Wednesday, February 5, 2014

The last Quizz!!


Learning something new everyday!


Blue flowers from Design101 students


Antigoni Purnell




Brigitte Ockers


Vitali Privalov



Giada Cauzzo



Irina Shulga



Nina Iversity



Mori Meta



Titouan Russo



Vasilia Katrini



Fabiola Alvarez


Ahmed Ezzat


Barbara Albasio


Gemma


Marina Telezar


MC Laupe


Guiuseppe Arrigo



Raphael T. Deinert



Marc David




Violeta Atanasova 





Nina Spenger






Natalia Martseniuk


Ivers Psnony


Diana Topin



Kristina Neral


Rosanna Li


More to be added soon!




Sunday, February 2, 2014

Sea of dreams

WEEK14 - DAY7 - Dreaming time


1. Soundtrack of the day

Baby Alpaca - Sea of dreams

2. People to meet

Anne Bronte - bio


3. Places to go

Our dreams

4. Question of the day

5. Inspiration

“I love the silent hour of night, for blissful dreams may 
then arise, revealing to my charmed sight what may not bless my waking eyes.” - Anne Brontë
Here’s a fascinating article about what happens in your mind when you sleep.

Surrealist artists 
Salvador Dali, Joan Miro and Rene Magritte - Some of their most important works were inspired by their dreams.

Vincent van Gogh once said “I dream my painting and I 
paint my dream.”
The Science of Sleep - movie
Inception - movie
Design for Dreaming - movieWaking Life - video
Lucid dreams - design your own dreams

Stephen LaBerge -  LaBerge’s team was interested in developing ways to enter the Lucid Dreaming state. This technique is easy — you just need to practice!

1. Before bed, decide on a problem you would like to solve 
while in a lucid dream. Frame your problem in the form of a question. Focus on the question for a few minutes – set your intention to dream about this.

2. Try a yoga nidra meditation or some exercises to help you 
get into a state of deep relaxation. Yoga relaxation routine here.

4. Lay down (if you can, in a bed designed by Mathieu 
Lehanneur, or in the Bubble, or the Dream Downtown Hotel, or just in your own bed).

5. Fall asleep and realise you are dreaming 
(pinch yourself or use DreamStalker or notice the vital signs – is there a purple monster flying around? Then you are probably not awake...)

6. Once you realise you’re asleep, bring up 
your question again. Seek the solution.

And if you want to explore further, here are 
some more techniques! And here.
Stephen King used the art of “creative sleep” to stay focused on the writing process. 

“Our work is without limits, full-time. 
There is no schedule, day and night. I
translate my dreams into reality, whatever I do” - Piero Fornasetti, an Italian designer, artist, interior decorator, and craftsman.

And he worked in dreams indeed. He woke 
up at night and sketched his ideas - baroque furniture, Palladian-style architecture or a modern variation. Or look at art works on the exhibition at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art. It was called “Dreams For Those Who Are Awake”. These works are also records of dreams.

Try Design by Randomness. Ideas start small so it is important to create an environment where you can nurture them and try them immediately before they disappear, where you can experiment and discover new ones. Find tools to develop the ideas from your dreams.


Dream books? They existed already 
in ancient Egypt and even Lord Byron wrote one. There are some other really remarkably designed dream book covers:

dream books from the 19th century, beautiful art nouveau dream 
books. Nowadays, you can always consult an online dream book.

In 1962, Bruno Munari, one of our 
favourites, published “Men on the Moon,” a special foldable book for kids with two LP records. Munari also used this motif in
“Good Design” (1963), where he portrayed the moon as an orange.

Verner Panton, the father of design. The moon 
inspired him to make this amazing moon lamp.

“I think we dream so we don’t have to be apart for 
so long. If we’re in each other’s dreams, we can be together all the time”, said Winnie-the-Pooh, the
wisest bear.

6.Homework:
Tonight, sleep deep and sweet! And in the morning, start 
recording your dreams. Use a notebook or a blog. Call the entries ‘dream whispers’. In a week, you will have 7 dreams whispering to you about things you want to do. In a month, at least 28. Quite a collection of dreams. Isn’t it nice? You can draw, design, write, paint...document you dreams in any way you please. And tomorrow, will you share with us a picture?



This Video and Letter were created by a group of Design101 students. Congratulations! A well done job!

Philip Seymour Hoffman died


One of my favorite actors died today of what seems to be drug overdose. I am so mad I could beat him. I did not even know he had an addiction. When I first read about it I thought it was an hoax. What a waste of life and talent. I just watched his movies one after the other. This is madness. Damn drugs.:(

Flowers in the wind


This is Anna Rebmann's work. Watch the flowers in detail
I love the video!

Elastic mind

WEEK14 - DAY 6

1. Soundtrack of the day

Röyksopp "The Alcoholic" A Puppet's Tale 

2. People to meet


3. Places to go


4. Question of the day


5. Inspiration

“Reality can be elastic, and I want to see how elastic it can be, you know?” Yoko Ono

Adaptability is an ancestral distinction of human 
intelligence, but today’s instant variations in rhythm, call for something stronger: elasticity,” Paola Antonelli.

“Designers give life and voice to objects, and along the way 
they manifest our visions and aspirations for the future, even those we do not yet know we have.” (Paola Antonelli)

Elastic Mind”. The MoMA 
exhibition’s website. 

 TED Talk - Paola Antonelli speaks of the exhibition.

“And I don’t know what to do, now that pink has turned to 
blue,” -  Hüsker Dü.
The most important thing today, for all of us is to develop strong skills of elasticity, “a by-product of adaptability and acceleration... It means being able to embrace progress, understanding how to make it our own,“ -  Paola Antonelli.

“Bucky”or Buckminster Fuller  - “the best way to predict the future 
is to design it”!

Ryoji Ikeda and his test patterns
Here he Goes Big, Really Big.

Flowers have been used since as far back as 50,000 years in 
funeral rituals. Many cultures do draw a connection between flowers and life and death, and because of their seasonal return flowers also suggest rebirth, which is the why many people place flowers upon graves...” (this was written here)

Saturday, February 1, 2014

Thank you!


A collection of blue flowers


KEEPING THE BLUE PLANET BLUE ONE FLOWER AT A TIME

My blue flowers are made of shampoo containers plastic and bottle pet plastic. When possible I used poor materials to answer Design 101 challenges. It was a deliberate option from the beginning of the course.
Obviously we look at it and think reduce-reuse-recycle.



Here's how  I presented the different flowers on iversity platform. 
I used a little humour on this first aproach - the single blue flower.

For the blue flower series I got more serious. Are we making enough to reduce waste? Or is it just flower after flower after flower?



The flower lamp proposal - because I got carried away and created two single blue flowers - deals with equilibrium between opposite forces, darkness and light. That's the key to survival of the Earth and ourselves. 
May Sarton was a poet and she loved Nature and flowers. So I found this quote and possibly influenced by Design 101's use of quotes used her words instead of mine.


Reduce - Reuse - Recycle

The collection and the vision

WEEK14 - DAY 5
1. Soundtrack of the day

By the beautiful blue Danube

2. People to meet

Junya Ishigami - interview


3. Places to go
Antwerp, Belgium

4. Question of the day


5. Inspiration
 Ishigami- interview

What is the best moment of the day?

“Just before going to sleep. I can finally relax from the day, 
have a peace of mind.”

“I would encourage them (the young) to create things in a free way. 
This means without depending on past knowledge or past creations. Try to create new values within architecture and design. Challenge current values and come up with new ones.”

“I would like to regard plant life not just as a landscape 
element but as an element equivalent to buildings in the formation of space.”

Ishigami worked for Sanaa.


“Times and conditions change so rapidly that 
we must keep our aim constantly focused on the future.” Walt Disney

About a concept
In Junya Ishigami’s case, his workshop for students at the Kanagawa Institute of Technology, his Greenhouses outside the Japanese pavilion at the 2008 International Architecture Biennale in Venice, Italy, his “Table” installation and his cuboid balloon” all show an obsession with light, lightness, transparency.
But it’s mostly about creating new space: exploring scale and proportion. He creates nearly “invisible” objects and architecture letting the surroundings define its own space.(From the course letter)

Some cute artificial flowers 
Tonkin Liu’s Future Flower.
Harvard researcher grows microscopic crystal flowers.
Green Azuma Makoto
A “Flower observatory” by Olafur Eliasson
Jeff Koons’ Inflatable - Balloon Flower (yellow),

6.Homework
How do you see your flowers? Today, you will make a web collection of your blue flowers, the ones you made yesterday. Show and tell us all about them!
Share your vision with us. Take a screenshot of your collection and share it with us. And also, give us the link to it!

(Next post, please!)

The flyer


Google has cake for me


A series of blue flowers

WEEK 14 - DAY 4

1. Soundtrack of the day

Sun Ra - Reflections in Blue

2. People to meet

John Baldessari
Documentary about him and his work.

On Kawara

3. Places to go

USA

4. Question of the day


5. Inspiration


I Got Up At... is a series of ninety postcards with printed rubber stamps On Kawara sent to his friend John Baldessari. Each card was stamped and sent from where he was at that morning and marked with the time he got out of bed.

Strange flowers
Hussein Chalayan
Philip Treacy
Dale Chihuly

Andy Warhol - “isn’t life a series of images that change as they repeat themselves?”

“Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.” Vincent Van Gogh

Alan Fletcher’s - his play with the colour blue: JAZZ BLUES, BLUEBLOOD, ONCE IN A BLUE MOON, BLUE STOCKING, BLUE FIT, FEEL BLUE, BLUE MURDER, BLUE PENCIL, BLUE FILM, BLUEBEARD, BLUE MOOD, BLUE FUNK, CORDON BLEU, TRUE BLUE, MOOD INDIGO...

On Kawara, in one of his earlier projects he sent telegrams to his friends saying, “I am still alive.” Nowadays, he has a twitter page that follows the same principle.It is another example of series. But in this example, the expression in the same: what changes is the person, On Kawara, as he progresses through time.

The goddess of flowers, gardens, and Spring:
Chloris seen by Botticelli.


6. Homework Today, from your one blue flower you will make a series of blue flowers. 


Making a series of flowers from one of my previous blue flowers would be easy if I had more PET plastic. But I runned out of PET in the house, the weather was terrible to go outside, and yes, I had to move on. So I moved to a different kind of plastic. Sorry if I'm not following the rules this time. These flowers are made with my shampoo containers. Now I have the remaining shampoo in a glass! I played with the shapes. I wish I had more plastic containers!
(And please remember that I do not wish to participate in the Berlin exhibition.)