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“X” Marks The Spot! #12
By Le Vin Chin
If you’ve had a look at our About Effect Pigments page then you’ll know we love the work of Jean Nouvel at XYMARA.com. His design for the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris reflects everything we want to say about the power and use of visual surface effects as an intrinsic part of an overall design. So we were happy to hear that Nouvel has won this year’s Pritzker Prize for his amazing and amazingly varied body of work. The Pritzker, the world’s pre-eminent architecture award, cited here his “courageous pursuit of new ideas and his challenge of accepted norms in order to stretch the boundaries of the field.” We congratulate the new Laureate! “X” Marks The Spot! at … Jean Nouvel’s Kultur- und Kongresszentrum Luzern (KKL) in Lucerne |
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We’ve just recently discovered Communication Arts (introduced to us by our contributor, John Emerson) and it’s already a bookmarked site. Communication Arts looks at the wide world of visual communication and seems to have its finger on the pulse of contemporary graphic design. Also, just like the Core77 site we previously featured, designers can create their own profiles and present their portfolios for search.
QR (“quick response”) codes – 2-dimensional barcodes holding up to 7,000 characters of information – seem to have made the jump from communication tool to full-fledged design element! Originally developed to provide a data-rich interface (“hardlink”) between the real and the digital via camera phones and other handheld scanning devices (creating near-guerrilla plastering of urban surfaces in many cities), we now find QR codes seeping into less expected areas … First off, Office Lendorff create “Pixel-Art Knitwear”, so of course they were the first people thought of when their friends at Kaywa (who run one of the many free QR code generators on the internet; and the one we’ve used for this article’s codes) suggested creating QR code scarves … Meanwhile, in Japan, birthplace of the QR code, Ishinokoe (“the voice of the stone”) are producing grave monuments with embedded QR codes to allow visitors access to memorial logs of the deceased. The Ishinokoe website appears to be only in Japanese, but you can read more here and here.
QR codes for …
the XYMARA url, the XYMARA Design Award url and “X” Marks The Spot!
Concrete: the material of the future? The indications have been mounting in the past few months … First, we met some young designers at both Material Vision (UPDATE: Alexa Lixfeld - we later talked to her again at tendence 2008) in Frankfurt and Blickfang Zürich (UPDATE: Interview with 10 Liter Design here!) who demonstrated the unexpected versatility of the material – normally associated with grim, grey overpasses and boring monumental office buildings – in use, in texture, visual appeal and functionality. More recently, we see reports of concrete being deployed in ever more fascinating and intriguing ways: as curtains (!), by MeMux and to build inflatable (?!) Concrete Canvas Shelters for use in emergency/refugee situations.
This month’s materials search agency is Finish Technologies, who offer a complete consultancy package, as well as project management support, for materials selection and product design. Finish also publish the Material Inspirations magazine which arrives quarterly with an array of material physical samples.
| More views of Jean Nouvel’s Kultur- und Kongresszentrum Luzern (KKL) in Lucerne Lastly this month, a bit of fun: two videos which highlight history and the passing of time, using two very different techniques. First of all, an amazing example of time-lapse art: the development of the Tokyo skyline, as seen through photos taken over 35 years, in ten seconds. Second, coming from the collaboration between the BBC television programme Timewatch and the UK's leading experts on Stonehenge, here’s a computer generated animation of the famous stone circle’s 4,500 years of existence. |
