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Curve onlline sample, online editions available October 2008
 
 
 
 
 
 
Curve industrial design magazine Inside BMW Alexandra Korndörfer  

Issue twenty-four
July 2008

Philips light spectrum, Grohe Ondus tapware design, Shinmi Park body architecture
Richard Seymour, photography by Melanie Tanusetianwau; Cupola reading table by BarberOsgerby and woven composite fabric illustrated by Paul Kouppas
     
     
     
Nathan Gray silkscreen print on paper, 2007
  Aggregates and assemblages: Nathan Gray
Melissa Loughnan

Artist Nathan Gray works across drawing, collage, silk-screening and assemblage, and possesses a particular affinity for colour. His paper compositions are cut and combined with found objects and small-scale sculptures to create 'aggregations'.

Gray has been exploring aggregation, a natural process in which growth begins from a single point and progresses to some kind of limit, as a metaphor for constructing his imagery and installations for much of his career.

Gray creates complex, ever-growing sequences of forms that are a blend of biological imperative and tactile pleasure. The work often references human responses to plant and animal forms where highly decorative sculptures uncover botanic micro-worlds and havens.
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  Team Effort

Min Wang is design director of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games and the dean of the School of Design at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing.

After a tough competition between design studios, ad agencies and design schools in China, CAFA won the bid to design the prized Olympic medals and a series of thirty-five pictograms for the Paralympics.

"We were lucky we won most of the projects we competed for," said Wang. "We had thirty students working on the core graphics, then each group was divided into subgroups, each working on a different project."

"Students have fresh ideas. They have no boundaries or baggage – or experience. They do what they like, whether it's realistic or do-able or not. They don't think about things too much; they just come out with interesting concepts."

"We worked together and narrowed our selection from a large number of ideas and submitted them to the Beijing Olympic Committee. The committee then narrowed the field further and we put together a team of the best students, postgraduates and faculty members to finalise the design. This process was much more complicated than in a commercial design studio. It was a big team and I was just a small part of it."
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  Interview – Richard Seymour

Richard Seymour, product designer and co-founder of London-based SeymourPowell, was in Melbourne for the AGIdeas Conference in April.

Seymour's upfront and direct style of communicating makes him popular amongst designers and those who have heard him speak. It has proved to be a very effective way of getting to the heart of his clients' issues as well.

Seymour talked with Belinda Stening, Curve editor, about communication, his partnership with Dick Powell and the future of the business landscape.

How have you developed the courage to talk to clients in such a direct way?

I think it came from two places. Firstly, it grew out of frustration. There are so many layers of marketing gobbledygook that mean nothing that I get very frustrated at finding a way through it all. Secondly, to be brutally frank, the harder you beat them, the happier they seem to be with you.
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  Some like it slow
Laura Traldi

In pre-industrial times, the success of an object was defined less by the design than by the ability of the artisan to work the materials.

With luxury now increasingly identified with one-off designs and with the current wave of renewed interest in local, traditional craftsmanship, the concept of quality is being re-discussed.

Thus, when Giles Hutchinson Smith and Henry Neville – managing director and president, respectively, of Mallet, the antiques house with galleries in London and New York – were told by some of their clients about their growing desire for contemporary objects of similar quality to fine antiques, they were not all that surprised.
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  East melds with west
Laura Traldi

People who are passionate about objects – designers above all, but also artists, artisans and general enthusiasts of material culture – know that the value of an artifact goes well beyond its function or appearance.

Hence, when it comes down to judging objects, what counts the most is not so much what they are (or what they are capable of doing) but how they were conceived, developed and made. After all, what makes a design timeless is not only excellent functionality and superb looks – which might well fade away – but its role as a culture carrier, as a messenger of the heartbeat of the society that created it.

In this sense, the OrienTales collection that Stefano Giovannoni and his long-time Japanese collaborator Rumiko Takeda recently presented for the A di Alessi – and last April celebrated with the publication of a book entitled {OrienTales: eastern stories through western eyes} (published by Gli Ori, Pistoia, Italy) – could well be an excellent example of a cultural bridge between the east and west.
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  The incredible lightness of being

Lightweight materials, as the name suggests, simply refer to materials that are light in weight. However, whilst there are many materials that may be deemed light (tissue paper, for instance), the category of lightweight materials we will look at here refers to those that are of high strength for their weight (often referred to as the strength-to-weight ratio), or have another important property relative to their weight (such as toughness).

In mechanical terms, there are different types of ‘strengths’ (tensile, compressive, torsional, impact and so on), and materials are also measured according to the way in which forces are applied. Some materials perform exceptionally well under tension but poorly under compression (and vice versa).

Additionally, some materials can withstand incredible forces, but only for short durations or for a few times before they fail, whilst others are more durable and can withstand repeated application of forces.
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  Health delivery

Students and designers from Osaka University in Japan have been working for some time now on a project they call PKD, or Peace-Keeping Design, in which they aim to design solutions to problems with food-supply, housing and health in developing countries.

PKD is an initiative of the Progressive Inclusive Design office headed by designer Kazuo Kawasaki and supported by the Medical Centre for Translational Research at Osaka University Hospital.
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  Life-saving design

Of the world’s total population, 5.8 billion people, or ninety per cent, have restricted access to many products and services we take for granted, and nearly half do not have reliable supplies of food or clean water, or access to shelter.

A growing movement among designers interested in creating low-cost solutions for this other ninety per cent is explored in the exhibition, Design for the Other 90%. Designers, engineers, students and academics, architects and social entrepreneurs from all over the world are coming up with cost-effective ways to increase access to food and water, energy, education, healthcare, revenue-generating activities and affordable transportation for those who most in need.
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