Why does our cringe list contain so many toys or toy-like objects? We like toys! But not really this one. This toy was in the house for as long as I can remember while my sisters and I were growing up. It arrived as a hand-me-down, but no one could remember from where or whom. It’s stamped Made In Germany on the bottom, which would put it at pre-WWII. It’s very well made, very sturdy, and the pieces spin and slide very smoothly. Somehow this makes the whole scenario all the weirder, and I can remember we found it quite creepy as children. Why were the babies screaming? Did they not like to be spun around? Is it because they hit the beads above when you spun them? Were the policeman meant to be babysitting, or were they out searching for abandoned babies, or perhaps for criminal babies? How many policemen does it take to find 5 babies, and more pressingly, how will they ever get to them? Why is there only one black baby, and more pertinently, why are there no black policemen? Was it a linear progression, with pastel eggs hatching into babies who then grew up to be white policemen? If those aren’t policemen, what are they? Baby abductors? Construction workers from different teams? What belonged in all those peg holes underneath? Was the main purpose of this object to hone a child’s narrative skills, or crime-solving skills? These and many other questions. It seemed as if there was a lot going on here, and most of it not very nice. And then there was the sickly colour scheme. It still bothers me to look at this thing, and still I can’t bring myself to throw it out. It’s as if some forensic expert or anthropologist might need it someday. But you could say that of a lot of toys.
Germany 1970. The German moderator discuss in the beginning how boring and lame the official looks are and that the fashion and color designers came up with the following outfits to make the game more interesting and colorful. They explain very detailed the colors since at the point many did not have color tv!
Clearly they made my day with the ideas. I just keep cracking up! I have no clue why they dance so madly. latin music dancing models with soccer fashion without shoes. but even Guenther thinks that the trikot needs an update as a service and entertainment for the fans who watch soccer games
OK from a textile design point of view I have to say I love the new 1970 jerseys. Fantastic. The dancing? I have no clue why they dance so madly. See also this recent remix of this video.
e15’s leaning book rack “Mate” is quite well-known (photo at bottom), but their shelf/cupboard units Kast Drie and Kast Een are equally nice. We would like to try to DIY these wall units in our studio, thought the smooth factory finish would be hard to achieve. But the chance to hide junk while adding sculptural interest to the wall is appealing.
e15, now based in Frankfurt, is named after the London zip code where its first studio was located. Architect Philipp Mainzer and product designer Florian Asche produce nice, deceptively simple minimalist pieces, and work on interesting collaborations such as a recent project with the French music and fashion collective Kitsune. Great yellow table, too. And having two of the leaning book racks would be nice.
This is a long, messy, eclectic photo essay about the strange, hybrid, and surprisingly impure histories of objects and buildings. It is skewed toward the ancient, the modern, the space-age, the 1960s and the 1970s, the adventurous, the unexpected, the ecological, the utopian and the anti-utopian, the unstuffy and the unstaid, design as making-do, the real, the lived in, and mixes of all kinds. Since design isn't divorced from other things, it's also about art, social issues, urban and community planning, technology, philosophy and anything else that intersects with design, which means everything. "ouno" is a name in both Finnish and Japanese, it's the same upside-down as right-side-up, it refers to both zeros and ones, and it is pronounced uno. My name is Lindsay and I'm open to your complaints, disagreement or general crankiness. Free free to comment or email. This is an anti-intellectualism-free zone and around here we don't try to dampen critique by calling it negativity or whining. We call it thought!
