ICFF 2012 - Design Trends

New York City for DesignWeek and ICFF is always an inspiring trip. This year was no exception; we had a wonderful time exploring the great design events around the city. After taking a few days to recover and sort through our photos we identified a few of our favorite trends from this years events. 

Open Frame - An aesthetic that is described by its suggestion of form via outlines and repetition. We particularly enjoyed the the Tweet Outdoor Stool by Ji-In Kim, chairs and light fixtures created by BEND, and the Acapulco Chairs by innit.

Obvious Construction – By embracing the way in which parts of an piece come together many designs brought focus to this intriguing point of juncture. A few examples include the tables by Jones Falls Furniture, which incorporate slivers of red aluminium trim on each leg that break through the top surface forming distinct red right angles. And the playfully proportioned Drop stools by Objeti, which pay particular attention to the detail where the metal base intersects with the wood seat.

Reclaimed Industrial – The growing movement using reclaimed materials and industrial detailing was well established this year with lots of repurposed materials being used in controlled ways. At the Core77 Open Exhibition we enjoyed the Strap End Table by uhuru and later stumbled upon another uhuru gem, the Stitch Table at their 2012 preview in the Phaidon bookstore.

Sculptural Dimensional Patterns – Another established trend incorporating 3D patterns and form on planar surfaces keeps evolving every year. The most exciting work in this category was the wall divider and ceramic/porcelain tiles by Interlam and Kowa. The use of subtle textural patterns was featured on the felt Buzzicube by Buzzispace and carried over to a 2D interpretation on the Hot Mesh chair by Bludot with a familiar 3D hexagonal pattern.

We hope you enjoyed our favorite design trends from NYC DesignWeek. Stay tuned for an upcoming post summarizing some of the colors trends we observed at the show!

Eames: The Architect and The Painter

On a recent trip to New York I managed to make it over to the ICF Center to see the world premier of the new documentary Eames: The Architect and The Painter. The film was very well done, touching on all aspects of Charles and Ray's career, both achievements and failures. I could really appreciate Eames drive for developing the best creative solution no matter the cost. An example noted in the film was the Mathmatica exhibition for IBM. The project was quoted for $150K went 100% over budget and the Eames studio covered the overage. Their passion to create and discover made the "office feel more like a design playground than a workspace." Most designers (including myself) credit the Eames for their innovations in furniture, but this film showed the multifaceted nature of their studio's work in a truly inspiring way.

When this film comes to the MFA in December our design team, avid Eames fans will be making a trip over to see it. Feel free to join us on our inspiring Eames outing. Visit First Run Features to see when the film will be showing in your area.

Here is a brief synopsis from the films website.

The husband-and-wife team of Charles and Ray Eames are widely regarded as America’s most important designers. Perhaps best remembered for their mid-century plywood and fiberglass furniture, the Eames Office also created a mind-bending variety of other products, from splints for wounded military during World War II, to photography, interiors, multi-media exhibits, graphics, games, films and toys. But their personal lives and influence on significant events in American life – from the development of modernism, to the rise of the computer age – has been less widely understood. Narrated by James Franco, 

Computing Digital Traces - From IDSA noLA

We recently returned from a great IDSA conference in New Orleans, our team had the opportunity to hear from many influential speakers on the topic of Community. On the opening day we heard about “Attitudes and Behaviors”, which explored in depth, ever shifting consumer behaviors.

One of the keynote speakers Aaron Zinman, co-founder of Boston-based Empirical LLC, showed some great and influential projects that aim to capture digital traces of users as they traverse the web. His work uses systems to aggregate and mine these traces, to expose both the individual and the community.

A sample of these projects include Defuse and Personas.

Defuse creates and illustrates data portraits of New York Times readers by tracking their comments and positions.  uses the content of the New York Times comments section to track user's comments and information associated with their positions. 

 Defuse is a new method for navigating and participating in online discussions. It generates data portraits of users and groups based upon their digital footprints.

Personas, now on display at the MIT Museum, takes a name entered by the user and characterizes that person based on information it finds on the web. See our own Richard Watson characterized below. 

Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person - to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.

Tools like Defuse have the potential to help understand a broad range of consumers. The traces of users' interactions can help generate findings that can be incorporated in the design process and drive potential design solutions.

Stay tuned for more interesting finds from our trip to the 2011 IDSA conference.

Fashion Show with Google

Fashion Show with Google from Robbin Waldemar on Vimeo.

Wieden+Kennedy Tokyo created a 30 second TV commercial for the launch of the new brand campaign ‘more with Google’ in Japan. It features the Image Search functions ‘sort by color’ and ‘similar images’ and shows that you can do more with Google than you imagined. 

This is an awesome add. A great blend of technology and interaction.

Via Today & Tomorrow

Mint Launches Mintdata

Mint Data aggregates anonymous spending data from Mint’s users to give you realtime insight on what people are spending on across the country. For example, the platform lists the most popular restaurants in San Francisco (by visits), the top shopping spots in New York City (by highest average spend), and the highest spending cities in the U.S.

In terms of actual regional data, you can choose from 300 cities in the U.S. to compare spending. And Mint.com users can compare their own personal finance and spending habits by category or merchant against averages in their area, or against the national average.

As a consumer product, this data is pretty fascinating, and a great way to get a little more insight as to how your spending stacks up against the rest of the consumers in your city or at a particular store. 

Via TechCrunch

As a Mint user I am not sure how I feel about this... But looking at it as a data source I am surprised Mint is making this a public service when companies pay millions for this kind of information. 

How do your expenses stack up against the trends? $4,767 in expenses every month? $5.39 at Starbucks? $344.22 at Apple? 

What other public data trackers are out there that you find interesting? Do you find the log of an individual i.e. The Quantified Self more interesting than the trends generated by millions? 

Monday Design Humor

Cool Stop Motion Video | The Pen Story

Here is a very cool video and concept that was created using stop motion.

"This is the PEN Story in stop motion. We shot 60,000 pictures, developed 9,600 prints and shot over 1,800 pictures again. No post production! Thanks to all the stop motion artists who inspired us."

This is also a shameless plug for Kats blog where I found the video

via DesignVagabond