The legendary bluegrass guitarist Doc Watson (image: right) has passed. Check “Where is my Sailor Boy” w/ Bill Monroe http://bit.ly/KtkLNS and think about when you last heard something that good at a local bar or club in New York. Generation! Dust off your guitar… sing something timeless.
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We try to make the best all the time. When you do something that is not able to evoke emotion, you will not win the people. And that’s what I’m trying to do. They use primitive tools, but with heart, to try to figure out: How can I make it better? How can I make it with that? How can I get the best result, but with primitive tools and how would it work?
… I draw, draw, draw [mimicking drawing in the sand]; that is what I’m doing. It’s like, you have to be quick, you have to be fast, to keep the people doing something, because they’re so full of energy, and they’re excited to see what will happen … it gives you energy; it keeps you running, running!
»— Francis Kéré talking about how techniques and local material, and fast-paced on-site drawing are useful in his design approach.
“It’s important that music be … hearable. There is a lot of contemporary composition that seems to be written by composers to have other composers analyze them in theory departments in other music schools … I’m definitely not that. I can show you the logic of how I put something together, but to me the most important thing is that you hear it. I am not afraid of melody at all … it’s just kind of evolved in a natural way”
Where Does my Tweet Go? provides an original 2D or 3D view revealing the reach of individual tweet messages over Twitter’s social network.
watercolor fashion by Meta Wraber on Metamundus
«The design process always combines the pursuit of functional goals with countless intuitive, even irrational decisions. The functional requirements — the house needs a bathroom, the headlines have to be legible, the toothbrush has to fit in your mouth — are concrete and often measurable. The intuitive decisions, on the other hand, are more or less beyond honest explanation. These might be: I just like to set my headlines in Bodoni, or I just like to make my products blobby, or I just like to cover my buildings in gridded white porcelain panels. In discussing design work with their clients, designers are direct about the functional parts of their solutions and obfuscate like mad about the intuitive parts, having learned early on that telling the simple truth — “I don’t know, I just like it that way” — simply won’t do.»
— Michael Beirut on Intuition in Design (and a great dialog in the comments with Rick Poynor), 2005.
Rob Mulholland’s Vestige installation features people-shaped mirrors haunting the woods of Scotland. In his words “The six male and female figures not only absorb their environment, they create a notion of non-space, a link with the past that forces us … to consider our relationship with our natural environment.”
Shelter on a pier in a frozen lake with a hanging stove and openable glass corner wall. All of this by 2x4 Architects in my favorite essential northern silhouette of a pentagon. Can we thank web designers everywhere for bringing back the form of “home”?
Elena Fantini’s handmade Italian Spring 2012 collection for her Save the Queen! label is beautifully textured and has lovely form.
update 05.29.12 - just encountered some of the dresses this side of the Atlantic. Disappointing fabrics.
“A tree’s year rings are analysed for their strength, thickness and rate of growth. This data serves as basis for a generative process that outputs piano music. It is mapped to a scale which is again defined by the overall appearance of the wood”
- Bartholomäus Traubeck’s Years
The squelching, scissoring, oozing claymation birds in Nathalie Djurberg’s “The Parade” will be threatening the public until the end of 2011 at the Walker Art Center. See them!
Christopher Doyle™ Identity Guidelines totally had me in stitches today at the Walker Art Center’s “Now in Production” graphic design show.
Postwar Designers in their own chairs: “Unfettered by dogma, the creators of contemporary American furniture have a flair for combining functionalism with esthetic enjoyment.” Playboy, July 1961
“There is no empathy in utopia because there is no suffering” - Jeremy Rifkin
«Complicated systems have many moving parts but they operate in patterned ways … complex systems, by contrast, are imbued with features that may operate in patterned ways, but whose interactions are continually changing»
— “Learning to Live with Complexity” by Gökçe Sargut and Rita Gunther McGrath
