optimisticracer - Tumblr blog

optimisticracer · 4 years

Text

MATERIAL MATTERS Half-Term Assignment: Designer @ Maker Questions

Yves Béhar, founder of Fuse project

https://www.dezeen.com/2020/10/27/the-ocean-cleanup-sunglasses-yves-behar-fuseproject/

The Ocean Cleanup has teamed up with Yves Béhar to create a pair of sunglasses from plastic that the non-profit has collected from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

This marks the first time that the Dutch organisation has created a product from the plastic it has retrieved from the ocean as part of its attempt to go "full circle from trash to treasure".

The sunglasses are made from plastic debris collected from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Produced by Italian eyewear brand Safilo, the glasses have a classic shape reminiscent of Ray Ban's Wayfarers, rendered in deep, navy blue, with distinctive turquoise hinges connecting each arm to the frame.

"It was important for the glasses to embrace the natural, raw iridescence of the blue material, as for me it mimics the beauty of the sea and says something about the material's origin," Fuseproject founder Béhar told Dezeen.

The design by Yves Béhar features a distinctive light blue hinge

The product is designed to be "useful and durable" and once it reaches the end of its life, it can be easily disassembled into its constituent parts and recycled once again.

"The material is a bit softer structurally than standard plastic, which delivers a nice feel in the hand and on the face," said Béhar.

"By designing a slightly thicker frame, we were able to transform the softer plastic composite into a solid and durable product.

"Our easily removable hinges are not inserted within the plastic as is common in traditional eyewear, which means the glasses can be repaired or recycled at the end of their use," he continued.

Italian eyewear brand Safilo manufactures the sunglasses

According to The Ocean Cleanup, the plastic used to create the sunglasses was entirely sourced from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP) – an area of 1.6 million square kilometres between Hawaii and the coast of California where an estimated 79 thousand tonnes of plastic has accumulated.

The Ocean Cleanup worked with independent certification body DNV GL to verify the plastic's origin and develop a new international standard for how companies can prove the "source and authenticity" of the marine plastic they use in their products going forwards.

Called the Chain of Custody Standard for Plastics Retrieved in the Hydrosphere, this sets out a number of requirements that companies need to meet including a traceable supply chain "from water to shore".

They come with a tubular black sunglasses case

The glasses come with matching, tubular black cases, made from the 2,000 kilograms of plastic that were collected during The Ocean Cleanup's pilot mission.

This started in September 2018 and had to be aborted early when the non-profit's floating rig, which skims the surface of the ocean for plastic, unexpectedly broke down.

The glasses represent the first product created from plastic collected by the Ocean Cleanup

The actual glasses are made from plastic that was collected during a subsequent, second dispatch in June 2019 and returned to shore at the end of the year.

All profits generated from the sale of the sunglasses will go back into funding future cleanup missions, with each pair paying to clean an area of the GPGP equivalent to 24 football fields according to the organisation.

To collect the plastic the non-profit uses U-shaped floating barriers, which are pushed along the ocean by wind and waves, to scoop up plastic that is floating up to three metres below the surface.

All profits will go back into funding future cleanup missions

Despite raising $30 million in funding, The Ocean Cleanup's approach has prompted criticism from the scientific community due to the fact that 94 per cent of the estimated 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic floating in the GPGP are microplastics smaller than five millimetres in size.

These are found not just on the surface but all the way down on the ocean floor and cannot be collected as easily as larger pieces. As Italian environmentalist Cristina Gabetti explained in an interview with Dezeen, "it's a soup more than an island [of floating debris]", as it is often portrayed.

Another environmental organisation, Parley for the Oceans, already repurposed collected marine plastic for a collection of sunglasses back in 2018.

As part of an ongoing collaboration with Adidas, the initiative has also released trainers, boots and an entire swimwear line, as well as football kits for Manchester United and Real Madrid fashioned from recycled, ocean-bound plastic.

Satyendra Pakhale, designer

https://www.satyendra-pakhale.com/about/

Satyendra Pakhalé

MAKING WHAT HE IMAGINES: PRODUCT DESIGN ALUM SATYENDRA PAKHALÉ FUSES ARCHITECTURAL TEXTURE AND POETRY

Amsterdam-based designer Satyendra Pakhalé (BS 94 Product Design), whose sensory-sparking and sinuous work—held in museum collections worldwide—spans industrial, transportation and architectural design, grew up in India loving drawing, painting, physics and mechanics.

Encouragement from his socially conscious teacher parents pushed him to be a maker at an early age. He was also inspired by the Ajanta Buddhist caves, paintings and rock-cut architecture—dating back to the second century B.C.—in the Maharashtra region where he was raised.

Satyendra Pakhalé's Flower Offering Chair, 2001, for Ammann Gallery.

1 of 7

Satyendra Pakhalé's Add-On Radiator, 2004, for Tubes Radiatori, photo by Tom Vack.

“When I was growing up in India, things were not industrially made, so you made your own,” he says. “You didn't go to a toy store to buy a toy. You would pick up wood, go to a carpenter and make toys for yourself. You make what you can imagine. That's exactly what I do today, except with somewhat better abilities.”

After discovering a book in his school library by the modernist American designer George Nelson, and reading it cover-to-cover, Pakhalé decided to pursue design. He earned a degree from the Industrial Design Centre (IDC) at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT Bombay). When he expressed to his mother the wish to study abroad, she spoke to family friend and Southern California native Dr. Orpha Speicher, who founded a missionary hospital in his hometown. She told Pakhalé’s mom about ArtCenter, and brought back a brochure from a summer trip.

Pakhalé reached out to ArtCenter and was offered scholarships to study at the former ArtCenter Europe campus in Switzerland. “Going abroad from India at the time was not easy for various reasons, including foreign exchange limits,” he says. At ArtCenter Europe, Pakhalé was taught a variety of design thinking methods by “wonderful minds,” he says, from designer Wolfgang Joensson to Simon Fraser, who worked then at Porsche Design.

Satyendra Pakhalé’s KUBU Chaise Longue, 2009, for Ammann Gallery, photo by Satyendra Pakhalé Associates.

After graduating, Pakhalé worked at Frog Design and Philips Design. At the latter, his projects included working on the Pangéa, a 1997 concept car developed for French car company Renault and designed for use by environmental researchers. After leaving Philips, he started his own design practice in Amsterdam in 1998, where his clients include Poltrona Frau–Haworth, Novartis and Cappellini.

“I was eager to explore all sectors of design, from handmade to machine-made and in-between,” he says. When it comes to his oeuvre, Pakhalé says his work is rooted in the culture of making and themes of poetic analogy, perception, atmosphere, social modernity, secular humanism, craftsmanship and technology. “I aim to create sensorial qualities in industrial design, such as the texture and warmth we recognize in age-old objects, yet without passively accepting traditions,” Pakhalé says. “The sensorial experience is essential.”

Satyendra Pakhalé's Panther, 2002, photo by Satyendra Pakhalé Associates.

Satyendra Pakhalé's B.M. Objects in 2019 monograph Satyendra Pakhalé: Culture of Creation, book design by Main Studio, photo by Rick Keus.

For instance, his 2002 multi-chair Panther, with its iconographic swooping lines and curves, was designed to celebrate the golden jubilee of Italian furniture company Moroso, and combines three sitting positions in a single form, evoking a leaping panther. “I created it to entice the user to try out various postures: sitting, lounging, reclining,” he says. “Panther is intended to make us aware of our existence and to take time for contemplation and deep breathing.” His 2001 Flower Offering Chair is a chair-like ceramics piece, structurally strong enough to sit on, with two removable vases in its backrest to hold flowers.

Satyendra Pakhalé: Culture of Creation, the first comprehensive monograph devoted to Pakhalé’s work, was released in September 2019 as a “labor of love,” he says. It includes images of his work and 12 critical essays by a range of designers and thinkers, including architect Juhani Pallasmaa, Museum of Modern Art Senior Curator of Architecture and Design Paola Antonelli, and former Philips Design Chief Executive Officer Stefano Marzano.

“Each project we work on goes through rigor and lots of care, and we stand behind each piece that we bring into the world,” Pakhalé says. “The monograph speaks about that journey.”

Alice Fox

https://www.textileartist.org/exhibition-review-tide-marks-alice-fox

Textile artist Alice Fox is inspired by the natural world and detail of organic things. In 2012 she was the artist in residence at Spurn Point National Nature Reserve where where she developed her work based on coastal landscapes. Here, regular TextileArtist.orgcontributor, Sue Stone considers Alice’s recent exhibition ‘Tide Marks’ which is currently showing at the Gate Gallery in Grimsby, Lincolnshire.

Alice Fox – Sand Marks Cloths

Tide Marks: Alice Fox

Gate Gallery, 12, Brighowgate, Grimsby, N E Lincolnshire, DN32 0QX Exhibition runs from 24 October to 30 November 2013

Words by Sue Stone

Alice Fox – Tide Line (detail)

The venue for the exhibition is Gate Gallery, a small independent gallery in Grimsby, North East Lincolnshire, UK, the town where Alice Fox grew up. Grimsby has close connections with the sea and so it is entirely appropriate for Alice to show her latest body of work ‘Tide Marks’ here.

The first thing I notice on entering the ‘Tide Marks’ exhibition is the tranquility of the work displayed. The images celebrate the coastal landscape and really capture that peaceful feeling of being at the beach with waves lapping the seashore, the ebb and flow of the tide and the imprints on wet sand. Alice has an affinity with nature and, in particular, the sea coast and it shows. She is a trained naturalist with a degree in Physical Geography who later returned to college to complete a Textiles degree as a mature student, graduating in 2011. She has been developing a close relationship with the shoreline and this series of work is an extension of the work made during of her residency at Spurn National Nature Reserve in 2012.

Alice Fox – Tide Marks Book

Natural fragments

The work on show consists of a selection of abstract images in various different media, including works on paper, cloth and tapestry weave.

It ranges from a series of large scale, wall hung textiles, and large, framed works on paper, to small, intimate prints and concertina, hand made artist’s books whose colour and printed marks are derived from beach-combed items, including rusty metal and collected man made and natural fragments.

I really enjoy the mark making aspect of the work; the layers built up with the use of rusty metal, collograph printing and embossing (using textured plates made with found items which are then put through a printing press) before adding hand stitch. It is apparent from looking at the work that Alice has observed, and made careful decisions on which marks should be included, after recording and gathering patterns and textures on her way.

Alice Fox – Sand Marks Cloths & Sand Marks

Coastal landscapes

My own favourite is the series of unframed hanging cloths which incorporate rust print, collograph print and stitch. The rust print is made using found rusty objects which have been collected on beaches that Alice has visited. They are used to make unpredictable, experimental marks and stains, the marks changing each time the object is used. Creases, tucks and stitches are used to then add texture and form to the individual hangings and when brought together they make up an installation measuring approximately 5 metres wide by 2 metres high.

The exhibition is accompanied by a series of specially commissioned poems and prose by the writer Nigel Morgan. These, and a selection of images of the coastal landscapes that provide Alice’s inspiration, sketches, found objects, work in progress as well as some of the final work shown in the exhibition are included in an A5, 80 page landscape book ‘Tide Marks’.

The exhibition is well worth a visit if you are in the Grimsby area.

Further information can be found at: alicefox.co.uk

The ‘Tide Marks’ book is for sale at: alicefox.bigcartel.com

About the reviewer

Sue Stone is a member of the 62 group of Textile Artists and the Society of Designer Craftsmen. She studied Fashion at St Martins School of Art and Embroidery at Goldsmiths College and exhibits both nationally and internationally.

https://www.dezeen.com/2019/06/28/jony-ive-legacy-apple-head-designer/

According to Apple there are currently something in the region of 1.4 billion active users of its devices. There's a good chance that you are reading this article on one of them. Given how ubiquitous they have become it is quite staggering to think that the design of every single one of those devices was overseen by Jony Ive, Apple's chief designer, who has just announced he is leaving the company to set up his own firm.

Moving from the UK, Ive joined Apple in 1992 – seven years after Steve Jobs departed the company he founded and five years before his return as CEO in 1997. Apple was already sliding into the trouble it would find itself in during the mid-1990s, but didn't realise it yet. Ive was involved with the design of several innovative though ultimately ill-fated products of that era, notably the various iterations of the Newton MessagePad and the Twentieth Anniversary Mac. But as Apple increasingly flailed around, these products never lived up to their striking designs.

Jobs' return brought discipline back to the company. He cancelled a number of product lines he felt weren't up to it or were distractions, including the Newton, and reduced Apple's overly complex range of Macs to a 4x4 grid: desktop and portable, consumer and professional. But something wholly new was needed to get customers excited again. This came in the colourful teardrop form of the iMac.

Ive's truly iconic design symbolised Apple's rebirth and return to relevance

Apple wanted the iMac to appear as ground-breaking as the original Macintosh was back in 1984, even creating images with "Hello (again)" printed on its the screen in homage to its predecessor's famous "Hello" message. But in reality, the iMac was not so different from the existing all-in-one Power Macintosh G3 when it came to its internals. What mattered, of course, was how it was packaged.

Ive's truly iconic design symbolised Apple's rebirth and return to relevance. It also sold in the millions, helping dig the company out of the financial black hole it found itself in. Its colourful, translucent aesthetic was, of course, much imitated, in everything from kettles and radios to electric toothbrushes. Few designs have ever been so influential – and certainly no computer designs, which before then rarely strayed from the beige box.

Dieter Rams is often seen as a major influence on Ive's approach to design, one that Ive has himself acknowledged. From both an aesthetic and philosophical point of view, Rams' 10 principles of good design run through Ive's work. But there are also some areas where they diverge considerably.

Most obviously, this can be seen through the realities of obsolescence, which contravene Rams' insistence that a product should be long-lasting, but is an inherent and vital part of the technology industry. More broadly, the idea that form should ultimately follow function becomes rather more complicated when that function takes place within the confines of a digital display.

Launched in October 2001, the iPod was in many ways the apotheosis of this idea

A computer – whether in the form of a desktop, laptop, phone, tablet, or even watch – is always a conduit to something else: what's displayed on the screen. So a designer has to balance the desire to get the device out of the way of the screen while creating a desirable object that will sell.

Launched in October 2001, the iPod was in many ways the apotheosis of this idea. Its clickwheel was both functional and iconic. But the real masterstroke were the white Earpods. Headphones up to that point had always been black. The white headphones differentiated the iPod and its users in a simple yet powerful way.

I was an early adopter, buying a second generation iPod in 2002, and I always remember the first time I saw someone else with the same white Earpods. From something you hardly ever see, they quickly became the height of fashion, driving iPod sales, before becoming so ubiquitous that competitors were even making their own white headphones. Today's wireless Airpods mirror this approach and trajectory. Pilloried on their launch for their strange appearance, these little white sticks poking out of your ears have become a phenomenon.

Looking across the range of products that Ive has designed one realises quite how varied they are: from the exuberant bright colours and curving forms of the iMac G3 to the pared-back asceticism of something like the Mac mini. This variety is why it makes no sense to call Ive a minimalist. Instead, his approach might be better described as strategic – always obsessed by materials and detailing but tailoring his design language to the circumstance and application.

Looking across the range of products that Ive has designed one realises quite how varied they are

This approach accounts for what some have seen as design missteps. From the apparently over-designed original iBook to the infamous "hockey puck" mouse, there are a number of examples one could cite, but few that provoked the furore of the iPhone X's "notch".

But far from being a design failure as many rashly saw it, the "notch" is clearly the result of a thoroughly thought-through decision to create a means of being able to tell an iPhone at a glance, a task previously performed by the home button which the iPhone X had eliminated.

In 2015, Ive was promoted to chief design officer, now formally responsible for all aspects of design at Apple. However, his influence had already extended into software, having led the human interface team since 2012. He was the driving force behind iOS 7's dramatic redesign, abandoning skeuomorphism – which incidentally Jobs had loved – in favour of a pared-back, almost entirely abstract design language.

Again this wasn't purely about aesthetics, but the result of strategic decisions. The original iPhone had created a new paradigm for interacting with a display, and its heavy 3D effects and borrowings from the physical were vital to it being intuitive. By 2013, when iOS 7 was released, most of Apple's customers knew how to use a touchscreen phone, and coupled with much higher resolution displays, it was now possible to eliminate the interface "chrome" and allow more room for content.

When Steve Jobs died in 2011, many observers saw Ive as the heir apparent, carrying the torch for decades to come

Latterly it's appeared that Ive has entered a kind of Baroque phase with thinness becoming an end in itself. Where before thinness was strategic, distilling the iPhone and iPad down to their very essence as simple sheets of glass, it's now being taken to an extreme, almost becoming an over-exaggeration.

Most users would probably be happy for their device to a bit little thicker and heavier if it gave them more battery life. But such compromises are rare in Ive's work, which at its best – and it usually is – is design as polemic.

When Steve Jobs died in 2011, many observers saw Ive as the heir apparent, carrying the torch for decades to come, though perhaps admitting the golden years that yielded the iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad were over. So now Ive has left, the question is, what next for Apple? Given that the design team works years ahead, it will be a while before we get a glimpse of Apple post-Ive.

My guess is that they will probably carry on as before, so fully have Jobs and Ive instilled their ethos into the spirit of the company. But whatever Ive himself does next, his legacy as the most important designer of the last two decades is assured.

Photography is by Marcus Dawes.

Owen Hopkins is an architectural writer, historian and curator. He is senior curator of exhibitions and education at Sir John Soane's Museum and was previously architecture programme curator at the Royal Academy of Arts. He is the author of books including Reading Architecture: A Visual Lexicon (2012), Architectural Styles: A Visual Guide (2014) and Mavericks: Breaking the Mould of British Architecture (2016).

What core themes do they explore through their work?

Founded in 1999 by designer Yves Béhar Fuse project, explores items from accessories to uitilities for the househod to things to untilise workspace surroundings. Through his business Satendra Pakhale works in a varity of platforms including industrial.design, mobility, architecture and editions.

How do the explore this? What practicle methods or materials do they use? What influences their choice of materials?

The materials used would be varied depending on the brief that is being worked upon, plastic is used in many of both Yves Behar and Satendra Pakhale’s works and this could perhaps be due to the negitivity of the material that’s been generated.

Do they use specific process to reasurch and develop ideas?

At the time of writing it does not seem like either designer has a specific process of research to develop their ideas.

How could you apply their approach, process or materials to kick start some sample making?

This is a very simple question to anwser but I must dispel the idea of using these makers approaches simply because they would have access to industry know how process & materials. Having said this there are nearly always is a way to find material which is usually easy to come by.

What have you learned from this designer / maker?

They specifically work to a useable product, however these product(s) have no bearing in motorsport or F1, however having said this the priciples can be taken and appiled to F1.

0 notes