Design Awards 2010

Took a trip to the Design Museum and here's my round up of favourites from the Design Awards. The stuff shown is what I reckon is most awesome- there was of course some stuff that I didn't dig- but the following was so good I left feeling good about the Design industry which I hadn't expected. This is Sugru- a material which can be moulded by hand and cures at room temperature to become a washable, heatproof silicone. Sold as coloured lumps in various sizes it's designed for hacking your objects- fixing, making better and is generally just awesome.

The Really Interesting Group (RIG) have created the Newspaper Club- utilising down time at printers they have created a service which allows individuals to upload artwork for their own newspapers of between 5 and 5000 copies- they've made printing incredibly affordable. Perhaps the most interesting (excuse the pun) thing which started it off  is 'Things Our Friends Have Written On The Internet', a publication aggregating images and text from blogs, and websites into a printed publication. Heavy web 3.0 shit.

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In a similar vain It's Nice That get my respect for producing a consistently quality package of blog, features, jobs board, exhibitions, artwork and most importantly for me an extremely affordable printed output: again, using the advantages of the internet to create content. Printing it turns it into something better- sort of brings it full circle.

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The Incidental has so many people involved that i'm not going to try and name check them all but it's pretty fucking encouraging to see some familiar names in there. Basically it's an almost immediate magazine based in and featuring both Milan 2009 and The London Design Festival 2009. Content was sourced from the people going around the events- tweeted, blogged, reported directly and then sifted, filtered and created into a new publication each day. Simple- brave- dramatically scaleable- pretty and above all useful.

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Real Time by Maarten Baas is a clock which is changed manually- he's done a few- some with brushes, some as installations but this one is done with some red glass- black paint (I think I read it was latex) and a squigee. Watch the video. Not in the show but found on his website: I really really like his clay furniture series- I mean I really like it and I'm not into chairs.

dm_maarten_baas Also worth a mention were BBC iPlayer, Amazon's Kindle (Both of these were of going to happen, but are still well designed and pretty revolutionary), Why Not Associates Literary Forest, and The Trillion Dollar Project (to raise awareness for The Zimbabwean newspaper.

The Five Obstructions

fiveobstructions_02 The Five Obstructions is a strange and worthwhile film. Jorgen Leth: a film maker is tasked by fellow film maker Lars Von Trier to remake his short film 'The Perfect Human' five times. However Von Trier stipulates five obstructions in the making of these and in doing so a documentary type film is created about the constraints and liberations upon creativity that rules and obstructions create.

As a designer who relishes the constraints and obstacles presented by a well written brief, I find it particularly interesting. The two protagonists of the film battle against each other: the first hinders the creation of a good film, and attempts to render the end product laughable and frankly bad through the obstructions he imposes, whilst the other defends, works around and uses the constraints to create something of worth. Thus the idea of challenge and success is naturally written into the brief. A design brief could perhaps be compared in that respect to a maths equation or a riddle- there is problem ergo there must be an answer and if we manage to work through and obtain an answer it must be either right or wrong- thus it's success (or failure) is easy to gauge. If only a brief were that simple. Of course there is no one firm positive response to a set of rules- how could there be when rules can be moved, changed, bent, coerced, massaged, and in some cases ignored.

Firstly, I believe it is the suggestion of and the striving for, however intangible and impossible, the 'perfect solution' that gives a designer a love of the brief and the desire to begin in the first place. Secondly- in the film one of the points that I never managed to get to grips with was why Lars von Trier and Jorgen Leth would bother to do this seemingly pointless task in th first place.  In the end I think it's to do with something I keep coming back to myself- it's the journey not the destination that's important. Von Trier set the rules as harshly as he could to fuck Leth up- he didn't want a beautiful polished short at the end he wanted the film maker to stumble, trip and preferably fall so that both might learn something in the process. It seems to me that the seemingly pointless (in this case a film with no direct message to convey, no direct reward to be gained. This could equally be a piece of design used to practice techniques, or scope interesting conceptual territory) can be made attractive to work on by constraints, rules and briefs which turn the pointless into a challenge.

(Sorry for the ramble- for a bit of context (if anyone got this far!) I'm finding it hard to motivate myself to complete self initiated projects- I think I may need to write some briefs- as I conclude these are motivation in themselves- when well written)