San Francisco tumbles into the sewer, panic ensues.

Biotech company Genentech and global design company Ideo have teamed up to make a free educational mobile-gaming app that imagines such a preposterous scenario. Instead of calling superheroes to solve the city-wide problem, in Ralph’s Killer Muenster, players use the science of genetics to restore the killer cheese to its former edible state. It’s all in a bid to make medical innovation enticing and accessible to youngsters.

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Ninety years ago, avant-garde architects were designing houses with modular spaces that echoed the efficiency of planes and cars. Today, we have automated planes (military drones) and, soon, driverless cars. Isn’t it time, then, for our homes to be just as technologically ambitious?

The Soleta House, or Soleta zeroEnergy One, is a step in the right direction. This prototype line of eco homes includes multifunctional structures with high-tech, clean-energy systems that can be controlled via your smartphone.

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Ninety years ago, avant-garde architects were designing houses with modular spaces that echoed the efficiency of planes and cars. Today, we have automated planes (military drones) and, soon, driverless cars. Isn’t it time, then, for our homes to be just as technologically ambitious?

The Soleta House, or Soleta zeroEnergy One, is a step in the right direction. This prototype line of eco homes includes multifunctional structures with high-tech, clean-energy systems that can be controlled via your smartphone.

The project, currently on display outside the American embassy in Bucharest, was developed by the Justin Capra Foundation for Invention and Sustainable Technologies (FITS). The goal was to design and build a zero-energy shed that could be used as a house, studio, or office in various climates. It also had to be affordable and versatile, with low-maintenance costs and a “positive eco-impact,” the company says in a statement. Naturally, it had to be good architecture, too.

FITS laments how many “low-energy” housing prototypes maximize performance at the discomfort of their occupants and the quality of spaces. The Soleta House was designed to counteract this trend. Its architecture employs an expansive palette of natural and renewable materials that give the house a pleasing, cottage-like aesthetic. It uses high-performance insulated glass to create airy, light-filled living spaces while still retaining thermal loads. Partitions are eliminated inside in favor of a quasi-open plan that subtly delineates one “room” from another.

Nearly every sustainable feature imaginable was embedded in the house, including solar heat, rainwater collectors, in-floor heating, “natural” and “forced” ventilation systems, LED lighting, and high-efficient fixtures. A totalizing climatic conditioning system (KNX) closely monitors the house’s ventilation and energy at all times; when used optimally, KNX can cut energy use by up to 45%. Best, it’s easy to control: You can use your smartphone to calibrate the interior environment to your exact specifications. Finally, there’s an app for that.

I’m loving the adorable, colorful animal illustrations found at Minimals. The site offers the illustrations on various printed pieces, from greeting cards to prints to invitations. Check out the entire line of paper goods right here.

via Site Inspire

Callie Schweitzer, director of Marketing and Communications for Vox Media (which publishes the Verge, SB Nation, and Polygon), can often be found curating the news from other sources on her popular Twitter account. To some people, Schweitzer may seem to be the epitome of a modern digital journalist. For others, she is perhaps nothing like a true journalist.

She prefers to call herself a hybrid between a journalist, a brand strategist, and an audience hacker. “I really see myself as a journalist in curating, packaging, and sharing news. For me that’s the most exciting thing right now,” Schweitzer says.

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Whether it’s making feature films very quickly or developing a dedicated advertising unit, Funny or Die is constantly spawning new comedic tentacles. The online humor depot’s latest move involves tearing down the paywall for its online magazine, The Occasonal, starting with the publication’s tech issue.

During the first six installments of the bimonthly publication, issues went for $3.99 each and $9.99 for a yearly subscription. Starting with the tech issue--which features Kristen Schaal and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and hits online newsstands on May 21--the whole catalog will be available for anyone who wants to lay eyes on it.

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