About metaphors

WEEK11- DAY 7

1. SOUNDTRACK OF THE DAY

Break on through to the other side

2. PLACES TO KNOW

A desert in Spain

3. PEOPLE TO DISCOVER

Ettore Sottsass - Metaphor book 

Video about Ettore

“If you think you’re meeting your destiny on the other side of a door you may not be interested in its design”.


Sottsass - “When I was young, all we ever heard about was functionalism, functionalism, functionalism. It’s not enough. Design should also be sensual and exciting.”

4. QUESTION OF THE DAY

5. INSPIRATION

What are doors?
“All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances,” Shakespeare.

Metaphors animate conversations, build interest and underlying tension, and finally encourage a more lively exchange. It’s a play with words. It’s about creating a story. An idea is drawn with a flexible outline: one that is blurred
by the overlapping of our individual interpretations.

“There is no present or future, only the past, happening over and over again, now.” Eugene O’Neill

“Time is like a handful of sand- the tighter you grasp it, the faster it runs through your fingers.” Henry David Thoreau

Contemporary design is 99% linked to the production of symbolic meaning and the telling of stories. Good design is about adding a symbolic value to an object, a food, a short story etc. To communicate with other people. To convey meaning and messages.

The Solar Sinter by Markus Kayser. This project was made using Arduino.

“There are things known, and things unknown, and in between are the Doors.”, said Jim Morrison, Ray Manzarek, Aldous Huxley and William Blake.

Huxley - “The Doors of Perception.” book
Blake -“The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” book

6. Homework 

Today, you will ponder the very sensitivity of your doors to the world: your perception of things. How do you see your surroundings? What do you observe most?

I am not from this world

WEEK11-DAY6

1. Soundtrack of the day

Love story

2.Places to discover

Wonderland

3. People to meet

Lewis Carrol

4. Question of the day

5. Inspiration

“Come, we shall have some fun now!’ thought Alice...

“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” said Alice.

“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat, “we’re all mad here.”

Lewis Carroll was quite a designer indeed. He designed worlds. Complete ones that made sense in their nonsense.

“Well, I never heard it before, but it sounds uncommon nonsense”, 
said the The Mock Turtle.

Bobby Fischer, the chess champion. - “All that matters on the chessboard is good moves.”A documentary on Bobby Fischer.

A designer is a person who has the duty to invent worlds.

6. Homework 

Today, you will relax and get lost in a dream-like state of mind. Explore the nonsensical, the riddles, the meaningless puzzles of life. Find a way slip “Through the Looking Glass” and reach “Alice in Wonderland.”

Thomas Lommée’s Open Structures

Archigram’s Archival Project

Norman McLaren’s video worlds

You must start building your own world. It can be a world like Escher or a world like the Collyer Brothers. Ferdinand Cheval or the Greek Meteoras. Bomarzo
or La Linea.

“No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness.”Aristotle

“Follow your inner moonlight; don’t hide the madness.”
Allen Ginsberg

“There is only one difference between a madman and me. The madman thinks he is sane. I know I am mad.”
Salvador Dali

Did you know that Dali illustrated Alice in Wonderland?
”I’m late! I’m late!
‘Hello, Goodbye’.
I’m late, I’m late, I’m late.
Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!”
said the White Rabbit.
“Well, no wonder you’re late!
Why this clock is exactly two days slow!”
replied the Mad Hatter.

The Lewis chessmen: “Few objects compete with the Lewis chessmen in terms of their popular appeal.”

Find out more on BBC’s “History of the World”

Jan Švankmajer’s version of Wonderland...

“Close your eyes or you won’t see anything” - Jan Švankmajer

7.Extras.

Alice from Pogo

Woman on a wire

WEEK11-DAY5

1. Soundtrack of the day

Rock argentino

2. Places to go

San Miguel de Tucumán, Argentina.

3.People to meet

 Tomas Saraceno’s “Galaxies Forming along Filaments, Like Droplets along
 the Strands of a Spiders Web”.

“I love the idea that people enter my installations and communicate with one another in a very different way, reacting to the space”.

Philippe Petit: “If I die, what a beautiful death!” He is the man who walked between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York. 

Man on Wire documentary

“You must not fall. When you lose your balance, resist for a long time before
turning yourself toward the earth. Then jump. You must not force yourself to stay steady. You must move forward.”

4. Question of the day

5. Inspiration

 Gelvin Stevenson -“It’s like a moving meditation.”

String games - “Cat’s Cradle” 

International String Figure Association? The String figure

A super simple String story- Ms. Anne Glover.
Alice in Wonderland story with strings
“The essential thing is to etch movements in the sky, movements so still they leave no trace. The essential thing is simplicity. That is why the long path
to perfection is horizontal.” Philippe Petit

“Start at the North Pole and travel due south for about 6,200 miles, having marked your initial direction. Then turn to your left and go the same distance one more time. 6,200 miles is roughly the distance from the North Pole to the equator, so your journey will have taken you to the North Pole to the equator, a quarter of the way round the equator, and back to the North Pole again. Moreover, the direction at which you arrive back will be at right angles to your starting direction. It follows that on the earth’s surface there is an equilateral
triangle with all its angles equal to a right angle. On a flat surface, the angles of an equilateral triangle have to be 60 degrees, as they are all equal and add up to 180, so the surface of the earth is not flat.”

Timothy Gowers

The Silk Vortices of Akiko Ikeuchi

Music out of strings!

“Even though you tie a hundred knots the string remains one.”

Rumi

“A net is holes tied together with string.”

Allan Watts

6. Homework - Today, you will write/design your own story with string. Use whatever string you want. We generally prefer nylon, but every type is good.

Hairy stuff

WEEK11-DAY4

1. Soundatrack of the day

Hair - the musical

2. Places to go

Eindhoven, Netherlands

3.People to meet


Thomas Vailly - A young and cool chap who melts hair and transforms it into a leatherlike bioplastic. He calls it “Metabolic Factory” or “Contemporary Vanitas”. 
An article on Designboom.


4. Question of the day

5. Inspiration

Hair = fertilizer: a product that puts hair into the ground, where it acts as a fertilizer and weed deterrent.

Hair= cleaner for oil spills

Hair = a chair

Hair= soy sauce from human hair
Ioana Cioanca makes clothes out of her hair. Each time she brushes her hair, she gathers those who fell, and when she has enough, she washes, spins and dyes them. Just like wool.


As Johann Wolfgang von Goethe would say:

“Beware of her fair hair, for she excels
All women in the magic of her locks;
And when she winds them round a young man’s neck,
She will not ever set him free again.”

Vidal Sassoon the movie and an ad he made

Vidal had a goal: 
“to get down to the basic angles of cuts and shapes.” 

“I was all about my thoughts, my work, my inspiration. I was always in hair”.

Margaret Vinci Heldt -  the lady who invented thebeehive hairdo in the 1960’s. A hairstyle that would hold its shape for a week!

Do you know what she used to tell her clients? “I don’t care what your husband does from the neck down, but I don’t want him to touch you from the neck up”...
Jean-Paul Gaultier and his Amy Winehouse-inspired show.
Hair possesses powerful symbolic and evocative properties. Hair science

In some places of the world, some people say that a person’s spirit lives in his / her hair.

The inanimate can live through a multiplicity of meaning: a symbol, mirror of ourselves.


6. Homework

Today, you will write/design your own story with hair. Metamorphosing hair from one form to another. First chop off some hair (your own or some other’s) and go head. Cut, colour, texture, wave, mix, braid, whip it into shape, #dowhateveryouwant... But let magic come out of it!

I dedicated the previous stone story assignment to animals. This one goes to surfers and sea lovers in general. It's a story well known, This is also a kind of a tribute to Garrett McNamara. This american surfer is such a crazy and courageous guy. I like him for that and also because he's a foreigner who really loves Portugal, maybe more than some Portuguese does sometimes but I understand that he found his little paradise here and some of us live quite in hell! Anyway, I love the sport, the sea and my long hair. Here it is! It's my hair, LOL!!

I have something to share! My father was an hairdresser. When I was a child he took me with him to the "beauty salon" many times. The techniques were very different from now. This is my father in the 70's doing a rehearsal on a model for a hair Beauty Festival. He was good at what he did. This homework is interesting because even if I grew around hair it's the first time I am looking a it in a different way.

7. Extras

Chairs with hair by Dejana Kabiljo

A chandelier with hair

Sonya Clark - human hair threads " Rooted and Uprooted, made of canvas and thread (2011)"

Human hair necklasses by Kerry Howley

Hair and skin on Pinterest

A movie Fur - an imaginary portrait of Diane Arbus suggested by 


And...

Here

And Beloved Hair

Glasses made of hair

Hong Chun Zhang - fascination with hair

Barbed wires, prickly fences and mobiles

WEEK11- DAY3

1. Soundtrack of the day

Mr. Slinky

2. Places to go

DMZ or the “Korean Demilitarized Zone”

3. People to meet

Mikhail Kalashnikov - “life can make you do many things, even kiss a man with a runny nose”. Kalashnikov is the one who invented the AK-47. It is a special object because it has a very strong symbolic value of protest and revolt. 

4. Question of the day

5. Inspiration

When we talk about storytelling, there are different factors of conduction, of transmission. It all depends on your audience, your tone of narration, punctuation and evidently the overall coherence. How do you address a certain audience? How do you reach them? How do you trigger their imagination?

Marshall McLuhan - “The medium is the message.”

We say that “the community is the message”!

The Eames’ DKR (Dining Height, K-Wire Shell, R-Wire Base / Rod Iron Base) chair.

Bruno Munari - His Concave-Convex series of wire mesh hanging sculptures. His first spatial environment ever. And also, it is “one of the first examples of installation art in modern European art”! Munari was one of the first to create mobiles. Check out his Arrhythmic Machine series. They are related to chance, dynamics and spontaneous movements and things.

Another chap who made suspended mobiles out of wire -  Alexander Calder. 

How-to create a Calder mobile? 

Kim Jong Un

6. Homework

Our goal is to find the most efficient ways for transmitting our stories. Today, you will design your own story with metal wires. By definition, wires are flexible. Think about it. Either choose a single strand or a mesh.

Mobile - Crazy silly thing called love - Youtube video

I went to my child memories again. This was something I learned when I was a kid. Get a glass, a wire, bend it, glue a cut out animal in thin cardboard in it and spin the wire. Lots os stories: dog after a ball, wolf after a rabbit...All I did was to adapt it to today's homework.

7. Extras

Seung Mo Park - wire sculptures from his site and here

Five from the ground - here

Kinetic wire sculture

Alexander Calder - sculptures

Alexander Calder - Circus

Luis Lopez- bird wire crafts

Monkeybyz - the site  (Something a bit different but I like it)

Simple and beautiful wire art

More wire, and more and more and more crafts and some more here!

A store online

Amazing crafts

Wire art Penang 2013

You rock my world!

WEEK11-DAY2

1. Soundtrack of the day

Ancient Indians made rock music.

Hard as a rock - AC/DC
Solid (as a rock) - Ashford and Simpson
Steady as a rock - Clyde Ray
On the rocks - Rita Lee

Now, let’s rock and roll!

2. Places to discover

Stonehenge, Wiltshire, England

3. People to know

Michael Grabs - the site and the blog

4. Question of the day

5. Inspiration

Stories with stones.

Painting - Munari (From afar it is an island, book) and Max Ernst stones .

Domino stones - Painted stones for home

Any tool is good to storytell, but rocks are always a solid and steady option.

Rock art: A traditional “religious” art that involves human markings on rocks and that can be found in so many times and places. As a general, roch art can be divided into these two categories: petroglyphs (carved) and pictographs (painted). Rock art was (and still is sometimes today) used to record historical events or stories, to help enact rituals, for cartographic purposes (as territorial markers), “hunting magic” or weather control… The “art” can either be abstract or not.

Rock balancing: either an art, discipline, or hobby, it involves putting and  keeping them in a state of balance rocks, one on top of the other and in various positions. Nothing more is added to the “arrangement”. Nothing less.

For example, you could check out Cairns or inukshuk.

The rock balancing master Bill Dan teaches us how-to do sometricks here.

Then, Michael Grab and his Gravity Glue - site - and demonstration - video.

Michael Grab says:  

“The most fundamental element of balancing in a physical sense is finding some kind of tripod for the rock to stand on.” 

"Every rock is covered in a variety of tiny to large indentations that can act as a tripod for the rock to stand upright, or in most orientations you can think of with other rocks. By paying close attention to the feeling of the rocks, you will start to feel even the smallest clicks as the notches of the rocks in contact are moving over one another.”

“Find a zero point, or silence within yourself.”

“Become the balance”

On his website, he quotes Yoda: “Try not. Do. Or do not. There is no try”...


A question of stability? Check out Fischli and Weiss’ 

“Rock on top of another rock” - here
Andy Goldsworthy - “You must have something new in a landscape as well as something old, something that’s dying and something that’s being born.” 

Ferdinand Cheval, a French mailman who spent all his life building a castle with found stones.

6. Homework

Today, you design your own story with stones from the Stone Age and beyond! Are you ready? Ready for carvings, hammerings, engravings, inscriptions,
scratches, sculptures, drawings, paintings, pictures, records...? 

7. Extras

Man lifts big stones

Painted stones on Pinterest

Stone art blog

Sticks and stones on Pinterest

Suiseki or an ancient japanese art

Wimo Bayang - stones and an article

How to skip a stone

Telling stories

WEEK11-DAY1- Telling stories

1. SOUNDTRACK OF THE DAY

Imagination - Just an Illusion

Tracy Chapman - Telling stories

2. PLACES TO KNOW

Pastrengo, Milan.

3. PEOPLE TO DISCOVER

Escher’s work was “a game, a very serious game“.

Escher’s  impossible cube invented for Belvedere.

4. QUESTION OF THE DAY

5. INSPIRATION

Donato Bramante

The choir of Bramante’s Santa Maria presso San Satiro church. It’s choir seems to be at least five meters deep, but in fact, it is deep of only ninety centimeters!
Bramante was a true master in telling stories.

Here some people who are able to tell very refined stories with the projects they do:

Lisa Congdon - collection a dayJonas Mekas - diary
Iacchetti Coltelli Inutili - industrial design
The Eames - at Moma store
Yona Friedman - article
Dunne and Raby - projects


Design is first and foremost about narration.While a movie director shares his stories through movies, a musician with music, a poet with poems, a designer expresses them through objects, spaces and services.

Good Design tells good stories.

Carl Barks, Donald Duck’s father. Some of his old stories, the long ones, they are so nice! It was a world before the computer, at its best!

Maurice De Bevere(Morris) Have you ever heard about Lucky Luke? 

Moebius and Jacques de Loustal 
Louise Bourgeois

Coco Chanel 

Marcel Duchamp

Paul Klee 

Stanley Kubrick - movie

Le Corbusier’s Modulor

Carlo Mollino (a crazy guy) 

Kazuyo Sejima and her Sanaa’s office.

Issey Miyake 

Marimekko!

John Maeda 

Duilio Forte

Pierluigi Anselmi