Love this advert! Funny and slightly sinister.
3
Feb 10
A2 fond farewell
I am sad to say that our lovely A2 is leaving us. I thought I’d write a little eulogy to this stunning modern day design icon in its memory.
Four things I love about the A2:
1. The styling
The A2 was a surprise when it debuted only two years after the original Al2 study. Many initial reviews commented on the design. Autocar’s initial drive verdict: “The best thing about the A2 is that it isn’t merely a design exercise. Yes, it’s a great car to look at, sit in and touch, but it’s also a riot to drive”.
The A2 won Audi’s first Design Oscar, germany’s most prestigious design award. It’s designer Luc Donckerwolke is now one of the world’s most respected car designers. After breaking the mould with the A2, he went on to head up the design team at Lamborghini and design both of their recent stunning models; the Murceliago and Gallardo.
2. The technology
The overriding theme in the design and engineering of the A2 was summarized by the then Audi UK product manager in an interview after the car won a design award in 2001 as “create a small Audi, not a cheap Audi”, and the creative brief is said to have been “Transport four people from Stuttgart to Milan on a single tank of petrol”.
The A2 is built using considerable aluminium and aluminium alloy content, providing significant weight and fuel efficiency advantage over similar sized cars. This helps the car to be significantly more economical than vehicles using traditional steel monocoques. As one of the first car ever to be designed as an aluminium car the A2 can be considered a trailblazer for the many recent aluminium-based vehicles, such as the second-generation Audi A8 (D3) and Audi TT, and the X350 Jaguar XJ and 2006 Jaguar XK.
3. The Interior
The A2 has a huge interior space for the exterior dimensions, including a boot, at 390 litres (13.8 cu ft) with the rear seats in place; they can be folded or even completely removed to create a truly cavernous load space. This is significantly larger than the luggage space of the next model in Audi’s range, the Audi A3. The boot also has a really clever double (false) floor where items can be hidden from thieves.
Another neat feature, which is amazingly handy, is that the headrests also do not need to be removed from the rear seats when they are folded. Each seat even has it’s own carrying handle for when it has been removed – now that’s attention to detail!
4. The service hatch
The front of the car included an unusual but brilliant design feature called the “Serviceklappe” in German — this translates to “service hatch”. Behind it are the filling points for oil and screen wash fluid, and the dipstick. Thanks to these features, in the daily use of the car the bonnet does not need to be raised so you don’t need to root around in the dirty engine bay when refilling any of the fluids - superb!
That’s all folks!
So, there you go. It’s a deserved design icon brimming with detailing that has delighted me ever since we got the car. It’ll be sorely missed but we hope it’ll go to a good home!
2
Feb 10
Platform 5 – Meadowview and Mapledene Road
Some work by friends of mine at Platform 5 architects. I love their work; intelligent and beautifully simple. I hope you like it too.
Meadowview
The site lies on the edge of a ribbon development village in rural Bedfordshire and is surrounded by mature trees, hedgerows and arable fields. A sweet chestnut clad box is cantilevered off a solid masonry and glass plinth, from across the fields, it looks like it is floating over the hedgerows. The house incorporates sustainable technologies such as rainwater recycling and a ventilation system with heat recovery. The landscaping forms a transition between the domestic and agricultural environments.
Mapledene Road
Mapledene Road is situated in a conservation area in Hackney. The property had been stripped of virtually all its period features and had become run down and used as a “crack den” leaving it ripe for modernisation. The cellular ground floor was opened up and extended to the rear to allow the spaces to flow into each other and to the garden. The kitchen and patio areas are unified by a concrete floor and London stock brick garden wall. The expansive glass roof opens up the view to the sky giving the space an external character.The project has been shortlisted for the RIBA Awards, AJ Small Projects Awards and the Grand Designs Awards 2009.
29
Jan 10
Brazilian house by Marcio Kogan
Located on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, this simple yet stylish concrete and glass design makes a strong horizontal presence with panoramic views of beach and surf. Built into a majestic tree-covered slope, this beach-front house overlooks a wide wooden deck and pool. The house itself is simple, taking shape as two stacked cubes open to the outdoors. Minimalist interiors make the primary focus the view – breathtaking from every angle, inside and out.
29
Jan 10
Log Cabin
This rustic cabin design was built by Piet Hein Eek for friend, client and musician Hans Liberg. There isn’t a whole lot to this simple, wood cabin design. Inside, this compact cottage design contains the one thing this nature dweller needed for survival – a recording studio! And if ever Liberg needs some new inspiration for his melodious compositions, this modern mobile home goes where the music takes him thanks to integrated wheels on the bottom.
16
Jan 10
10 consumer trends for 2010
The following is courtesy of trendwatching.com. I thought there were some really interesting insights here. Probably most interesting to me was the extent that these consumer trends are driven by the growing influence of the internet on our lives.
1. Business as usual
Forget the recession: the societal changes that will dominate 2010 were set in motion way before we temporarily stared into the abyss. More »
2. Urbany
Urban culture is the culture. Extreme urbanization, in 2010, 2011, 2012 and far beyond will lead to more sophisticated and demanding consumers around the world. More »
3. Real-time reviews
Whatever it is you’re selling or launching this year, it will be reviewed ‘en masse’, live, 24/7. More »
4. F(luxury)
Closely tied to what constitutes status (which is becoming more fragmented), luxury will be whatever consumers want it to be over the next 12 months. More »
5. Mass-mingling
Online lifestyles are fueling and encouraging ‘real world’ meet-ups like there’s no tomorrow, shattering all cliches and predictions about a desk-bound, virtual, isolated future. More »
6. Eco-easy
To really reach some meaningful sustainability goals this year, corporations and governments will have to forcefully make it ‘easy’ for consumers to be more green, by restricting the alternatives. More »
7. Tracking & Alerting
Tracking and alerting are the new search, and 2010 will see countless new INFOLUST services that will help consumers expand their web of control. More »
8. Embedded Generosity
This year, generosity as a trend will adapt to the zeitgeist, leading to more pragmatic and collaborative donation services for consumers. More »
9. Profile Myning
With hundreds of millions of consumers now nurturing some sort of online profile, 2010 is a good year to introduce some services to help them make the most of it (financially), from intention-based models to digital afterlife services. More »
10. Maturialism
2010 will be even more opinionated, risqué, outspoken, if not ‘raw’ than 2009; you can thank the anything-goes online world for that. Will your brand be as daring? More »
13
Jan 10
Sagmeister’s typographic chair
You and I might take a sabbatical and treat it like a holiday. Stefan Sagmeister used it as a way to free up his creativity. During his 1 year stint in Bali he created several interesting pieces including this chair which appealed to me because of the intrinsically connected typography and physical material.
The words on the chair are taken from a diary written during his stay and therefore have a contextual relevance to the place where the chair will live.
Typically of Sagmeister, the chair made of indigenous Bali Rattan is not beautiful in the usual sense, however the thin red line it weaves through it’s setting, into the material used, the words written in the material and back through into the setting experienced while sitting on it, is extremely elegant and verging on genius.
So there you go, some people do their best work on holiday.
To Sagmeister
To Karim Charlebois-Zariffa (fellow Bali breaker and the person who took the photo)
6
Jan 10
2009 Round-up from NY Times
The New York Times Magazine annual Year in Ideas issue uncovers both magical oddities and major shifts in consumer wants and needs (aka: trends). Here are a few of them from their A>Z index of how our world is changing.
- Good Enough Is the New Great. An idea I’ve been looking for words for – basically, “Companies that had focused mainly on improving the technical quality of their products have started to notice that, for many consumers, ‘ease of use, continuous availability and low price” are more important’.” Think Flickr, YouTube, iPods (vs. photo books, high def and stereos.) Today, it’s often more about what’s easy than what’s the very best. That’s a game changer.
- An Advertisement that Watches You. Maybe an oddity for now or maybe where our world is going. Using a camera and face-tracking software, a poster in a Berlin bus shelter changed its content this year based on whether or not people were paying attention to it. Look away and the graphics change in your peripheral. The technology is improving all the time. Now it can even identify the sex of a passerby and dynamically change the graphics to match.
- Random Promotions. You’ve heard, of course, of The Peter Principle – people are promoted to their level of incompetence. If you’re good at doing, you get promoted to managing; good at managing, you get promoted to leading. Despite the fact that those three functions require entirely different skills. And, then you’re stuck in that role until you use up all the equity that got you there. A new study found that promoting people entirely random improves the overall efficiency of a firm. So much for merit.
- Printable Batteries. You probably remember Entertainment Weekly running the first video ad in a print publication this year. The technology to print those video ads is surprising accessible. The challenge has been how to power them. The solution is to print batteries too. This year, a research team at the Fraunhofer Research Institution for Electronic Nano Systems revealed a 0.6-millimeter-thick battery.
- Subscription Artists. I love it when social gets all practical. You’ve probably heard of productive crowdsourced business models, like Edison Nation, iStock and Innocentive and do-good ones like Kiva and Microplace. A relatively new player in the field offers the best of both – it’s Kickstarter. It offers artists a chance to put together business plans and engage subscribers or funders to pay for it. For perhaps the first time, an artist can quickly answer a nagging question: Does anyone actually want my art badly enough to pay for it?
6
Jan 10
Octium by Jaime Hayon
This new interior for Octium in Kuwait is a beautiful example of a decorative modernism that also succeeds in evoking the memory of Tiffany’s in the breakfast-based movie from back in the day; all without stepping over the line into comical kitsch.
The interior design is the baby of no less a creative mind than Jaime Hayon, whose fantastic and almost clownish projects have been undermining the classical understanding of design for years now. In this case, he had a true stroke of genius: In the positive sense, and without shying kitsch or opulent colors and shapes, he has created a fairy-tale-like location where the only thing that is meant seriously is possibly the price-tag on the wares.
