Moleskine myDetour is an international project that encourages creative thinkers to sketch, write and draw in their Moleskines, sharing their creations with other enthusiasts around the world. In partnership with 826 Valencia, myDetour is currently stopped at 7 locations in San Francisco, where it will remain for one more week. The show has made previous stops in New York, Paris, Berlin, Milan and Istanbul (which we covered here), and will continue on to Tokyo, Japan. Stop by to see 50 one-of-a-kind notebooks from thinkers, writers, photographers, artists and designers from all of these stops.

Until it closes, myDetour will be accepting submissions of Moleskin creations around the theme "District of You," a tribute to familiar and extraordinary places in the San Francisco Bay area. After October 1st, all submitted notebooks will be juried and the top 10 notebooks will be selected for the International myDetour archive, traveling to all additional locations around the globe. In addition, the jury will choose one outstanding notebook to be featured, along with its author, at the next installation of myDetour in 2010.

The judges are Michael Carbatta, Creative Director, Chronicle Books; Marco Beghin, President, Moleskine America; Yves Behar, founder, fuseproject; and Leigh Lehman, co-founder and Executive Director, 826 Valencia.

Find myDetour San Francisco at:
Blick Art Materials: 1414 Van Ness Avenue
Borders Bookstore: 400 Powell St.
Chronicle Books: 680 Second St.
Flax Art & Design: 1699 Market St.
S.F. State University Bookstore: 1650 Holloway Ave.
Utrecht Art Supplies: 1930 Van Ness Ave.
Stanford University Bookstore: 519 Lausen Mall, Stanford, CA.

(more...)

SEE is a network of eleven European partners sharing knowledge and experience on how design can be integrated into regional and national policies to boost innovation, entrepreneurship, sustainability and social and economic development.

Their first bulletin is now online. Make sure to check out their article on the future EU innovation policy which gives an excellent update on what the European Union is doing to stimulate design and user-driven innovation.

(more...)

While China has a reputation for farming big architectural projects out to the Western world of design, Beijing-based "design collaboration" MAD is a more-or-less homegrown firm that does work in both Asia and abroad. Headed up by Beijing native Ma Yansong, MAD has just made quite the architectural splash with their design of Taiwan's Taichung Convention Center. In their own words:

The design is conceived as a continuous weave of architecture and landscape that blurs the boundary between architecture, public space and urban landscape, proposing a futuristic vision based on the East’s naturalistic philosophy. This project inherits Chinese architecture's long-standing attitude towards holistic integration and order of space. It employs the Eastern philosophy of a harmonized synthesis between human and nature. In the face of the project's enormous scale, the architecture no longer exists as a series of individual blocks, but instead is unified as a collective form. The resultant space enclosed within comes into focus, in a natural order emerging from air, wind and light, fostering a resonance between human and nature.

Check out more of MAD's work here.

via green muze

(more...)

About halfway through Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation, Tim Brown repeats Tom Peter's much cited comment that "the MFA is the new MBA." In doing so, however, he doesn't fully endorse the sentiment. Instead Brown observes that the dynamic skills required in business share as much in common with the creativity required for a design practice as they do with the critical thinking required for the MBA. On the back of the book jacket the author observes, "this is not a book by designers for designers, this is a book for creative leaders who seek to infuse design thinking into every level of an organization." In that way it straddles the gulf between the MFA and the MBA. Clearly learning to draw is a far sight from learning how to run a discounted cash flow analysis and the skill set doesn't overlap. We need both MFAs and MBAs. But the crux of what Brown is getting at is what McKinsey & Company referred to as the "T-Shaped" person, where the vertical axis represents the depth of the skill set that forms their core competency. Valuable design thinkers, however, "cross the T," holding not only deep familiarity with their core role, but also a disposition for collaboration across enterprises. A "design thinker" isn't just an artist and isn't just a number-cruncher. Instead they need to be knowledgeable enough about each to be conversant: to be a member not of a multidisciplinary team but of an interdisciplinary team.

If this all sounds a little like business-jargon-tinged self-help ... well, it is. Business books tend to be written in a peculiar dialect somewhere between anecdote and allegory, and Change by Design is no exception. Perhaps owing to the Harvard Business School case method, it seems de rigeur in business books these days to present lessons as anecdotes about business interactions (e.g. Shimano's core business of bicycle sprockets and derailleurs was flattening) followed an analysis of the market and the causes of said shift. At the "B-School" the initial case would be followed by rigorous debate and a written analysis of what the company should do to change its position. In Change by Design, the reader learns what solutions IDEO reached (e.g. returning to the comfort and familiarity of coasting bikes from childhood). Regardless of the success of that coasting initiative, however, the real lesson is in the allegory as Brown provides that proves the centerpiece of the book: "The reason for the iterative, nonlinear nature of the journey is not that design thinkers are disorganized or undisciplined but that design thinking is an exploratory process; done right, it will inevitably make unexpected discoveries along the way, and it would be foolish not to find out where they lead." Reading that, then, perhaps industrial designers should be thrilled; the processes that we learned for "needsfinding" and "directed research" truly are akin to the case method. Perhaps that's what Peters was getting at after all.

But if Tim Brown was right, and this isn't a book "by designers for designers," what can we get out of it? The rigorous analytic thinking that MBAs learn in finance classes isn't presented here. Instead we see the softer/touchier side of "inspiration, ideation, implementation" of which long-time prototypers and experimenters should already be aware. IDEO, however, has managed to out-business corporate America through design, so perhaps there's something to be learned here. Ultimately, the difference between design and art is commerce and function, so most designers will eventually need to reach out or at least speak to corporate America. Through his years as CEO of IDEO, Brown knows as well as anyone how to communicate with suits ... even if he has an MFA. Consequently, while we (designers) may not be the target audience for the book, there is certainly something to be learned here for us to "cross the T" and speak to MBAs.

(more...)

New-England-based Big Idea Group, yet another organization that seeks to let the common man/woman come up with an idea for an innovative product and get it on the market, has their latest success story: Arra David, a New Hampshire resident who was having a problem with his driveway markers.

Winter after winter, passing snowplows would snap off the markers that outline Arra David's long driveway. Or he would scrape against them as he pulled in to park, scratching his car. And if he waited too long to install the markers, pounding them into the frozen turf without breaking them became a problem.

Eventually, his frustration inspired a solution: a stainless steel spring at the bottom of a 4-foot fiberglass reflective rod that was flexible enough to survive plow blades. To make it easier to secure them, David added an 8-inch steel spike to the bottom.

David turned to Big Idea Group, an "open source innovation company" that helps the average joe go from idea to assembly line.

As a city dweller, I didn't even know what "driveway markers" were, let alone that there was a problem with their design. And I can't see a product like this coming up on most of the brand name design firms' radar. But it was on David's radar, and now that his re-design has hit store shelves--a process that only took nine months--the forecasted sales for the first year are two million!

via boston dot com

(more...)

Last up in inventor Emil Jacob's Flex-Seat designs for airplane interior layouts is his Economy configuration. I was worried Jacobs would give us non-Business-fare-paying common men the design shaft, but even his Economy layout strives to give passengers more room through the simple concept of vertical staggering.

By simply elevating every other row (and removing one seat from the raised rows, to accommodate stairs on either side) Jacobs provides a heckuva lot more room, not to mention storage space. The elevated seats can recline fully, since the space directly behind them is empty air; the lower rows recline by scooching forward. The lower seats also fold vertically to access the storage bins in front of them, and again, this removes the need to stand in the aisle and load overhead compartments, which should reduce boarding times.

And now for a little about Jacobs himself. The inventor came up with the idea for Flex-Seats while stuck on a cramped overnight flight where he eventually resorted to sleeping on the floor.

"From down there I saw all this space," Jacob explained. "I thought that there has to be a better way to do it; there's so much space it'd be absurd not to use it."

After tinkering with the layout plans of different airplanes, the Flex-Seats were born. Jacob, now owner of Jacob Innovations LLC, has a few airlines currently looking into his new designs.

The Epoch Times has a brief piece on Jacobs and his system here.

(more...)

Here are a couple more configurations of inventor Emil Jacob's Flex-Seat designs for airplane interior layouts. The Business-Flex 2 configuration is a tweak on the first set-up we showed you that allows for longer beds and does incorporate some overhead storage.

Jacobs' Upper Deck configuration is designed for interiors with less headspace, for example, the upper deck of a 747. Seats are staggered not quite as high as in the other designs, but again, the layout allows for copious storage space while still providing privacy and two-meter-long beds.

And what about us poor slobs in Coach? Stay tuned.

(more...)

images by Damon Winter via NYTimes

New York City's Garment District is in danger of becoming another manufacturing-community-turned-commercial-district, threatened by Mayor Bloomberg's plan to consolidate the garment manufacturers that operate there to just one building, potentially eliminating this vibrant cluster of skilled workers in Midtown.

Jean Lin, editor of otto, has posted an article about the details and implications of this plan and what you can do to save the Garment District. An excerpt:

With garment manufacturing largely moving overseas to Asia, the remaining manufacturers in New York have shifted their focus to high quality production with attention to detail and design. Not only do well known fashion designers such as Vera Wang, Nicole Miller, Proenza Schouler and Marc Jacobs depend on the garment center for production, but smaller, independent designers have depended on their valuable working relationships and precious friendships to bring their indie designs to life. Smaller labels simply do not have the volume of product to go overseas. In short. We need more than one building. A lot more.

Read the rest of her article here, or, if you're getting anxious, head directly here to Save the Garment Center to find out how to get involved.

(more...)

When it comes to layout, the typical airplane interior is no different than the earliest movie theaters: Unimaginative, mindless rows of seats. It's hardly an efficient use of space, and does anyone you know actually enjoy flying?

Inventor Emil Jacob is proposing a radical shake-up for airplane interiors with his new system of using the vertical as well as the horizontal space of an airplane cabin. Whether in Business or Economy class, Jacob's designs stagger passengers vertically, providing more legroom and privacy.

His Flex-Seat design, which "can increase the density of a conventional Business Class by up to 50%" provides benefits even while packing more bodies in: each passenger has more room and privacy, and luggage is stored under movable stairs, reducing loading time (no more standing in the aisles while accessing overhead compartments). The amount of luggage storage space is also vastly increased, designed to encourage passengers to carry everything on-board, eliminating the baggage claim hassle at the end of the flight altogether. And the flex seats don't require reclining mechanisms; when it's time to stretch out, the seats have beds attached to them at 90 degrees.

(more...)

Christina Fesmire has created the Fugle Swing, which seeks to create "a more playful present" in adult life while taking cues from mid-century Scandinavian design and functionalism. Made primarily from maple veneer and walnut laminate, the rigid swing gets its form from the careful consideration of its comfort. The central dip in the swing accommodates the tailbone, while the ends taper for lightness, strength and visual fluidity. We are especially impressed with Fesmire's dedication to nuance and the detailed fabrication process she developed to produce it:

The mold itself was made from manipulating sheet metal to the desired shape and joined with particleboard. To accurately flex and form the veneer material to the metal mold, a pipe is placed within the crevice, and the veneer is vacuum formed with heat. In this process of lamination, running long and short fibers of wood sheeting in opposite directions, creates a durable structure. A layer of adhesive is coated between the each ply. The thickest portion is centrally located, and measures approximately 2cm, 1cm thicker than the tips, allowing for visual fluidity. In order to achieve this tapered effect in the lamination process, one must stagger the veneer material at incrementally increased lengths. In staying consistent with the use of natural materials, Walnut inlay defines the entrance and exit of the natural hemp rope suspensions, allowing a suitable contrast in material. The method of pulling apart and rejoining fibers of the rope is called 'splejsning' in Danish. The "handlebars" of the swing were designed to seamlessly begin and end using this technique.

(more...)