Don Norman 3 ways good design can make you happy.

Enjoy this. you will struggle not to.

Icon Reviews... 'Design For Life'

Vroom. Here comes Philippe Starck on his motorbike to save British design. We’re in the home of British design, Paris, so it’s more like Vreurm. The 12 contenders on BBC2’s Design for Life applaud rapturously. If this was The Apprentice – the long-running reality show on which Design for Life has been closely modelled – you could imagine the no-nonsense entrepreneur Sir Alan Sugar scowling at this kind of toadying. But this isn’t Sralan, it’s Fleep, and Fleep laps it up.

The contenders have a lot on their plates. One of them will go on to win six months in the Starck design studio. To achieve this, they will have to impress Fleep, possessor of the sprawling, capricious ego of a renaissance princeling. And, as mentioned, they have to save British design, which has had some success in the past, but now there is “nobody really arriv[ing] on the market” says Fleep, casually dismissing a generation. “We can maybe create English style,” he adds, in an anything’s-possible way.

Let the games begin. Two episodes had aired when icon went to press. In the first, the contenders scoured a hypermarché for pairs of objects, and in the second they had to design something that would benefit humanity. Neither round produced anything interesting. Two contestants are eliminated each week, but Starck seems at times to want to rid himself of all of them. Eight now battle on, hopes of a nation on their shoulders.

Starck is magnificent on screen, like some eccentric bright-feathered predator which grips its prey in a death-hug, dissolves it with kisses, and puts the bones on the next Eurostar. The format fans his ego, bringing out his watchable worst. As for the contenders, the BBC is clearly now adept at picking cocky, clueless cutthroats. Film a dozen innocent 20-year-old know-nothings playing party games for an insane Frenchman for days on end, and I’m sure it’s not hard to cobble together six hours of vaguely entertaining footage, even if you have to pad it out with jejune commentary (“Philippe Starck is considered by many to be the bad boy of design”).

The trouble is that The Apprentice didn’t claim that it wanted to reinvigorate British industry. But Design for Life depends on the premise that British design is sick, and Fleep is the cure – otherwise, presumably, the stakes just aren’t high enough. This premise is at least debatable – it could be seen as pretty insulting – and even if it were true, it’s unlikely to be solved by sudden-death hypermarché dashes at the whim of the house of Starck.

SLED COFFEE TABLE AND RUG

A Coffee table that interacts with its Rug, the coffee table is in the shape of a traditional child’s sled and sits neatly into a thick pile rug with two deep groves cut into it, giving the impression of compressed snow under the weight of the skis. Clever.

Pandora's Box

Pandoras box from Michael Flückiger on Vimeo.

Beatles Fow Chart

Felt wine rack by ETCETERA MEDIA

Electric Company plays 'House'

I agree with PitchDesignUnion: Ddelightful old-school collage & cut-paper stop-motion by The Electric Company & Carmen D’Avino. Ella will love this!

Herbert Matter

When Herbert Matter got the job to design a new logo for the New Haven Railroad he literally went through hundreds of sketches before arriving at the final logo.

NHRR logo development from Herbert Matter on Vimeo.

225 Forest by Michael Neumann Architecture

The 225 Forest store is like a pastiche of a skate store. You enter through an open garage door via a ramp to a paradise of roughed up surfaces, reclaimed furniture and wooden crates. It is a carefully orchestrated retail experience that is part shop, part community centre for the area's skating and surfing youths.

The store is located in an old light industry warehouse and all the original features such as strip lighting reflectors have been salvaged for the new space. It is dominated by a platform of stacked plywood that is dotted with product displays and seating created from piles of moving blankets, wrapped together with thick straps. The back wall is made of green, orange and yellow hosepipe, woven around a timber frame.

The only alteration to the structure of the building is a new light shaft which brings the store its only natural daylight. The space below it is used for displaying artworks by the store's artists in residence.

225 Forest's patrons are encouraged to tag the plywood boards attached to sliding rails on the warehouse's exterior walls. When they are full boards will be moved inside to become part of the interior.

London Design Week coming up soon.

Light Drop

By Rafael Morgan.