The Italian company Sawaya Moroni in collaboration with designer/programmer John Maeda, using his algorithmic “Fireball” graphic. Photo above by renzo358 from the Abitare Il Tempo 2009 in Verona.

These are a mix of glass and lucite, past and present. The bottom 3 pieces are from the 70s and all of the pieces at top are contemporary. Transparency puts furniture into the realm of the future or the imaginary, even when it also automatically harks back to the 1970s. Which may be the same thing. The 70s also had that thing for kaleidoscopic and candyshop colour, iconoclasm, disco and visual pleasure. And conveniently mirrored table tops. Above, XXX tables by Glas Italia, released this year. See this Arren Williams article. Below, glass and lucite by Italian company Sawaya Moroni, who are present-day masters of this too. Example further below are vintage.

Two photos above are by Klick Interiors.

Above, French 70s lucite desk from here. Below, Electrified Plexiglas and Mirrored Glass Low Table by Ron Ferri, circa 1970’s USA. Mirror, Lucite. From Todd Merrill

Below, unknown chair.

Everyone always leaves.

The Unhappy Hipsters blog features Dwell Magazine photos with the captions they were crying out for. Because it’s lonely in the modern world.

Even in your company I feel so alone.

Dwell has a sense of humour; this is their Twitter reply.

Most people have probably seen this video, but I thought it was worth seeing again. Dave Eggers won the 2008 TED Prize for his education and literacy work with kids, and in this entertaining acceptance speech he provides a history of the project. He’s the founder of the fantastically successful Once Upon A School which develops free drop-in tutoring centres for kids. The centres are entirely manned by volunteers – writers (including Eggers), professors, grad students, and others with flexible schedules. Quite apart from the genius of the overarching idea, Eggers also intuitively understands the role design plays in making kids and teenagers actually want to drop in for one-on-one tutoring after school. The spaces are wildly imaginative and hilarious without looking childish. In fact they must – and do – appeal to adults as well, because they are all multipurpose centres with a retail front, adult office space and kids’ tutoring area. For example, at 826 Valencia in San Francisco, Eggers’ publishing concern McSweeney’s Quarterly operates out of the back; there’s a functioning “Pirate Supply Store” in the front, and the kids’ tutoring area is in between.

There’s nothing about this project that isn’t just total genius. Below is the facade of 826  Valencia, decorated with a mural by graphic novelist Chris Ware depicting the history of language, speech, writing and publishing. Exterior photo by David Hilowitz; sandwich board photo by Dan Rochman.

Above is the Pirate Supply Store, built to feel like the inside of a ship. Photo by Willy Volk from the Flickr Creative Commons. The shop is beautiful but funny, full of elegant-looking gags: for example, as you stand and read a framed list of ways to play practical jokes on pirates, a wooden hatch opens overhead and covers you in string mop heads. Below, a visitor to the store awaits his measure of lard in exchange for which he has bartered a lock of his hair. Kids who’d just finished a workshop rushed out to witness the transaction. Photos by rgr.jnr on Flickr. Eggers and co. were forced to dream up the store component because the building rental contract stipulated there must be retail activity – hence, of course, a pirate supply store, which just happens to be a retail success in itself. Every centre has its own shop: in New York it’s the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Company. All profits from the stores go to support the tutoring centres, whose extra projects include publication of the childrens’ writing and field trips. The further advantage of the shopfront is that the centres are easily accessible and embedded in the neighbourhoods they serve. To date tens of thousands of kids have been given chances they would otherwise never have had. It’s not surprising that the idea has taken off across the country. When Eggers jokingly wrote “You shall know our velocity,” he wasn’t kidding.

Not a rhetorical question. This is a hodgepodge sample, for sure, and spans decades, but all of it seems to partake of some form or other of adventurousness. It’s possible I’m projecting, and that my view of Australia is entirely filtered through my childhood fixation on that girl in National Geographic who crossed the outback on camels. But I doubt it. Above are from the National Archives of Australia appearing in the Heide Museum of Modern Art’s exhibit Modern Times: the untold story of modernism in Australia. Top: ‘A modernist vision of Australia: Grant and Mary Featherston’s wing sound chairs were a feature of the Australian Pavilion, designed by architect James Maccormick with exhibits selected by Robin Boyd, at Expo 67 in Montreal, 1967′ and ‘View of the elevated restaurant, Centenary Pool, Brisbane’ by James Birrell. Most images below are from desire to inspire, the half-Australian blog. House directly below is the Wheatsheaf House. House in woods below by Drew Heath; room with screen, photo by Lucas Allen; geometric bedroom by Greg Natale; provenance of last 3 photos is lost, please advise; last photo is room by Marion Hall Best, considered the mother of modern Australian interior design.

This is a follow-up to an earlier post on the way digital technology and textile printing is fueling a wave of experimentation in textile design. I just heard from Melanie Bowles, a lecturer at the Chelsea School of Art in London, who produces a very interesting blog called makeitdigitaltextiles. She has recently co-authored a book on this topic as well, Digital Textile Design. The Make It Digital blog is a very useful resource for designers or anyone interested in textile or other digital design. The beautiful book shown above is not Bowles’ book, but a digital design resource book called Kapitza which I discovered on Bowles’ blog. “Each geometric pattern is built from ‘font shapes.’ The book comes with a CD of downloadable fonts so you can create endless pattern yourself.” Extremely useful! The blog also has an interesting post on Alexander McQueen, but most of the designers Bowles mentions were new to me. For example Glory Scarves out of Australia, see below, who use algorithmic design to automate the production of one-of-a-kind prints:

Fabulous digitally printed scarves from Australia show the changing look of printed textiles using a digital medium. Each scarf is created by entering an individual equation into a computer – creating a mathematically valid fractal – each scarf is therefore unique.

Finally, Bowles likes geometric and experimental patterns, and her blog is free from the more kitchen-y, crafty, neo-granny textile patterns that are proliferating in North America via the new digital printing services. It’s great that digital printing democratizes textile design and makes it affordable, but for me many of the results are disappointing, on this continent anyway. Bowles’ blog is not like that. Below is one of her own textile designs, a conflation of traditional Japanese shibori – which has always had a geometric component – and more mathematical design methods. Very well thought out and beautifully executed.

My recent work ‘Digital Shibori’ explores the parallels between traditional craft processes and digital technology and I have been looking at the ancient craft of Shibori which uses the techniques of stitching, knotting and folding fabric which is then dyed to achieve the organic patterning that it creates. I have translated these effects in Adobe Illustrator by manipulating graphic geometrics and experimenting with light effects, blends and folded pattern to create the essence of this traditional craft… the designs have been finally digitally printed onto organza and cottons to maintain the feeling of light.