Eindhoven’s Dutch Design week is imminent, meaning personally that two years ago, in 2023, myself and many friends were scrambling to finalize our displays for the Design Academy’s graduation show. Ward Lauwers and Nathan Raccah had been immersed in their ambitious Angeli’s Delight project, which had both instigated and absorbed a lot of events in all our lives during that last spring semester.
If you’re in London this week, come see Tasty coffee one hundred at the show organized by Das Programm for London Design Festival alongside work by a lot of people whose stuff I’ve liked for a long time. Open late on the 16th. Plan to report back with other notable things from the festival.
I said previously that we generally prefer to carry value with us rather than leaving it behind in places we can no longer access. I meant this in reference to places we rent and live in, but I got to thinking about what this could mean in places like old schools where we’re maybe more inclined to try leaving a mark. These are settings where we know future cohorts will pass through, trying to interpret the traces of vernacular history they find.
Some of my fondest memories of my high school, Etobicoke School of the Arts, relate to the utility tunnels under the school. (If a current student happens to be reading this, there is a trapdoor in the courtyard-side art studio, in the corner of the exterior wall and the wall with the chalkboard. Another entrance is in the drama department costume room.)
Learning hard lessons about plaster moulding and slip casting as I work on a project I will share more about soon. See you next time.
Is a design ultimately successful if the initial idea kind of sucks, but it’s implemented unusually well? Does effort spent later in the process naturally fill the space left by a questionable starting point? What effect does a combination of irresponsible design at the outset and high quality in later stages have on how we feel about a designed object?
This week I took apart a Beomaster 1600, a solid-state amplifier from 1980 with a strange control system. There are two rubber tank treads, one on each end of the inclined control panel. The aluminum strip along the bottom of the panel surface is divided into uniform buttons, grouped into a left cluster for tone controls and a right cluster for input selection and radio tuning.
Shot under hazy pink wildfire-smoke sunlight.
Enamel bucket
The “good bucket”.
I’ve tried to formalize a few related strategies I use to limit waste of material and space in my living and working areas.
The most specific of these is “active storage”, or putting materials otherwise just sitting around taking up space to background use until they’re needed for a project with more finality.
The design-related planning that that goes into this is mostly about avoiding damage to the material that would limit possibilities for future use. I don’t say re-use because in this approach the future use is the primary one and what you do in the meantime is secondary.
This means strictly no alterations to the material, especially if the piece is of standard dimensions. Folding, rolling, stacking, and reorienting are the options for getting the material to the necessary dimensions and shape. This is most doable with soft materials, as I’ll explain with some examples later.
It also involves risk mitigation — planning the “actively stored” material’s interim use in a way that it doesn’t sustain significantly more wear and tear than it would sitting in “cold storage”. If you live in an old house like mine, this would be a consideration in any case, where most available storage space is in the damp-ish basement. With active storage, the material is nearer to you, and by using it day-to-day you can keep a better eye on its condition.
The best part of staying close to a material is that you can almost passively gain a better understanding of its qualities over time. I think this can inspire future use of a given material in a much more practical way than if you didn’t have some firsthand experience living with it, or if your only understanding of it was in a strictly planned context.
Most of my cutlery comes from secondhand stores in Brussels and Eindhoven. I like to have a variety of shapes and metals but keep things within a certain range of normalcy so if there are a bunch of people over you can just grab a handful out of the drawer at random and not end up with unpleasant combinations. Of course there are a few exceptions.
This silver spoon is my go-to. The handle is fairly slender but thick enough that it feels good in your hand. The head is a nice versatile shape and size.
This big aluminum spoon basically takes the form of a heavy old French soup spoon but is lightweight in a way that changes how you use it. The edges are surprisingly good for scooping grapefruit. It’s so convincing in its normalcy that every few months it ends up in the dishwasher and turns an ugly grey.
Here is a Braun alarm clock: the AB 4A designed by Peter Hartwein and released in 2005. On paper it has a lot of the characteristics that the heads will recognize from Dietrich Lubs’ better-known earlier entries in the series:
These shelf brackets demonstrate how a form that might seem unlikely at first can naturally emerge through the method by which the raw material is shaped into something functional.
Rather than imposing a shape after the fact, the manufacturing process seems to have started from a simple rectangle of metal and let it evolve from there. Time, effort, and material aren’t wasted stamping out a specific shape at the beginning or trimming away edges after the fact. Whether or not these offcuts would normally be recycled is another question.
Connected together here are two accessories from Steve Jobs-era Apple products: a standard AC cable shipped with Mac Minis and AirPort routers, and an iPod USB power brick. Since the very first iPod, Apple’s rounded-off white plastic power bricks have been maintained as a consistent and rarely discussed modular system, scaled up to laptop chargers and compact wireless devices.