Showing posts with label surface philosophy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label surface philosophy. Show all posts

11.9.09

A bit of Trendy Reality... So to speak



Ok we don't do marketing but we like to think about what and why we design stuff...
It's like the weather forecast for ad and market strategy. Sunny stuff

by Paul Isakson
head of strategy for space150.

Here is what he says with it :

How can you help? I have two requests.

First, I'd love to hear your thoughts for how to improve the presentation.

What's missing? What's off? What could be improved? What should be left out? Etc. Be as brutally honest as you like. It will only help make it better.

Secondly, I want to include a section that highlights what some of you think the next 60 years will hold for advertising and marketing. I'll treat what you say in one of two ways, depending on how you submit it.

30.6.09

What you will wear tomorrow according to yesterday




WHAT YOU WILL WEAR TOMORROW - october 1958
By Lester David

"MEN’S fashions, long noted for their sepulchral hues and funeral cut, are currently erupting in a major revolution of styles, colors and surprises. Gone are the days of the petrified collar and suits of “cast iron tweed.” New fabrics, new fashions and new fads are the order of the day. Where will it all end?"

still a big question, huh?

"We asked clothing and industrial designers, textile manufacturers and other experts to peer into their crystal balls and tell us what lies ahead in the field of male fashion. Here are some of their amazing answers: For the immediate future the sunburst of color adopted a few short years ago will get even wilder. According to Baker Case of Hatton Case, a leading men’s wear establishment in New York, waistcoats, Bermuda shorts, sport shirts, cabana outfits and swimming trunks will blaze even louder as the seasons go on.

In Hollywood, Sy Devore, who fashions suits for filmdom’s top stars, has already removed breast pockets from men’s suits because he claims they are totally unnecessary. He’s even eliminated the lapel buttonhole. “Absolutely unneeded,” he asserts.

What about the distant future? The wonders will continue, experts claim, and before too many years have elapsed episodes like this one may be commonplace: A fellow is out to dinner with his best girl. While staring into her eyes, his hand trembles and a blob of gravy drops on his pants. He just lets it dry, then reaches into a pocket for an eraser and rubs out the spot!"

We wish !

"That evening, the same chap surveys himself in a mirror and decides he’d look better in narrower lapels. No fancy tailoring bills for him. He merely takes out a pair of scissors and snips his lapels to the desired width."

The little fairy came and Issey Miyaké was here ("A-POC, a piece of clothe" project)

“There will be no buttons to come loose or to lose on these clothes of the future. A small magnet fastened to each side of the jacket will keep the front closed.”

Oh Jenny this makes you happy...

"These experimental paper clothes can be draped, printed, silk screened and cut and sewn like any other fabric. They can be made to specifications, varying in strength, appearance and texture, and can also be rendered water and flame resistant.

How else can male garb be improved for greater comfort and more efficiency? Officials at Burdick-Rowland Associates, a noted firm of industrial designers, offer these future possibilities.
They suggest a suit made entirely of netting (with the vital areas covered, of course). No part of the netting would touch the wearer. The material would be suspended about a half inch from the body by a simple wire arrangement or small suction cups. What could be cooler for long suffering males in summer?"

see image above. Just awesome

"Another suggestion is clothes with air vents built into them for maximum hot weather comfort. These vents, or air scoops, could be attractively designed and made a part of the suit’s pattern.

A small built-in air-conditioner and de-humidifier operating on transistors would be useful. The jacket housing the device would have to be lightweight and airtight with the neck and sleeves closed.

Communications could also be simplified in the clothing of the future. Ben Fromkin, a Burdick-Rowland designer says, “Why not a two-way telephone built right into the suit, powered by solar light?”"

hm hmmmm. Fascinating


Source : Mechanix Illustrated, october 1958 via Modern Mechanix Blog

31.5.09

Puff & Flocking NYC (finally !)

Yo

Here are the visuals for the breaking news... we are so so busy (being on a break? working some more? visiting the family? witnessing weddings? if only you knew !)
FABULOUS SHOW and being in New York, obviously awesome.




Puff & Flock sponsored (we wish) by samsung mobile






saaaaaaammmmples !!!


Elisabeth's shower curtain "Spiky" is our star, check this "starfish" kid out :)


Jenny, intrigued, and intrigued the crowd with her magnetic wall coverings


Kathy's cosy woven light corner


Melissa's street corner, Urban Upholstery



The Cookie Wardrobe and Mess Eater Wallpaper,
I met the people from Kidrobot <3 wooooooooooh



Our cool neighbours, "Dead Good", at the end of the show :)
Summarizes well the physical state on tuesday night.

THANK YOU FOR COMING !
The fact some people knew us there already was a BIT scary but hey isn't it why we are doing it for?

LOVE, >Amelie + Puff + Flock

1.3.09

"Shuella", your umbrella shoe !

Hi !
Thinking there were not enough girlie talk out there, and in order to reassure you about a range of interests that are dear to us, I wanted to share with you this amazing wonder of design and object innovation I spotted...

"I have my high heels on inside the boots!" - Beckie


A must have in cloudy London? High heels and rain are not good friends, here is an in-style solution to a universal feminine problem...

Simply genius !
Now I have to say... I don't wear high heels so much, actually never.

Available online at www.shuella.com in the following shades :
Classic Black,
Hot Pink,

Buttercup Yellow,

Apple Green


Includes zippered pouch and drying cloth.
Please note: "SHUELLAS" were designed to be worn in the rain.
Do not wear in snow or on ice!

23.2.09

MA Textile Futures at CSM : Year 1 Final Biomimicry group work sample

Hey this is Amelie reporting live from the teaching world... I would like to show here some absolutely great work by my group of students in MA Textile Futures year 1 at CSM... They worked as a team of 9 people, under my supervision, like a trend agency to produce inspiring imagery linked to Biomimicry (taking inspiration from nature's principles to inject into design solutions and surfaces). This is only an extract from the great work they produced. Most of them had never done any video work before... :



Anemone Hands : a visual definition of biomimicry






The braided suit : inspired by bio-luminescent underwater creatures




ideas for these clips by Dana Haim and Laerke Hooge Anderson.





below : the students team of 9 called themselves TOTEM 9 and came up with a nice trend book display.





totem_9_people



totem_9_colours_samples



totem_9_trend_agency_book



work by Seveen Muneer, Ginna Lee, Suphichaya Vanasarikul, Siwen Huang, Lucy Hall, Francesca Warren, Dana Haim, Moon Young Lee, Larke Hooge Anderson.

more on the MATF website home page : www.textilefutures.co.uk

19.2.09

Plushie : An Interactive Design System for Plush Toys



Yuki Mori and Takeo Igarashi

Amelie is back out there with her obsession with toys and cute things, somehow related to the very serious matter of the future of textiles... SPOTTED : the future of crafted toys and one of its experimental lab in Japan... My future next big trip :)

Thanks to this experimental programme, the user can interactively designs a stuffed animal's model by sketching. The system automatically generates the corresponding 2D cloth pattern you have to use to make a 3D stitched shape to stuff.

This is soooo coooool !!!

Although for now it only works on PC (tsssss...)

This is a PhD research project by Yuki Igarashi
at Fine Digital Engineering Laboratory
Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology (RCAST)
Graduate School of Engineering
The University of Tokyo
click on the video for a short demonstration of how this works


9.2.09

Off the Grid

"For more than 30 years, the Surface Design Association conferences have been amazing meeting places where textile artists from all over the world come together to be inspired by work, ideas and techniques. The wealth of information, creativity and talent on the podium, as well as in the audience, is astounding. During the four days of the conference, we learn from each other. It is our excitement, knowledge and willingness to share that makes each SDA conference a unique experience." - www.surfacedesign.org/conference.asp

There are two exhibits running at the conference that are still taking submissions. If you'd like to participate in the Member's Show or the Student Show - both juried competitions - the application deadline for both is 1st March.

26.1.09

comfort in the office


"the ironing board" aka Amelie's office at CSM textiles studio, 2008

This is a serious matter at Puff & Flock.
Does comfort improve performances at work? I can definitely say so. For once a type of pragmatism was out of good sense. The ironing board allows you to chose the height of your work plan, and provides a soft layer for power naps. I miss my office badly now that I have a proper one, but I sort of started a research on similar design propositions.
So far, this is the best one I found :



Just close your office door open the EXECU-CHAIR

NEW EXECU-CHAIR IS DIFFERENT This is the first chair designed exclusively for the office. Closed… it looks like a regular office chair… blending perfectly with any decor. It is a comfortable chair to sit on. Yet it flips open in just a second… almost effortless into full-length 76″ long bed with a pillow rest for the head.

taken from Modern Mechanix Blog

3.1.09

The Sky Is The Limit

In its mere definition, a textile is the "result of a processing technique that can be applied to many materials" writes Els Ziijlstra in her article Architectural Textile (http://www.materia.nl/). She adds that "textile embraces materials that are pressed, knitted, crocheted, knotted, spun or woven". It is either hand-crafted or manufactured. Textile design is also about surface decoration, a way of assembling and repeating patterns together as well as working on colours and textures. It can be printed, embroided, stitched, engraved, etched, cut...At Puff&flock we stand for an open vision of textile as long as it is exciting, innovative and beautiful!


When I visited "Made Up", the art's biennale in Liverpool last autumn, I found a few examples of what a textile can also be. Shown in the first photos of this post, the work by Richard Wilson Turning the Place Over is a disturbing reflexion on what an architectural surface is. The envelope of the building loses its protective function and becomes a moving pattern.


In the photograph above, the art work by Yayoi Kusama is a sealed box the size of a small bathroom full of colour-changing light bulbs which reflect to infinity on the walls covered with mirrors. A textile can even be an illusion, an immaterial way of embellishing the world!

Last but not least, this is a balloon structure by Tomas Saraceno. Textile can be stuffed or inflated in all sorts of way to become 3D structures. That is when a textile becomes a volume!

At Puff&Flock, to get inspiration, the sky is the limit!

31.12.08

"road works"


Sample from Sainsbury's toy department

I have this fascination about how bad and unaccurate the kids road carpets look compared to reality. I want to find connections that don't exist and make it so I get to see the space some other way than this unavoidable axonometric view of the buildings and parking lots on the flat surface, because this is not how life looks like.
All the roads are not nicely looped and linked like it appears on the carpet. I want to play but I am bored with the closed circuit.

It seems to all be about the ways.

The way you go, the way you say things, the way things part.
There supposely is always a way...
That seems to be the only thing that never leaves us and keep us going.
Accidents or luck? roundabouts or time loss? Crossroad or diversion?
I say highway. Get lost and wait for the sign to guide you. Of course then you desperately need to pee and the gas station is nowhere near. Typical. I need to know how many kilometers it will be until relief.

Amelie, finally posting something here (ready since october)
visual surface philosophy / story-teller.
as shallow
and sweetly inconsistent as it seems...