Table of contents for INDESIGN #66 - Care in INDESIGN

You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, and if the eggs are anything to go by, then we’ve made one hell of an omelette! Sure, we’ve had a saucy new makeover (we know, we look totally hot now), but more than that – and from what we’ve all come to learn from every after-school special in existence – it’s what’s inside that counts. We are Indesign. We have always been Indesign and we will continue to love being Indesign. We curate, inspire, challenge, provoke, educate and at times even infuriate; bringing you the world’s most extraordinary design activity, edited for the Asia Pacific region – edited for you. If we’ve chosen it to feature in our ever-so precious and limited pages, you know it’s something worth remembering.…

Based in Reykjavik, Iceland, experimental designer Sruli Recht is no stranger to controversy. Take, for example, the time his Reykjavik studio was raided by police who seized his entire stock of ‘The Umbuster’ – an umbrella with a brass knuckled handle – and charged the designer with importing, manufacturing and intending to sell prohibited weapons, (Recht initially lost the case, but went on to win at the supreme court of Iceland). Or, the ‘Born Out of This’ jacket made from the wool of stillborn lambs that formed part of his first menswear collection in 2011. Perhaps most memorable, is the appropriately-titled Forget Me Knot art project from 2013, for which Recht documented a one-off surgery to remove a 100mm x 10mm strip of skin from his abdomen while he was…

Aah, image. In this Instagram selfie age it seems that to get ahead in this world, we all need to have our own personal brand – one that is unique, quirky and has that little point of difference that separates us from all of the other narcissistic self-obsessed people out there. Since the rise of social media and dating apps, the intentional and very self-conscious art of manipulating our image has become the way we portray (dare I say, sell?) ourselves to the world. The problem is when everyone is striving to be a bit quirky or a little bit unique – how do you actually differentiate between people? The desire to be different or to have that point of difference is so strong on social media platforms that most…

You’d be forgiven for thinking that the all-woman lineup of Ambassadors for Melbourne Indesign 2016, August 12 and 13, is part of a plan by the design and architecture sisterhood. Then again you might think that the fact the all-female ambassadorial domination at MID 2016 rated a mention here is perfect proof of A+D’s continuing patriarchal paradigm. The truth however is more straightforward. It just happened. Or did it? Did we mention that the new and improved Indesign Magazine you now hold in your hands is co-edited by two women and that one of August’s events – its WorkLife panel talks – is all about gender imbalance in the architecture and design industry? Discuss. Anyway, however it transpired… the Ambassador lineup this year for the three precincts – CBD, Collingwood…

With the ability to capture iconic and interesting locations, the pop-up enables designers to create a distinctly local market experience while representing different brands. Consider ice cream brand Häagen-Dazs’ recent pop-up experience, designed by ArchiBlox and located at Melbourne’s Federation Square. Featuring leafy vegetation, hanging plants, plywood custom seating booths and Weathertex external cladding, the modular design aligns with ArchiBlox’s core value of sustainability. The local experience was all about telling a ‘Melbourne’ story: the interiors are sleek and unpretentious using carbon neutral and sustainable products, with the only Häagen-Dazs-branded crimson splashed on the space’s three booths. Bill McCorkell, ArchiBlox’s director adds that the process itself was also uniquely Melbourne: “That’s one of the beauties of doing business in Melbourne; the celebration of collaboration. As a whole the team: the…

“H2O has bridged the divide between technology and human experience by using warming devices like timber, “skin-like” materials and human shapes. The “pink egg” communicates a kind of biologic feel that straddles the man-made and the organic. Inside the egg, the plywood-panelled walls remain raw; each panel was made-to-the-millimetre off site before being individually crafted together by specialists.” “The high-tech operations in Silicon Valley told us exactly what we shouldn’t be doing,” says architect Mark O’Dwyer, director of H20 Architects. “Those centres are quite chaotic. Some of them could easily be taken for sweat shops in some Third World countries.” So when it came to designing Swinburne’s Factory of the Future, O’Dwyer and his colleagues were more inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. The futuristic-style film,…

Ovolo Sydney Architect Hassell Lighting Consultant Medland Metropolis Engineering Consultant Medland Metropolis Graphics There Total Floor Area 100,000 sqm Hassell hassellstudio.com Furniture ‘Seb’ chair, ‘Stanley’ stool, ‘Brandy’ table, ‘Bel’ mirror, ‘Harper’ chair, Jardan. ‘Spike’ stool, Stylecraft. ‘B&B Italia Tifty Time’ sofa, Space Furniture. ‘Eames Classic’ lounge and ottoman, Living Edge. Lighting ‘Periscope’ ball lamp, Atelier Areti. Bedside lamps, Luke Furniture. ‘Topos’ feature wall lamp, Hub Furniture. Bathroom wall lamp, Fat Shack Vintage. Finishes Fabric finishes throughout, Svenska KJ, Kvadrat, At Work with Camira, James Dunlop, JR Group, Gabriel Fabrics. Leather throughout, Contemporary Leathers, Spinneybeck Leathers. Paint and special finishes throughout, Dulux, Wattyl, Axolotl. Metalwork throughout, Astor Metals, Locker Group, Alloy Design. Tiles throughout, Academy Tiles, Bisanna Tiles. Carpet throughout, Godfrey Hirst, Gibbon Group, Birrus Matting. Timber flooring, SE Timber. Cowork|rs…

With the advent of new technologies that makes every camera enthusiast a photography professional, there’s one question we need answered: How do we handle ‘fast photography’? Striking photography can entice a wide range of audiences online, whereas unflattering photography is disappointing all round. “Photography is quite a personal thing,” explains Hamish Guthrie of Hecker Guthrie. “Every office likes to have a way that their projects are represented, and photography is a way that a project is captured for posterity. “More often than not, the way people see a certain project is not through them visiting the space, but through exposure of imagery through a multitude of media,” continues Guthrie. Indeed, the recent funding of viral concept Casa Brutale House, highlights the ways in which eye-catching imagery, whether of completed or…

Subscribe to Indesign and get 5 issues for the price of 4! ($55). Join the global design gang at www.indesignlive.com/subscribe Indesign looks for the point and purpose of everything in design – exploring what we do, how we do it, and why. Indesign is the only place you’ll find conversations on the design industry that is clever, provocative, insightful, and just a bit cheeky. Indesign is for creative professionals – aspiring and established – hungry to continue the ideas that inform the best projects, products and people.…

“Indesign is a professional resource for the design curious. We look for the point and purpose of everything in design and architecture; exploring why, how and what we do. Indesign is the only place you’ll find clever, provocative (and a little bit cheeky) conversation on our industry. Indesign is by and for creative professionals – both aspiring and established – hungry to continue exploring the ideas that inform the best projects, products and icons the world has to offer.” Indesign Media Asia Pacific Chairman/Publisher, Raj Nandan. We INspireWe INviteWe INvestigateWe INformWe INvolveWe INfluenceWe INfuriateWe INvoke thought WE ARE INDESIGNWE LOVE BEING INDESIGNWE ARE FOR EVERYONE IN(TO)DESIGN Are you IN?…

For close to half a century, Japanese designer Issey Miyake has been redefining the relationship between cloth and the body, unconstrained by existing notions of how fashion should frame the human form. He founded Miyake Design Studio (MDS) in Tokyo in 1970, and it was here that he and his team began to explore and develop new ideas for how technology and fashion could work together – particularly through the celebrated Pleats Please collection. Most importantly, he brought those ideas to life. These days, 78-year-old Miyake rarely grants interviews (in a 2011 interview he said: “My brain. It’s tired.” And, in an email interview granted to the New York Times in 2014, his secretary stated that he prefers making things to talking. I did, however, manage to secure a phone…

It’s a very intimate relationship you have with your business partner. It’s a sibling-hood without the blood, though plenty of sweat and tears. Think of the tensions that come into play every day in a business partnership: honesty (when brutally required), trust (always), aligned values and shared drive, understanding of one other’s idiosyncrasies and thought processes, respect and space for the other’s skillsets and opinion. It takes patience, compromise and perspective to be in business with another person. Something you may not know about the kick-ass Swedish design duo, Anna Lindgren and Sofia Lagerkvist of FRONT, is that they’ve been in business together since university; but they don’t actually live in the same country. And yet they have overcome obstacles of geography and time difference to work in a fluid…

“The trick with [Hassell’s approach to the] new Sydney hotel is to bring the inside-out thinking of designing for the workplace to re-imagining how a hotel works to really serve the needs of its guests.” The assumption seems to be that all guests are tourists who are out all day and spend the rest of the time in their rooms. But what of the professional travellers who may not want to work in their room or in the utilitarian ‘business centres’ and who may want to have working meetings with local clients? As team leader Matthew Sheargold reveals, the brief for Sydney’s Ovolo Hotel required only cosmetic renovations of the rooms, so the focus was strongly on the public area at the promenade level. Ovolo, says Sheargold, wanted this space…

“There’s a lot of theory and terminology that’s been developed around workplace [design]. Frankly speaking, I didn’t buy into any of it.” Perhaps one of the stiffest challenges an architect will face during their career is designing their own studio. “There really is nothing harder,” confirms Bruno Mendes, Melbourne-based principal with Woods Bagot (WB). In taking up the mantel of project lead on WB’s new, in-house designed Melbourne studio, Mendes had some clear terms: “I said, ‘If I do this, you’ll leave me alone and I’ll do it.’” The project would be designed and built over a tight period of 2.5 months, and the studio’s staff of 100+ were to be brought in at three vital points during the process: at briefing which involved a studio-wide survey, and for the…

“We didn’t want it to be a white-tile, exposed-timbers look, we wanted to bring the coffee to the front, so we took the distinctive ‘swirl’ effect of café latte, and elaborated the design around that.”Patrick Keane, director, Enter Projects. “The solution itself is striking, both for its aesthetic interest and its functional merit, but equally impressive is the designers’ willingness to engage with the client and put themselves in their shoes, to know what they want and need, even before they do.” A design brief is a mercurial element. On the one hand it can offer a useful, sometimes indispensable guide to understanding a client’s objectives, tastes and resources; on the other, it can become a minefield of vague or contradictory ideas. In particular with abstract or spare briefs, a…

Ever worry that your Facebook page is only 80 per cent awesome? That your Instagram feed is too filtered? Or, not enough? Increasingly disincarnated by digital technology, we’ve become the inadvertent art directors of our own lives. In his seminal 1975 book, Travels in Hyperreality, Italian semiotician Umberto Eco unravelled the manner in which contemporary culture is composed of theatricalisations, recreations – what he famously termed ‘simulacra’. Around the same time, French Marxist theorist, Guy Debord, published La Société du Spectacle. Four decades down the track, we are the spectacles of our own society, hyperreal. With only 140 characters a Tweet, image is king. For architects and designers, communicating a clear message about one’s practice to a distracted audience is problematic but not impossible. Realising they had an image problem,…

The phrase ‘human-centred design’ has, in recent years, become an increasingly popular addition to studio profiles and mission statements. While it certainly sounds like the right thing to say, there’s a resounding lack of clarity around what it actually means. Designing for humans is what architects and designers do after all, so why make it seem like something out of the ordinary? For Sans-Arc Studio founder, Matiya Marovich, this description simply reinforces his belief that the end user is always front-and-centre. And his resulting design approach and process is consciously informed by the way a space is to be occupied. As he explains: “It’s about designing experience into a space; about embodying an experience that’s full of references and a language people understand, whether consciously or subconsciously, so they’re left…

“I like to disrupt the design process. People get really pissed off. But then they learn how to accept the challenge and move it in new directions.” An efficacious self-taught Danish designer, Johannes Torpe is what some would describe as a jack of all trades. From a musician, lighting designer and club owner to furniture designer, restaurant owner and interior designer, he has proven that formal training isn’t a necessary prerequisite to success in the design industry. As the founder of his eponymous global design firm Johannes Torpe Studios, he has worked with an impressive line-up of clients including Hay, Roberto Cavalli, Dolce & Gabbana and Skype, and – up until his exit last year – Bang & Olufsen as creative director. Torpe’s unique childhood has helped to inform his…

We’ve all watched in awe as the Silicon Valley workplace revolution has reconstructed offices into giant daycare centres for adults, with everything from funpark slides to ball pits. But now, young digital natives are hunting out more than just fun in the workplace. In New York, Cowork|rs is a typical example of a company making its mark in that relatively new corner of the sharing economy, known as ‘coworking’. It has recently opened its second location in Brooklyn’s up-and-coming Gowanus Canal area, engaging Leeser Architecture to transform a dilapidated industrial building into a shared work space for multiple companies. “They weren’t quite sure what they wanted,” comments principal Thomas Leeser. “But they were very interested in that old factory look and feel.” While the main fabric of the ex-industrial building…

“We wanted to create an environment for learning and a place where teaching was able to be more fluid and connected to students’ needs,” says Debbie Ryan, who could see that teachers needed to work across a number of rooms in the one learning session and cater for student groups aimed at a particular activity. “It’s important, like science, that students feel a sense of ownership in their school and the specific spaces they gravitate towards,” adds Robert McBride. “Most classrooms are simply square boxes. The mosaic shapes of each learning space allow students to think more laterally, which after all, is what science and the broader learning environment is about.” Though seemingly an abstract concept, the physical elements of design can in fact influence the way spaces are used…

“When we started, we wanted to create a new kind of retail experience, a kind of store that never existed before, that ignored all the pre-conceived notions of how a store should be, that dismissed the established rules of retail, that offered the customer a new and stimulating shopping experience that raised the spirits and excited the senses,”says Dover Street’s Adrian Joffe. The allure of shopping online is obvious – browse boutiques worldwide and have it all delivered to your doorstep at the click of a button. So, it’s hardly surprising that global online retail sales have risen from 10 per cent to more than 50 per cent in just over a decade. There is, however, still something to be said for the real-world shopping experience – the tactility, the…

“It’s really important to have the care factor – we couldn’t do what we do without caring.”Barbara Schmidt, director Zenith Interiors. The design industry (like any industry) simply cannot grow or progress without the care of its leaders. Every sector needs investment; good people with good ideas and even better skills to drive it. How these CEOs, entrepreneurs and experts choose to invest is likely determined by their role in a particular organisation, practice or project, but it’s their collective contribution that leaves a legacy, sets benchmarks and effects greater change aimed at benefitting the market. For global design and consulting firm Woods Bagot, care is manifested in a strong commitment to research and development. The industry giant injects a percentage of its gross income into this area annually, which…

“Many organisations are copy-and-pasting solutions from 20 years ago, from flexible working into a new space, with the assumption that if you have done that, you have done the job. You can change the physical workspace, but if you don’t change the mindset of the organisation, then nothing will really change in terms of outcomes.”Gijs Nooteboom, Australasian director, Velhoen + Company The workplace over recent years has seen a lot of fashion. But that is not to say there has not been genuine change. It is just that as in any other field of human activity there are always the innovators and the imitators. Since Velhoen + Company’s legendary Interpolis project in Holland (1990-95), there has been what many see as a revolution in the workplace with radical changes following…