Standing on the Shoulders of (Design) Giants

Think of BoDW as a Lollapalooza of the design world. A veritable who’s who from all corners of product, industrial, graphic and fashion design as well as urban planning and architecture. 

 

 

Guest of honor and introductory plenary speaker was Dieter Rams, once chief designer at Braun and now spiritual design reference guru of Apple’s Johnny Ives.

 

Also on hand was Art+Com founder Prof. Joachim Sauter, talking about the "Renaissance of the Physical" and his firm’s kinetic sculpture project for BMW. Remember that one? Metal spheres suspended in space, forming shapes? Yes that was an Art+Com project. Yes it won boatloads of awards (listed here) and yes, our fanboy genes were activated so just HAD to get a picture with Herr Sauter.

 

Creative Mornings has a very good mirror of the Art+Com talk here. Watch and be amazed.

 

NOSIGNER, aka Eisuke Tashikawa, normally designs weird lamps and other furniture, but he talked more about how design should help and change things, citing his OLive project. OLIVE was an effort he put together right after the Sendai earthquake, focusing on crowdsourced design ideas for survival. It quickly grew to an archive of over a thousand design ideas for repurposing everyday objects into other things, like halving a water bottle to make 2 plates. Within one month, the site had over a million views! Change indeed. 

 

View the English version of the OLive project here. 

 

Adrian van Hooydonk, VP of BMW’s DesignWorks USA, talked about how design should be borne out of a need to discover and innovate. "We support experimentation and curiousity," he said.

 

Urban Visionary John Higson of peopleowned.org demonstrated that through through structured dialogue, you can achieve inspired projects even on a community scale. He demonstrated several projects in Sweden of how local citizens and tech firms came together (with the efforts of peopleowned.org) to change wasted urban spaces into parks and community-friendly spaces using sustainable and environmentally responsible methods.

 

Watch a TEDx talk by John Higson here.

 

 

BoDW had its fair share of rockstars as well. Case in point, Danish architect and urban space rebel Bjarke Ingels, principal of the Bjarke Ingels Group, who advocates fluid thinking when it comes to urban space planning and architectural design. When criticized by an audience member (an elderly architect) for having "no real signature style," he immediately countered it by saying that having a signature style "sometimes limits your design solution. How you solve the problem is the signature style and if you were to put it in chef terms, you wouldn’t always cook with potatoes." This rebuttal got a rousing reaction from the audience, which really should have been a standing ovation. Bjarke Ingels’ unconventional ways have even led to him writing a book, "Yes Is More", which is actually quite awesome since it’s a graphic novel on architecture. How rock star can you get?

 

More information on Bjarke Ingels here: www.big.dk (I kid you not, that’s the URL)

 

Next year’s BoDW promises to be a great affair as well, as Denmark is the partner country. And you can bet that Collab will be there.