Here’s another interesting design from the International Contemporary Furniture Fair: Spike Lights. While the blue spikes do look extremely cool, we worry about bumping into a wall and losing one of our lives. I mean, we’re at x04 right now, which is pretty good, but x03 would mean no more sky diving or glue eating without hitting x02. And a life without passions is no life for me.
By designer Tom Kirk—who is said to also be working a follow-up design: walls that close very slowly. – Mark Wilson
ICFF 2007 [mocoloco]
With the International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF) in full swing, we’re seeing some really fun designs floating around the web. These Button Lights are the product of Silvia Campan from the University of Bozen.
We appreciate a design that not only unabashedly displays its wires, but one that is structured around the very idea. The Button Lights manage to both look fantastic and diverge from the ceramic goose styling I would generally anticipate from the name.
Just don’t lose a button or you’re f&#!@ed. – Mark Wilson
NY Design Week 2007 [core77]
“PBJ-14″ (Jones, 2006)
Interview/Article by Jonah Brucker-Cohen
In the multifarious world of consumer electronics and fetishistic objects, designers and corporations attempt to create products that evoke some kind of emotional or aesthetic connection to their users in order produce forms of “gadget lust” and indoctrination to keep people buying more. Taking this credo to an extreme is London-based artist and designer Crispin Jones. From his compelling efforts as a graduate student at the Royal College of Art’s Computer-Related Design MA to his professional art-meets-product-design collaborations and solo projects, Jones’ work examines the tumultuous and playful side of consumer devices and their connection to human civility, physical thresholds, and creative methods of automizing repetitive tasks and actions.
Gizmodo caught up with Jones to discuss his approach to design, products, and how technology should be customized to our state of mind and location of use, rather than a single device for everything. Images and interview after the jump.
If you can’t actually have designer furniture in your hepcat bachelor pad, now you can possess a veritable Greatest Hits of Chair Design in 1/12 scale with the Masterpiece Chairs of the World Collection. That oughta fit in even cubby-hole apartments. The little seats are highly detailed, and some of them have removable cushions. That chaise lounge even reclines a bit.
These miniature chairs are available in six volumes, each group costing between $38 and $50. The models don’t have much practicality, but they just look cool. Check out the gallery to get an idea of their scale. – Charlie White
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Masterpiece chairs of the world collection (Japanese translation) [Rakuten, via TFTS]
Build an extra bedroom into an apartment with architect Dan Hisel’s Z-Box. The Z, which stands for ZZZs, is a 12 foot squared, 10 foot tall box has a translucent polycarbonate shell, lined with douglas fir wood. Inside, there’s room for a bed, nighttables, lamps, and shelves backlit with windows, while the outside has a bookshelf, and even a little dog bed. The idea is to set up the box inside of a large room, with the added benefit of splitting the area in two.
$18K? Does it make more sense to put one of these in a loft or to spring for a 2 bedroom?
galleryPost('zboxbed',8, 'Z-Box '); – Brian Lam
Dan Hisel [via Apartment Therapy and Archictecture.mnp]
Remember those sexy golden headsets we saw back at CeBIT? We’ve found the local pricing and it isn’t nearly as hideous as you would first think. Not that it is cheap, but we are talking 24-carat gold and Blue Steel— a wait, that’s stainless steel. But still, both look gooood. Maybe even gooooood.
The gold option comes in at $429; the steel at $299. Considering the standard JX10 comes in at around $169? Yeah, okay. A sight more. But if you like the bling, now you know the price. Save a few gold coins until next month and you can pick one up. -Seamus Byrne
Those kooky designers are feeding our toast fetish again this morning, and this time it’s Toasty, a design concept for a cassette deck–style toaster. Designer Arthur Wu tips his hat to the old cassette deck tilt-away routine while catering to that loneliest number, one, which is all this retro-chic postmodern toast-o-matic can handle.
But who, pray tell, is satisfied with just one measly piece of toast? Never mind that. Toasty is pretty enough to have sitting there on your table, where you can pop in another piece and it’ll be hot and ready to go by the time you’re finished with the first one. We especially like that lit-up Toasty logo up front. Way to go, Artie! – Charlie White
Toasty, Cassette-deck Style Toaster [Yanko Design]
Microsoft announced the winners of its 2007 Next-Gen PC Design Competition, and this year’s champs gave new meaning to that old cliché, “outside the box.” These PCs won’t be available anytime soon, but their industrial designers pick up some serious recognition along with a substantial wad of cash for their efforts. This year’s competition had entries from 35 countries, and the 349 submissions were judged on their innovation, user experience, aesthetics, technology integration and ecology.
Taking home a cool $25,000 for the Chairman’s Award is John Leung from Melbourne, Australia with his design you see here, called “MADE in China.” The acronym MADE stands for Massively Administered Digital Entities, incorporating a design that has all of its applications and data stored on remote servers. It looks like an Asian dining platter, and its chopstick-like input device, called a CHOPstylus, allows for input on the PC’s touchscreen. Take a look at the gallery for the other winners. – Charlie White
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Brave New World of Computing [Microsoft]
It’s been a while since a cellphone has filled us with as much lust as this SLIQ design. It’s a concept by Mike Serafin with no keypad and what he calls an “advanced touch interface.” It better be pretty advanced, because we haven’t been all that impressed with touch interfaces thus far.
Its illustrations have the Samsung logo either proudly or hopefully displayed, but we’re not sure if this is a Samsung-authorized design or not. Besides its good looks, the concept has one particularly unusual feature we’ve never seen in a cellphone before.
Get this, the most unusual feature: it has a crank that powers it up, so maybe it doesn’t even need batteries. Neat. check out these design sketches:Also included in this possibly vaporware concept is a 2-megapixel camera with a Schneider-Kreuznach lens that looks like it retracts into the phone’s slightly bulging top section. Even with that camera goodness, the design calls for an ultra-thin profile of a mere 10mm. Its shiny toy-like form factor with its sexy disappearing LCD screen really gets us going. OK, back in our holes. – Charlie White
Designer’s Page [Coroflot, via Yanko Design]
This is one weird-looking seat, called the Solar System Chair, perhaps because it lets you sit on cushy balls shaped like some of those nutty planets out there. So let’s see, your ass is on Uranus while your back rests against Neptune and one arm leans on Mercury while the other is, yeah, well-grounded right here on planet Earth. Too bad they’re not properly colored to resemble different planets, unless you want all of them to be models of the planet Mars.
At first we were thinking if you spend $196 on something like this, your head is in Uranus. But wait, as strange as this chair looks, if its orb-shaped cushions are bouncy enough, it might just be comfortable. We’d like to try it, because it would go perfectly with our Outer Space/Palladian Craftsman-style décor, plus we have a lot of space-cadet friends who would immediately insist on sitting in it. – Charlie White
Product Page [Solar System Chair]
