Global initiative to foster creativity and innovation
London, Wednesday 19 September: The BE OPEN Sound Portal has arrived in London’s Trafalgar Square. A mysterious, black, rubberised cube, it will host five soundscapes over the next five days so that the public can ‘switch on their hearing’ to appreciate the most advanced audio technology in the world.
Source: wallpaper.com
The debate in Covent Garden last night was a sound argument for a sonically enhanced future. Can intelligent, personable sound design encourage us to spend more in retail environments? Could sound help the older generation feel more comfortable? Will electric cars soon be jamming our streets, all playing the same sonorous ‘G’ note from beneath their bonnets? Can a better understanding of sound and our sensory systems help us design anything from household products to skyscrapers that can breathe, grow and ‘think’?
Source: wallpaper.com
Last Friday night at London’s Earls Court exhibition centre, a panel of prestigious design-world figures put together their creative minds to select three future-thinking young designers to win the 2012 BE OPEN Awards. The awards programme, launched earlier this year at Milan Design Week, was set up to support emerging design talent by the BE OPEN foundation, a creative Think Tank headed by Russian entrepreneur and philanthropist Elena Baturina.
Source: wallpaper.com
‘Do you remember the very first scene from “A Space Odyssey”, where the monkey picks up a bone and whacks the other monkey over the head with it?’
Ben Evans, London Design Festival director, is describing the inspiration for the design of the BE OPEN Sound Portal, an audio installation that was placed in the centre of Trafalgar Square during last week’s Festival. ‘In the background of the scene,’ he continues, ‘there’s a big black obelisk and no one explains to you what it is. It appears again at the end of the film as a metaphor for the past, present and future.’
Source: wallpaper.com
The ambisonic clamour of sea shanties, clattering percussion, classical guitar and lush synthetic vocals flooded the space inside the BE OPEN Sound Portal on Trafalgar Square today.
Thursday 20 September 6-8pm
The Hospital Club, 24 Endell Street, Covent Garden
BE OPEN hosted a panel discussion in collaboration with WIRED Consulting (the bespoke events arm of the internationally renowned magazine WIRED UK), on Thursday 20 September at London’s Hospital Club. Tom Cheshire, Associate Editor of WIRED UK, moderated a panel of leading design minds, including celebrated designer Tom Dixon, Roland Lamb, Matthew Herbert, Lauren Stewart and Benjamin Koren.
Tom Dixon’s west London canal-side HQ was the venue for BE OPEN’s first off-schedule event at the 2012 London Design Festival. Described by Dixon as a flash-market showcase of young design talent, BE OPEN SPACE consisted of eight site-specific raw-wood stands conceived by designer-engineers Pan Studio and JailMake. Their solid, practical construction made reference to pine art-transport containers while also echoing the old trade stalls of Florence’s Ponte Vecchio.
Designer Sam Bernier’s starting point is the ultimate contemporary dilemna. “After finishing the content of a mason jar… I always clean it and keep it for later use. I quickly realised that I had almost no opportunities to actually reuse them unless I decided to turn my kitchen into a canning manufacture,” he writes. Bernier’s response was to create customised lids using low cost 3D printing for the jars. He uses the popular phrase ‘upcycling’.
Imagine the world of tomorrow and imagine the soundscape. Will it be beeping computers, electric cars, giant wind turbines and spacecraft?
Will it be a noiseless, utopian world of clean, environmentally friendly machines, where humans can travel, communicate and experience life through the limitless possibilities of the internet, or noisy and frenetic, where nature and humanity come second?
“I am not really a teacher,” says Ron Arad. A strange remark from a man who has spent 12 years as Professor of Design Products at the Royal College of Art. Especially strange when one considers that he was speaking on a platform – part of the Beopen Talks in Basel – to discuss how we educate tomorrow’s innovators. But then in his own work Arad has achieved greatness by going against the grain. His Concrete Stereo (1983) was a hi-fi coated with protective resin, then encased in concrete before being chipped away to reveal rusting steel beneath. It is often seen as the emergence of a punk aesthetic in design: an emblem of the times. However as the Museum of Modern Art’s citation describes it, it was also “a surreal challenge to the sanctity of consumer electronics.”
