Finnish Summer Greenhouse
Once again, Finland offers us a fabulous way to become one with nature. Last month we wrote an article about the Igloo Hotel in Kakslauttanen, in which guests could enjoy the northern lights and stars of the crystal clear sky from their comfortable room through the thermal glass capsules. Helsinki-based architect Ville Hara and designer Linda […]
A Floating Catamaran Suite
Book an adventurous night in a hotel floating in nature. That’s all possible thanks to Marijn Beije’s graduation project Free Floating. The project basically features is a floating catamaran suite including four places to sleep, two terraces for relaxing, and a crow’s nest to spot birds. The floating catamaran suite aims to lure a broader target […]
Bringing Buildings To Life
With his graduation project ‘Out of the Box, Into Your Life’, designer Erik van Halderen explores the potential of elevators as flexible rooms in buildings that can be utilized for more than transferring people up and down. In an attempt to bring static buildings to life, he created a series of three architectural models in […]
Suitcase Symphony
This is yet another innovative design by Jeriël Bobbe, the creator of the Movie-ng Experience that we mentioned earlier in our Dutch Design Week 2011 series. Bobbe’s frequent travels and the carrying a trolley suitcase inspired him to use the trolley as a music instrument. Instead of annoying noises on ordinary stone pavements, a range of relief paving stones create […]
Taggie Shows Where Supermarket Food Comes From
Designer Niels van Hoof developed Taggie, a smartphone app that enables children to research where their supermarket food comes from. By aiming a smartphone camera at a product tag, an animated film will be played which explains where the food comes from and the way it grows. Besides, Taggie enables its users to playfully discover […]
Bas Van Tol (Müller Van Tol) On Temporary Design
Bas van Tol is partner and designer at Müller van Tol, an Amsterdam-based design agency devoted to (temporary) interior design. Founded in the end of the eighties, the office has spezialized in wonderful, raw and minimal temporary interior projects for exhibitions, restaurants, bars, clubs and offices, such as the legendary restaurant and nightclub 11 in Amsterdam […]
A Bridge Of Ice
“For millions of years, powerful natural elements such as water, ice, black sand and molten rock have shaped Iceland into a country renowned for its rugged beauty. Yet today an additional, man-made power is sculpting the landscape: aluminium smelters, as part of an industrial landscape controled by hydro-power plants and massive dams.” This landscape has […]
Self-Growing Shelter
Biesbosch is a national park in the south of the Netherlands. Usually the river floods about three times a year and covers parts of the park with water. From that, to build permanent constructions from wood or bricks for recreation would be difficult. Feike de Jong came up with Biesbosch Expedition, a steel frame overgrown […]
Saturday Night Fever
‘Limelight: Saturday Night’ is an interesting project which explores the possibilities of the city as a stage by replacing streetlights with theater spotlights and turning every passer-by into the next performer. Instantly turning city life into a show, the project features spontaneous performances by citizens, somewhere between spectacle and surveillance, as the creators explain: “The spotlight attracted […]
A Restaurant In A Crate
Ardie van Bommel’s ‘Pure Nature’ graduation project is a modular outdoor restaurant made out of characteristic apple crates. By composing the diverse kitchen and dining units at any spot, allows an open air restaurant to pop up in a minute. Van Bommel’s modular crate restaurant is based on the classic apple crates that are used […]
The Yellow Sublime Of Post-Its
This is the second of a series of two posts reflecting on current design practices in India. The first post talked about how these design initiatives re-create divisions between people who design and people who are designed-for. The exhibition ‘Design with the Other 90%: Cities’ is going on in the United Nations building, New York […]
Train Ticket To The Movies
Wouldn’t it be nice to have some movie entertainment in trains? However, installing LCD screens behind each seat like in airplanes would be much too expensive. A nice and effective way to solve this problem was shown at the Dutch Design Week with Jeriël Bobbe’s ‘Movie-ng Experience’. Not some projected video on a sound barrier, but a series […]
Inventions For A Nomadic Lifestyle
Designer Maaike Fransen came up with a great collection of what she calls ‘inventions for a nomadic lifestyle’. Living in a temporary situation herself, Fransen delved into the needs of an urban nomad in daily life. Being in cognito form time to time is such a basic urban need for nomads wo are spending most of […]
Nadia Amoroso On DataAppeal And DIY Urban Mapping
One year ago we wrote an article on The Exposed City: Mapping the Urban Invisibles, a book by Toronto-based urban designer and researcher Nadia Amoroso that deals with the world of visual representation of the city in a new digital context. The book formed the basis for DataAppeal, a new online geograpical data visualization service that was […]
Integrated Bird Houses
Some people consider city birds disastrous when it comes to their homes. The birds are especially unwanted when they accommodate at attics, making holes into wall insulation, and under roof tiles. We could install some traditional wooden bird houses in our garden, on trees or social housing for birds at other places in the city. Recently we stumbled upon even more esthetical, yet subtle solutions: bird house roof tiles. These tiles consist of terracotta with a bird house perched on top where the bird can nest in.
