Designing for Disaster Relief (Student/recent graduate competition)

Sexist jeans

This washing label was spotted in some jeans by Telegraph journalist Emma Barnett. Read her article for her response to it. What do you think? Funny or sexist?

Caine’s Arcade

I thought you’d enjoy this. Wonderful story.

Great British design: six favourites

Last week’s Observer had a feature on British Design to coincide with a new exhibition at the V&A. Here’s James Dyson’s pick of the best of British:

I remember the launch of the Mini in 1959. We were all aware that this was a complete break from the past. My mother bought one in 1960 when I was 14. I loved it. My brother and I were both 6ft 1in and my mother was 5ft 11in, so here were these great lanky people, getting into a Mini and thinking it was huge.

Italy had the Fiat 500 and France had the Citroën 2CV, both brilliant cars, but the Mini was a very British riposte to that. It was revolutionary in quite an interesting way. The Fiat and Citroën were both cars with big wheels that projected into the interior of the car, making the interior feel small – if you got into cars of that era, you were horribly aware of the big wheel arches. The clever idea of Sir Alec Issigonis, the Mini’s designer, was to make small wheels but to pump them up harder to get over difficulties with the suspension. The brief was to have a car that was only 10ft long – he thought cars were too big – and the Mini also answered a sociological need: it was a small family car that was extremely economical.

If you get into an original Mini now, you’ll find the interior is still large in comparison to cars of today. Issigonis dispensed with the wind-down window which meant that when you touched the inside panel of the door you were also touching the outside panel, so you got the full width of the car. It was very simple, but a great breakthrough. There is a reason why it became Britain’s best-selling car.

 

(Read the rest of the picks at Great British design: six favourites | Art and design | The Observer)

Drying clothes in Japan

Nifty.

Exciting!

Clothes dryers aren’t common in Japan so drying is done the “old fashioned” (and natural, energy-efficient, not-clothes-destroying) way. As a result, innovation in clothes hanging has taken the country way beyond our biggest achievement, the radiator hanger.

(You’ll learn the Japanese for “high performance”, “good job” and “it’s perfect” by watching these adverts. We’ll test you on those soon)

Jonathan Ive on the importance of prototyping

 

Sir Jonathan Ive, Apple’s lead designer, has been interviewed by The Evening Standard. This part is particularly interesting:

“Where you see the most dramatic shift is when you transition from an abstract idea to a slightly more material conversation. But when you make a 3D model, however crude, you bring form to a nebulous idea and everything changes — the entire process shifts. It galvanises and brings focus from a broad group of people. It’s a remarkable process.”

Read the full interview at This Is London

The Story of Keep Calm and Carry On

The language of ties

Radio 4 had a programme on the language of ties last week. As an avowed non-tie wearer (both for physical and ideological reasons), I think the politics of ties are interesting. You can listen to it on iPlayer, or download the podcast. Here’s an interesting snippet especially the bit at the end about the direction of the angles and the difference between American and British ties…

For other people, especially the student revolutionaries of my generation, refusing to wear a tie was not so much a matter of personal convenience, but an ideological statement and a political act: for it meant a deliberate rejection of authority in all its forms.

Che Guevara didn’t wear a tie, nor did Fidel Castro, and Albert Einstein had never really liked them, either. All his life, he had a horror of constraint, be or physical, intellectual or emotional, which he described in the German word “zwang”. For Einstein, as for many of the student revolutionaries of the 1960s, the necktie became the very embodiment and symbol of “zwang”.

There was some justification for this view, well summed up in the phrase “the old school tie”, which was – and in some quarters still is – redolent of snobbery, elitism, connection and privilege.

For ties in their most traditional form, with diagonal stripes or heraldic crests, were closely associated with public schools, Oxford and Cambridge colleges, and gentlemen’s clubs such as The Garrick or the Marylebone Cricket Club, better known as the MCC, and they could only be worn by old boys or alumni or members.

Lower down the social scale, ties had become more widespread from the late 19th Century with a massive growth in the number of clerks and bureaucrats and petty officials who were revealingly described as white-collar workers – and in those days, you couldn’t wear a shirt with a white collar unless you were wearing a tie as well. And after World War I, there was a significant proliferation of striped regimental ties that could only be worn by those who had recently been on active service.

Depending on its design, wearing a tie in Britain might mean that you were a humble office worker, or that you belonged to one of the closed worlds that formed part of the establishment.

(I)n the United States, diagonally-striped ties became the widely accepted dress code for professionals and for those who worked on Wall Street. They were produced in many different colours and many different permutations, and they were especially associated with the firm of Brooks Brothers, which by the 1920s was specialising in outfitting professional American men.

In order to distinguish their product from the exclusive British club and regimental ties on which they were modelled, the Brooks Brothers ties were manufactured with the diagonal stripe going the other way, and to this day, striped American and British ties retain this difference.

Read the full article at BBC News – A Point of View: The language of ties

Give it five minutes

Dismissing an idea is so easy because it doesn’t involve any work. You can scoff at it. You can ignore it. You can puff some smoke at it. That’s easy. The hard thing to do is protect it, think about it, let it marinate, explore it, riff on it, and try it. The right idea could start out life as the wrong idea.

So next time you hear something, or someone, talk about an idea, pitch an idea, or suggest an idea, give it five minutes. Think about it a little bit before pushing back, before saying it’s too hard or it’s too much work. Those things may be true, but there may be another truth in there too: It may be worth it.

(Read the full article at Give it five minutes – (37signals))

Gorgeous ceramic gradient cladding

A new has appeared in Walworth behind the Elephant and Castle decorated with some interesting ceramic tiles in a pixellated gradient. Rather attractive…

(See more photos at Noisy Decent Graphics)