Industry Scavanger Hunt

Yesterday we went on an Industry Scavenger Hunt in Farringdon. The point of this hunt was to get us thinking about other ways of finding design studios around London rather than just googling them. So we were given a task to find three design studios, then take an interview from a designer, get a business card from another one and take photos of one of the studios. We were put into groups of threes.

The IDEO Studio

In the beginning of the hunt, we found the IDEO studio, and asked at the reception if we could meet one of their designers and have a chat for five minutes, luckily they weren't busy at that time, so we met their Industrial Designer, I forgot to note his name down. We talked to him about what he studied and how he got into IDEO and how he finds working there. He was very nice and friendly and gave us answers to all our questions. What we found out from him was that he graduated in Industrial design from Central Saint Martins and straight after his degree he got and internship at IDEO in July 2007, and then was kept on permanent and has been working there since then. He told us that at IDEO they like to have T shape designers, it means that they like people who are good at two things at a time, one their own specialization and an extra thing on top of that, like he is an industrial designer there which is the stem of T and the top (extra thing) is the graphic designer. Here are a few photos we took at the IDEO studio.

This is our group looking at the small exhibition corner in the studio.

This is the phone designed by IDEO.

The first laptop design by IDEO and also I was quite surprised to see these white kitchen accessories were designed by them too as I bought all of them a few days ago as I loved their distinctive style, the ones I bought were in bright colours.

Pictures of some more stuff designed by them.

Visit to the GREY Studio

So for our second task, we found this really nice studio in Farringdon. I quite liked the interior of the whole studio, it was very well designed and had a contemporary feel and look to it. So it was a rather good hunt for our second task which was to take photos of a design studio.

This is the picture of their reception area.

The display wall for different stuff designed by them.

The 3rd Task

The third task which was to get a business card from a designer, sounded like the easiest one, but came out to be the most difficult one, as by the time we had finished the first two tasks, it was about lunchtime and we couldn't find any more designers. So we kind of cheated a bit and took a business card from a printers shop.

So it was quite a fun day and a really good experience on the whole.

If You Could Exhibition

On Friday, we went to see the If You Could Collaborate exhibition, which is the fourth annual If You Could exhibition. The aim of the exhibition is to provide a platform for the finest creatives from all over the world to question their conventional working methods and outcomes. The contributors had been challenged to produce something a little unexpected, by working with a partner of their choosing from any discipline, profession or background. There was no brief to answer, or format to honour – the only limit was the enterprise and imagination of the artists involved, and a liberal 12 month deadline. There was some really nice stuff at the exhibition, I particularly liked these numbers designed by George Hardie, Leonardo Sonnoli & Sara Fanelli. Working with well known children’s illustrator Sara Fanelli and highly regarded graphic designer Leonardo Sonnoli, the trio have used their time to play a game of consequences with numerals.
Visit the website to see other interesting stuff http://www.ifyoucould.co.uk/collaborate.

Maharaja Exhibition

I went to the see the Maharaja exhibition at the V&A. The exhibition explored the extraordinarily rich culture of the Maharajas (great kings). I really liked the exhibition but it's a shame that taking photos wasn't allowed within the exhibition, so I couldn't take any photos. I did buy a booklet of postcards, here are the scans of a few of them.

Ankus (detail)

Elephant goad

Gold with colourless saphires and enamel

Jaipur, around 1870

Golden Thorne of Ranjit Singh

Hafiz Muhammed Multani

Wood and resin with embossed gold

Lahor, about 1820

Canopy (detail)

Pearls, rubies, emeralds and diamonds

on deerskin and silk

Baroda, 1865

Comissioned by Maharaja Khanderao Gaekwad

of Baroda

Private Collection

Rolls-Royce Phantom 1 with 'Hunting' coachwork

Made by Hooper

England, 1927

Specified and ordered by His Highness

the Maharana of Udaipur, shipped to India in 1927

Reproduced by kind permission of Christopher van Essen

For more information about the exhibition visit http://www.vam.ac.uk/microsites/maharaja/

Networking Project

Today we were given the project brief for the first half of the term. The title of the project is Networking, which is an ideas based self promotion project. The main purpose of this project is to get us thinking as professionals, considering our peers and the design industry. For the project, the whole Networking group was divided into sub-groups of 4s. In our group, it's me, of course, then its Anna Maria, Matt Bolton and Konrad Bednarski. So we introduced ourselves to each other today, and tried to come up with unique ideas to promote ourselves, what we came up with today was to do something related to charity for Haiti and send some 10 clients broken bricks with our blog name spray painted on it. Now I am going to do some research into current collaborative groups and events and try to come up with some more ideas for our group meeting on Thursday.

Decode, Tree 2005

Above are the photos of another interactive installation by Simon Heijdens who often explores the themes of nature and technology in his work, which he displays in urban environments. The branches of the tree blew in response to the wind outside the museum. As you approached the tree, its leaves shed and gathered on floor. They moved as visitors walked among them.
Check the website out at http://www.simonheijdens.com/, there is some really interesting stuff in there.

Decode, Light Rain 2007

Above is the video of an exhibit called Light Rain by a Japanese group named Wow. This was one of my favourite exhibits in the exhibition and I quite enjoyed kind of interacting with it. In Light Rain as you can see in the video activated as someone moved in front of the projection, the responsive graphics triggered by shadows cast on the projection surface. These shadows were detected and movements were integrated into the animations.

Check their website out at http://www.wowlab.net/

Decode, Swarm Draw 2009

Above is the video of an animation by Joshua Davis called Swarm Draw. Davis was one of the first web designers to work with open-source Flash programming. Adobe Flash is a programme that allows designers to create interactive and animated web-pages. Davis has created Swarm Draw within the Hype framework, a network that supports non-specialists programming in Flash.

Check some more of his work out at http://www.joshuadavis.com