Dutch graphic artist Frank Dresmé has made a series of psychogeographic collages of routes through Amsterdam. They are quite stunning images by themselves but also interesting as they present the city as a kind of unified whole, somehow for me capturing the quality of the city in a way that single images or map for [...]
Beautiful graph of Construction Activity in the U.S.A. by Bill Rankin of Radical Cartography (via). Note the dips during winter.
Artek and Tom Dixon have a new range / recycling strategy for their furniture. It’s called 2ndcycle and it is reselling used Artek furniture again. But in addition they add an RFID tag, this tag has information for access to a website which then gives the history of that item, when it was made where [...]
Yesterday it started snowing here and already in the afternoon the landscape had flipped from earthy autumn colours to white. Everything, the grass, the roads, the buildings look different, especially those white prefab concrete block apartments now so ubiquitous in our fair nordic capitol. And last night I couldn’t help think about how it would [...]
A new quarterly magazine is due to come to Finland soon called Baltia covering Architecture, Urbanism and Design. Published in Russian and English it is based in St.Petersberg with a brief to cover Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, and NW Russia, around the St.Petersberg area including Kallingrad. Why Poland, Germany and say Sweden are not covered [...]
An excellent gallery of old Finnish Beer labels. Russia and the Baltic are also covered. Too bad we can’t taste them also!
I saw the Citywall installation by students at HIIT yesterday which is one of those multi-touch screens hooked up to tagged images of Helsinki from flickr (film). Played around with the photos, the closest I’ll get to a Jeff Han touchscreen for a while I guess. It’s really nice playful installation for the summer, [...]
I’m unsure what to make of this essay about working at O.M.A. On the one hand I’m thrilled by the thought of working there in a kind of supercharged electrical field of design, where ideas are ruthlessly produced, used ,discarded, reworked. On the other it sounds like a slightly authoritarian production office which [...]
Natural materials and the economy of their use seem to be a common theme see Pinmag for a flavour of the latest news from Japan, where they have featured several Finnish items. Oh and they like to make films over here to!
Finland has established a considerable reputation in Japan. This is reflected in the increasing [...]
I remember going to a lecture as a student about the strategies used in malls and large shops in attempting to control the behaviour of their clients. This handy A-Z of retail tricks (via) is a nice summary of the main ones. There is also a weblog called Architectures of Control in Design which takes [...]
After attending a lecture by Max Underwood of Arizona state university about Charles and Ray Eames I became a great fan of their work. I hadn’t realised had produced some of the first multimedia presentations, worked with IBM, and at World Fairs. Their films too have at their core a design sensibility taken to a [...]
I have a Tommy Perman print on my wall bought at analogue. He is a great artist & one day I will listen to some of his music too. But in the meantime go to his website Surface Pressure and take a look.
