This almost surreal Polished Steel Coffee Table by Italian architect and designer Gabriella Crespi looks like a metal crystal formation of some kind. Ca. 1970s. Very beautiful, and also multifunctional. The staggered leaves are retractable, as you can see, and it’s covered with a mirror-finish steel. It’s unfortunate that Crespi’s work never went into mass production – she did a lot of custom work – and that she eventually pulled away from design altogether. Read her bio by clicking below, via Todd Merrell Antiques. If I could have anything on his website, and I like most of it, it would probably be this.

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Ada Lovelace Day is an international blogging event instituted to draw attention to women who excel in the area of technology. Who is Ada Lovelace? From here:

Ada Lovelace was one of the world’s first computer programmers, and one of the first people to see computers as more than just a machine for doing sums. She wrote programmes for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, a general-purpose computing machine, despite the fact that it was never built. She also wrote the very first description of a computer and of software.

See also the Wikipedia entry, where we discovered Lovelace was also, oddly, the only legitimate child of the poet Byron. On Ada Lovelace Day, bloggers are asked to write about a present-day woman in technology. Since this is a design blog and not a tech blog, I’m going to arbitrarily include architecture and design under technology, since they are technical fields. As in other technical fields, woman have excelled in architecture and design but have had a very tough time gaining recognition thanks to the fact that these fields have been extremely male-dominated. When Charlotte Perriand asked Corbusier for a job, he said “We don’t embroider cushions here.” Perriand convinced him to hire her anyway, and went on to become an important figure in design whose star is now rising long after her death. (By the way there is nothing inferior about embroidering cushions, and the textile arts ought to be angry about that remark.) Recent evidence shows that women need female role models much more than men need male role models, and that is why this blog is jumping into the fray. Please also see previous posts on Eileen Gray, Charlotte Perriand, Nanna Ditzel, and many other women designers of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Charlotte Perriand:

Eileen Gray:

And finally, I love this recent Annie Liebowitz photo of SANAA architect Kazuyo Sejima holding a model of her New Museum design:

This fantastic new pendant lamp or chandelier is by our friends Propellor, an award winning collaboration of three Vancouver designers whose ridiculously beautiful studio is a few blocks from ours. The lamp was publicly launched today and while we have loved their Red Square chandelier for a long time, and would like to install it in our studio, we like this one just as much. Propellor also organizes Swell, an annual exhibition of sustainable design.

“Dazzle painting,” devised in Britain during WWI, was based on the theory that its complex optical patterns would confuse enemy naval rangefinders by disguising a ship’s speed and direction. It employed a number of visual tricks including the painting of false bow waves on portions of the ship other than the prow. There’s a fascinating explanation of how it was meant to work here. Interestingly, the concept was invented by an artist, a marine painter named Norman Wilkinson. When devising dazzle painting Wilkinson adapted some of the abstract, graphic style of constructivism and cubism even though he himself was a much more traditional painter (click below). Women artists from London’s Royal Academy of Arts dazzle-painted small scale models for optical studio testing before the design for each warship was finalized. It would be impossible to make this kind of stuff up, though perhaps it’s not surprising that historically it’s been standard practice for artists and designers to devise wartime camouflage. In the end the military effectiveness of dazzle painting was uncertain, but it did have the effect of being very good for ship’s morale, and it produced some surreal and beautiful ships. More photos in our Flickr pool, and see also the Tate Modern article on their camouflage exhibition, and more historical information here.

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Cynthia Maxwell, who is not only a mechanical engineer who has just finished a PhD on “Sound Synthesis from Shape-Changing Geometric Models” at Berkeley and has been part of the audio group at Apple and has worked for NASA, she also has a great eye and a sense of humour. Her blog, on her website House of Bits (she’s in computer science so that’s apparently a double entendre) is called Some Bits: a decent way to waste time) and it’s an interesting and informed compendium of design – fashion, interior, graphic, architectural and many others. She is obviously busy. How did she have time to find things we hadn’t?

Aladdin chairs by Claesson Koivisto Rune; Casa en los Tuliperos, Chile, by architect Gonzalo Mardones Viviani;  knitwear by Tim Ryan; sideboard by Formstelle; Chinese porcelain crumpled beer cans; meh flask. And if you want to know what’s in her personal cacti collection… here.