Global initiative to foster creativity and innovation
The BE OPEN forum explores human perception and how to design for it.
BE OPEN partners with Design Miami/ to launch the BE OPEN Forum, a portal to the future of design practice.
Each of the Forum participants practices outside the boundaries of traditional product design, utilizing food, scent, biochemistry and haptic technology to make research accessible to the global community and imagine the possibilities of design through sensory exploration.
Dawn Goldworm, Marije Vogelzang, Carter Cleveland, Marcelo Coelho, Tuur van Balen, and Jamie Zigelbaum
The diverse group of speakers at the BE OPEN forum represented the frontier of design. BE OPEN, an initiative that seeks to foster discourse on technology innovation, hosted a compelling panel of designers that break the categories of design, art and problem solving. The forum focused on the idea of sensory design and highlighted a selection of designers who work with the senses to create new solutions and experiences.
The BE OPEN Forum at Design Miami/ reveals the sensory visions of today’s most innovative designer.
Imagine if you could design a product that appealed to the sixth sense – something that felt intuitively ‘right’. It would be a runaway success because everyone would want it, without questioning it. This is the area that the BE OPEN Foundation has chosen to research over the next year. It launched the project at the 2012 London Design Festival with a series of events that focused on the sense of sound and how to design for that.
Predicting the sound of the future is an indvidious task. Listening again to the work of Francesco Balilla Pratella who wrote the Manifesto of Futurist Musicians in 1910, it is surprising just how dated the music is.
It could have been an Italian version of the piano sonatas that Stravinsky wrote but disavowed later in his life as being too like late Beethoven. Pratella’s piano piece, La Guerra, captures a world of established structures collapsing; what we understand as the tonality is frequently suspended but never fully lost. The focus on chords and their progression is dissolving but we recognise the series of notes played on the piano. It sounds like Europe as it plunged into the First World War.
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.
