This Way
Fluid stairway concept by Bosch & Fjord
Vitae International
Campaign for Europe’s largest homeless shelter in Portugal. By McCann.pt.
Design to Improve Life
The worldâs biggest design award.
A Mobile Platform
And it has nothing to do with wireless communication.
Geocache Hunt
Global dropspot/geocache hunt for T-Shirts!
Your Name On Toast
Pay money to see your name on toast. It’s fun, it’s branding (and it’s for a good cause).
True Landscape
A four kilometer path shaped as one long zebra crossing.
jeffbridges.com
Unusual movie-star homepage.
‘Designs of the Time 07’ (Dott 07) is a program of grass-root community projects taking place this year in North East England.
The aim of dott 07 is to support innovative projects that explore how sustainable principles and service design (in contrast to product design) can make a positive difference to our daily lives.
One of the interesting projects to emerge from dott 07 is Low Carb Lane, which examines how households in a whole street can minimize their carbon footprint and environmental impact.
The ambitious goal of the design-team is to come up with a service model that can help people reduce their demand from the power grid by 60% in ways that are sustainable and affordable.
The final result of this, and other Dott 07 projects, will be shown and discussed at a festival in October 2007.
Low Carb Lane resembles a case in Denmark where inhabitants of Guldager, a small village, united to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide in order to become carbon neutral. Similarly, Ashton Hayes is about to become the first carbon-neutral village in the UK.
Lee Walton is an artist who utilize urban space as inspiration and playground in his work.
In some of his performances he interacts with urban systems and codes in unexpected and highly humorous ways, thereby making us look at things in a new perspective.
At his website you’ll find lots of video documentation – here are three favorites:
• Attempting to Escape Lower East Side
• Get over it
• Sitting
Have you ever seen a single shoe in the gutter, a beanie on the road, or a glove on the tram, and thought about whom the object may have belonged to, and how it got lost?
If yes, then you will love the Discarded Object Poster Project.
Discarded Object Poster Project is an urban artwork by Beth Arnold devoted to lonely deserted objects that we tend to notice, only to forget about them soon after.
The artist recently invited people in Melbourne to submit photographs of discarded objects along with information about their location. The images will then be made into high-quality posters and posted around the city.
Walking tours to view posters will take place at the opening on Thursday December 12th.
Ten is an award-winning exhibition which took place during 100% Design in London earlier this year.
For the exhibition, the curator and organizer Chris Jackson invited 10 designers to produce an object with materials found within a 10 km radius of their studios and a budget of 10£.
The aim of the Ten was to express the designers personal perspectives on sustainable design issues in London.
In this part of the world, all we hear of Kabul is usually related to war, crime and misery.
However, they actually have an emerging art scene as well and much of it seems to be connected to The Center of Contemporary Art Afghanistan, which is occasionally frequented by international artists.
One of them Luis Berrios Negron – an MIT graduate – recently went there to carry out a workshop with local students.
Provoked by the brutal past of the Taliban regime as well as the absurd amount of advertisements which US driven democracy apparently has enriched present day Kabul with, Luis Berrios Negron decided to set up an architectural performance with his students.
Together they took over a huge abandoned billboard overlooking the city and covered it with a green cloth. In Afghanistan green is the color of rebirth and from everywhere in Kabul people could see the intervention.
• Read more about the performance
Enzi is a set of 114 identical multifunctional objects developed by Austrian architects PPAG.
The modules can be arranged and rearranged according to the situation or need and may be used for sitting, playing, sleeping or as decorative building blocks. They come in different colors – pink, green and blue.
Enzi was designed to be used at the Museum Quartier in Vienna back in 2004 but they should still serve as an inspiration to urban planners, architects and decision makers who tend to furnish our public spaces with static elements that fail to stimulate our senses.
The Waygood Gallery in Newcastle (UK), has put together the cinematic exhibition Little Jewel Cinema, which is inspired by the peep show format of the pre-cinema days.
Little Jewel Cinema is located in a shop window of one of Newcastle’s busy streets where passers by can stop and peep through 10 holes to watch short films, documentaries and animations made by 13 different artists and filmmakers.
Little Jewel Cinema is running from October 20 to January 1.
DropSpots is a community project that interconnects people through an exchange of ‘gifts’ hidden in public space.
To become a DropSpotter you simply have to find a public accessible place suited for hiding a gift of own choice, e.g. a poem, an image, a question, etc.
Via the DropSpots website you add the location to a map and describe in detail where and how the gift can be found.
Are you in Amsterdam? If yes, I have placed something for you! You can find the location here. If you take the gift (or someone else’s) please replace it with something new to keep the exchange going.
Credits: DropSpots is made by Ed Purver, Dan Phiffer and Brijetta Hall.
In a conceptual protest against the privately owned public spaces in New York City, members of the Graffiti Research Lab came up with a way of making these non-spaces a bit more user-friendly.
Inspired by the FedexFurniture project, the GRL team created a bunch of chairs, made of free-of-charge US postal mail boxes and brought them to one of the locations in question.
Thanks to the DIY chairs, the space was momentarily turned into real place where people could actually sit and relax.
The Graffiti Research Lab is dedicated to outfitting people with open source tools for urban communication. Their goal is to empower individuals to creatively alter and reclaim their surroundings from commercial and corporate culture. One of their most celebrated tools is the LED Throwie – a small, battery-powered light, attached to a magnet, which can be used to make ‘light-graffiti’ on metal surfaces.