Global initiative to foster creativity and innovation
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.”
Visitors to the current exhibition at London’s Barbican Centre on the Bauhuas would be forgiven for thinking that the Bauhaus was a style. The exhibition of course contained many beautiful objects in perspex boxes. There was some detailed explanation of the desire to respond to industrial production but there was no reference – apart from a few photographs of empty studios to the fundamental point. The Bauhaus was not a style – it was a school. Jean-Louis Cohen’s The Future of Architecture since 1889 addressed this issue in a fundamental way. He explains that the school rethought the relationship between art, design and architecture. The school championed the new principles of abstract art to challenge existing building forms and then under Hannes Meyer and Mies Van Der Rohe the shapes of cities.
A prize for achievements in design education
Sandberg Institute has been selected to win the BE OPEN Inside the Academy Prize, from a shortlist of six leading European design schools: La Cambre, Belgium; Ecole Cantonale d’art de Lausanne (ECAL), Switzerland; Hochschule Basel, Switzerland; Konstfack, Stockholm, Sweden; Sandberg Institute Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Glasgow School of Art, UK.
BE OPEN Inside the Academy – a new platform to showcase and honour recent achievements in educational approaches – at Design Miami/ Basel
The next stop on BE OPEN’s worldwide tour is Basel, for Design Miami/ Basel 2012. A new platform – BE OPEN Inside the Academy – will showcase and honour recent achievements in educational approaches that promote real-world problem solving through creative design.
London Design Festival 2012
19-23 September
Trafalgar Square project
BE OPEN Sound Portal
Take a journey to the heart of acoustic creativity, through a portal in Trafalgar Square
This year BE OPEN, the new global initiative to foster creativity and innovation, and the London Design Festival are co-producing a project in Trafalgar Square that focuses on the idea of ‘design you can’t see’.
Sociologist, journalist and author of over 20 books translated into various languages, ranging in subject from trends in consumption to social change. Founder of a Research and Strategic Institute – Future Concept Lab (1989). Mr. Morace is also Professor at Domus Academy and Milan’s Politecnico. He has participated in conventions and seminars in 22 countries worldwide.
Tim Abrahams is a former editor of Blueprint. He now writes for Icon, Architect’s Journal and RIBA Journal. He is also the owner of a digital publishing company and an advisor to major cultural institutions on their online strategy.
Everyone operating in the worlds of architecture, design and technology knows that the world has changed since 2008, but the job of identifying and describing exactly how is only just beginning to happen. It was the contention of the convener of the first BE OPEN conference, Francesco Morace, that three new relationships in the world of design had undergone a huge and important shift. Morace suggests that a fundamental realignment in thinking has occurred in over the issue of sustainability, the idea of happiness and perhaps most fundamentally the relationship between the local and the universal. These theories were tested by the inquiring minds of some of the leading figures in the design world.
Tim Abrahams is a former editor of Blueprint. He now writes for Icon, Architect’s Journal and RIBA Journal. He is also the owner of a digital publishing company and an advisor to major cultural institutions on their online strategy.
The most important object in the Freud Museum in London, where the great psychoanalyst lived for just one year before he died, is clearly his couch. Draped in Persian rugs and scattered with cushions, it is on the bohemian side of mid-20th century tastes. Although insignificant in size it is impossible not to look at the piece of furniture and not think of all the dreams that have been relayed there and the neuroses diagnosed. Given that Freudian analysis prioritises relations between the subject and their parents, the familial and domestic becomes the site of the fundamental debates of existence. The couch is not just important because of his historical significance but also because of its symbolism. Anne Leibovitz has photographed it and Louise Bourgeois has exhibited alongside it.
