Wednesday, January 5, 2011

film: The Genius of Design (part 4)

part 4: better living through chemistry
in 1947  Earl Silas Tupper founded Tupperware. Tupper had observation on everyday practice in mind when he invented the Tupperware. in 1938 his Tupperware Plastics Company was the first company to take in use the plastic polyeten in everyday objects.
plastic was a post-war material that influenced allot; kitchen ware, furniture's, other objects used in everyday life. after the war the economy started rising, people had more money and the consumer market grew. Tupperware is a object of design taken for granted, when it is actually revolutionary within plastic and the consumer market.


Dieter Rams was a designer that wanted to clean up after the war, and give the consumer everyday design. he got hired by Braun to design consumer electronics. record players, radios, etc got simple form of rectangular with circular buttons. he wanted form to follow function and stripped back all decor and showed a clear, honest way of thinking of design. there was perfection and purity in his design, where he had to remove all decor and unnecessarily things for the design to be optimal. the product should be exactly what it should be.


                     Dieter Rams for Braun: System Combination, 1958.

the world was rising again after the W.W. 2 and in 1956 they started construction of the first motorway. to know where you are driving you need signage. from 1958 graphic designers  started designing road signage. they were functional, minimalistic and had a clarity and simplicity about them so that the driver could read the sign quickly and clearly. typographer and graphic designer Margaret Calvert designed all the road signage in Britain with the special designed font "transport".  the signage´s was a sign of changing time.

good design is fit for purpose and everyday use. 

                    in 1963 Robin Day designed this stack able, light 
                    but strong, washable, comfortable, indistructable, 
                    everyday use and low cost (1/4 of the price of 
                    traditional products) plastic chair.   

the post-war time was a optimistic spirit of time. a new world had began were people was more happy and relaxed. the material plastic became liberation to designers and consumers. with plastic the designer could shape objects easy and design whatever they wanted. plastic was rock&roll!


the Italian manufacture Alessi, founded by Alberto Alessi in 1945, hired avant garde designers and architects to design artistic everyday objects.

designer Joe Colombo  was a 60´s favor. he loved the notion of change and was very experimental in his design when he designed environments for the future. an good example of his design is his Cadillac bed that was very private with built in radio, phone and cigarette lighter.




with the plastic came the inflatable chair. a fashionable and disposable chair designed for the teen-age consumer. it was a time to relax and comfortable lounge furniture´s became popular with the young generation. plastic became a new lifestyle.

another very famous designer in the 60´s was the danish designer Verner Panton. he had trained with Arne Jacobsen and his Scandinavian style. Panton revolutionized the world with his legless chair that was injection molded in one piece of plastic. the well-known S chair or Panton chair. it was designed in 1959 but did not make the market before 1967 when the manufacturer Vitra wanted to mass produce his chair. but it was not before in the 90´s production and when molded with the plastic polypropylene that it became indestructible.
Panton was a designer liberated by the time, he had forgot all about traditions and created total design meaning wall to wall, floor to ceiling, an environment that captured the design. these soft environments were very psychedelic, like you were on drugs when you spent time in the designed room. his environments reflected the effect of taking the popular 60´s drug LSD.




the designers wanted to make objects smaller, movable plastic electronics that were to be durable with modern technologies. in 1947 the Americans invented the transistor that is used in the radio. when the objects became smaller they also became movable and portable, something that gave libertaion and freedom to the consumer.in example the Sony Walkman that was a new experience for the consumer, a separate reality for the user. even the homes became portable like the 60´s Futuro home made in polyester in 1968. it was a Utopian fantasy, Tupperware you could live in. it looked like a spaceship and it was probably were the idea of the home came from: the Space Age living. but the home must be hooked up to water pipes, so it was´nt that durable after all.

with the new technology and cheap mass production of everyday objects the consumer could do what ever they wanted. a throw-away culture was rising. and they saw that the material of the future; plastic, was not that easy to get rid of. and they saw that plastic did not look good over time, it got brittle and cracked. the designers thought they had solved a problem by designing everything in plastic, but they were actually doing the opposite; creating a problem. early 70´s optimism of the future faded away.

                       an example of a throw-away furniture is the
                       Monobloc chair designed in 1967. it is
                       injection molded in one plastic piece, cheap
                       (£ 2 to produce!), 40-60 sec to produce,
                       perform well, stack able, functional, but
                       people get bored of it and throws it away.

today we don´t look at plastic as an object of optimism. it is used for everything and looked upon as cheap. and the scary thing is that plastic is what will be left of this world. but for the designer plastic is still fantastic! you can still do anything with it were new possibilities awakes all the time. and plastic is actually based on intelligence and purely made from humans.

examples of futuristic designers of the late 20th century, and today as well, are Philippe Starck and Mark Newson. Starck is seen upon as a superstar designer. he is a pleasure seeking designer. it is to be both futuristic, smart and innovative. like his lemon squeeze; Juicy Salif:
























Mark Newson are seen as the most hippest  designer of the planet, were his Lockheed lounge from 1986 is the most desirable furniture of the world.  he designed the chair in his backyard when he was only 23-24 years old.



mass production was the ultimate goal of a designer. but it introduced  a curious dilemma; how can a mass product have personality? the designers wanted to solve this problem. and many designers saw  a design product as a luxury item.


Michael Graves are seen as the most successful industrial designer, where he got Alessi as manufacture. his Kettle from 1985 are seen as the first mass produced product with personality. it is a design classic where form follows function. it has a sense of charisma were the consumer desire to own it.












during the rescission a new retail experience named IKEA was founded by the Swedish guy Ingvar Kamprad Elmtaryd Agunnaryd in 1943, he was only 17 years old, selling everyday small objects from his home, the farm Elmtaryd that was situated in Aguannaryd in Sweden. in 1955 the company started designing their own furniture´s, and is to day the most successful manufacturer of all time.

advanced CAD assignment:existing building

Tuesday, January 4, 2011

studio crit 2: concept






film: The Genius of Design (part 2)

part 2: designs for living
during the 1920´s a new mechanical era started, and the question of should peoples homes be a castle or a machine for living in became popular.  they learned that people and things are joined together in this world by design. people had different views on what was design and there were different styles of design.

in 1926 Walter Groupius founded the Bauhaus school in Dessau, Germany. the school looked like an industrial factory, were it was founded to educate young people to design and create products with an industrial look. Groupius wanted to join together all kind of craftsmanship disciplines to get them  to experiment together to design products, and see what got out of them working together. with this they educated people for a new future were artist learned from the construction workers, and the construction workers learned from the artists again. this was a vision for a new kind of life, a new future, and a new way to design.


Bauhaus´s enemy was the style of Art Novae with organic, erotic and a decorative design. this was the complete opposite of the modernist style that were objects of quality with no decoration. the modernist were imposing a future vision on people, many felt that they were forced on this kind of way to live.

the new technology made it possible to produce tubular steel. this opened up a whole new field of shapes; all sort of possibilities. tubular steel was mainly used on the chair were it became half structure, half product.


this new machine age led to the mass production of the kitchen, were the kitchen had become a functional room, a fitted kitchen were it was almost to be like a factory for the women were they were to produce food faster and simpler. it was designed for living, easier living.

the kitchen in a way became a machine. a machine for living in. something that led the film to the Swiss born architect Le Corbusier that saw the house as a machine for living in. a fitted house should open up for entertainment were the service places, like kitchen and bathrooms, should be limited, and small places. the house for Le Corbusier was a modern traffic machine were it stood for engineering and the future. a house should be flexible in the future with multifunctional furniture's. the occupant should be able to do whatever they wanted inside the house, were the floor plan should be flexible and walls could be moved around to create wider or smaller spaces after what was needed.
the furniture's were functional but not so comfortable. they saw that it was easier to change products after the style then the architecture. many saw the modernist style as too simple, some liked it, some did not.

in 1932 Bauhaus school got closed down by Hitler and the Nazis, and Groupius moved to Britain.


George Carwardine designed the Anglepoise lamp in 1935 where he added spring makers on the lamp to easier control the light.  the design was based on engineering principles.

in 1935 Le Corbusier moves to USA, with ambitions to change the American design and style. but the Americans had already chosen their style and future. it was chosen by capitalism and consumerism. and in New York Le Corbusier saw that every building had its own style.
Henry Dreyfuss is seen as a genius in the USA; he applied common sense and a scientific approach to design problems. his work both popularized the field for public consumption, and made significant contributions to the underlying fields of ergonomics, anthropometric, and human factors. Dreyfuss designed for the consumer and their needs, were he wanted to include everyone in his vision of the future. with the use of his measurements of the average human that he called joe and josephine he designed thinking of the ergonomics of the human being. he looked at how people used objects, and wanted to make it easier for people to use different objects. Dreyfuss way of thinking of the human was very different from Le Corbusier´s way of thinking, that was very functional and machine like. and that is also the reason why so many disliked Le Corbusier and his ideas of the future.

 another machine for living in was the Airstream trailer designed by Wally Byam in 1933. the minimalistic trailer was made in aluminum and had everything you needed.

the Frenchman Raymond Loewy is seen as the first interior consultant were he uses inspiration from the modern and streamlined design and made it in to interiors and homes. in Loewy's early years in the U.S., he lived in New York and found work as a window designer for department stores, including Macy´s, Wanamaker´s and Saks in addition to working as a fashion illustrator for Vogue and Harper´s Bazaar.

dolphins barn apartment

here´s a render image created with the use of the programs autocad and 3d max studio. this was just a small assignment we did after the mini project and the dolphins barn earlier during the fall semester.