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Yesterday, Joe Biden praised Steve Jobs with a simple line: he democratised technology. He did, but he did so in a very specific way.

While writing an article on Google and Apple for Intelligent Life, I knew little about design. So I called someone who did, my former colleague Cliff Kuang, now the editor of Fast Company's award-winning design blog. He put Apple's great achievement better than anyone I've heard, and so I paraphrase it here: it used to be that when you got a computer or a gadget, you had to read a long manual or spend forever fiddling with it to learn how to use it. One person in the family might take the time to do so, and then spend the rest of the Christmas holiday teaching everyone else how to do the things they wanted to do. 

Apple changed all that. Take the iPad: an extremely expensive bit of high-tech kit, it comes with no instruction manual. You open a luxuriously thick cardboard box and behold what looks like a piece of art. What next? You press the one big button on the front. The iPad jumps to life and starts setting itself up to work for you. Then you start playing with it. How many people have ever downloaded, printed or read a bit of the instruction manual? After using an iPhone, there are few things more complicated than figuring out how to work a Blackberry.    read more »

Industrial art is thriving. The shortlist has just been announced for a new pylon design in Britain, a government-sponsored competition run by the Royal Institute of British Architects. The finalists have all come up with possible replacements to the 1927 construction of Sir Reginald Blomfeld, which continues to march across the landscape barely changed (except a little taller). The winner is announced on October 5th and National Grid, the company that runs the electricity network, will consider whether to use that design in the future. 

There are some interesting structures in the mix: one is a painted, lattice cylinder; another has slivers of steel pointing up to the sun. Others seem to perform the function—there is a Y-shaped offering, for example—albeit with a less striking form. 

My personal favourite in design terms, though, is a pylon that didn’t make this list but won the 2010 Boston Society of Architects Unbuilt Architecture award. Called “The Land of Giants” (below), it features huge lattice men who look as though they’re carrying the wires across the landscape. It was designed by Choi+Shine Architects, and the images on the firm’s site are simply stunning. A feasibility study was under way in Iceland to see if the figures could be used, but when things got a little tricky in the Icelandic economy in 2010, the project was put on hold. It’s unlikely to thaw any time soon.   read more »

You build yourself one of these.

The buzzwords in design these days are "economic" and "ecological". Throw in "functional", "biodegradable" and assembly lines that "reinforce values of integration and respect" and you have a recipe for an object destined to appeal to today's guilt-ridden, penny-pinching yet acquisitive and aesthetically minded consumer.

So it was with some eagerness that I clicked on the image attachment of an e-mail press release for the Bold cHair by Sanserif Creatius, a small design firm based in Valencia, Spain. Created entirely of biodegradable corrugated cardboard (without screws and wedges) in "special employment centres" where labourers surely whistle while they work, the chair sounded so promising.

But tell me, dear reader, what do you make of this? I'm all for a bit of insouciance mixed with my environmentalism, but would it go with the rug?

This chair and the rest of the firm's hairy series will be on view in the "My cHair needs a haircut exhibition" at Arquitécnica Gallery in Valencia from September 16th to October 12th

Natalie Jeremijenko, an artist and engineer, is not constrained by what exists. Rather, she is solely interested in what should exist. On a small scale this applies to things such as words and titles (professionally she prefers to be called a "thingker"—her own linguistic invention). Among her weightier concerns, she hopes to transform personal aviation from an environmental blight to an ecologically productive exploit. The latter lies at the heart of Jeremijenko’s latest project, xAirport, an installation that proved to be a highlight of this year’s 01SJ Biennial in San Jose, California, over the weekend.

The project took place on a strip of wetland designed for landing recreational sport aircraft (ie, a "wetlanding" strip). Visitors had the chance to earn their own “pilot’s license” (via a multiple-choice test administered throughout the weekend), design their own 16-foot-wide set of wings and “test drive” the strip on a 21-foot high zip-line mounted above the wetland (“high enough to be thrilling, but not high enough to be really dangerous,” says Jeremijenko). The point was to both explore the possibility of environmentally friendly flight infrastructure and to remind us of the wonder of flight—something that has otherwise succumbed to the drudgery of commercial aviation, "where you surrender your tweezers and get padded down and lose all civil liberties and chew on expensive peanuts,” observes Jeremijenko.  read more »

Neither Marseille, where he was born, nor Paris, where he worked for most of his life and died in 1983, appears to be marking the centenary of Roger Excoffon, born September 7th 1910. No exhibition, no monograph, no conference.

Still, if the name of this anglophile dandy is not familiar, his work is. Excoffon was at the height of his powers in the 1950s and 1960s, those years which—despite the ignominy of Dien Bien Phu, despite the tragic chaos of Algeria—France insists on calling Les Trente Glorieuses: the era of its rush into a peculiar, mid-Atlantic modernism whose most enduring symbols are the films of Melville, the Citroën DS and Excoffon’s Mistral typeface.

It is now 36 years since the last DS was made and sightings are scarce. Mistral, however, is still ubiquitous: on French garages, outside village hairdressers, on plumbers’ vans;  on bistros in Bexhill and tandoori joints in Bromley; on the covers of Australian sporting annuals; on Pentel Tradio pens. Ingeniously based on its maker’s handwriting, it is the most informal and eccentric of scripts: this is typography as art, genuinely popular and heartening. 

~ JONATHAN MEADES

When Peter Fiell talks about design, he speaks on a first-name basis: Karim (Rashid), Ross (Lovegrove ) and Zaha (Hadid). It’s like name-dropping Marty, Woody and Quentin while discussing the future of film. He and his wife and business partner, Charlotte Fiell, recently ended their 15-year tenure as heads of the design branch of Taschen, an illustrated book publisher, in order to start their own publishing house, called Fiell. To hear them tell it, they are paving the way for their own publishing revolution—bringing innovative, democratic design books to the people—and doing it all under a modernist flag.

This August will see the release of their magnum opus, "Tools For Living: A Sourcebook of Iconic Designs for the Home", a 760+ page book about excellence in domestic design. More Intelligent Life met with the husband-wife team in their London home office to find out why they chose to cut ties with the publishing establishment.

More Intelligent Life: One of Fiell’s self-proclaimed goals is to have “broad appeal”. But for many, design books are quite niche. How do you reconcile that?  read more »

Tobias Wong, a New York-based artist and designer, was found dead in his apartment over the weekend. This is a loss: at 35, he had already produced a body of work rich with nose-thumbing cleverness. As Alexandra Marshall writes over at the New York Times's T-Magazine blog:

Wong was a soft-spoken and gentle presence, but his satirical, cheeky work contained an undercurrent of violence. Bullet Proof Rose, featured in The Museum of Modern Art’s 2005 exhibition “SAFE: Design Takes on Risk,” is a flower-shaped brooch made of Kevlar. His “Aalto Door Stop” is a cement block cast from one of Alvar Aalto’s Savoy vases; its construction process requires the shattering of the vase to extract the piece inside. For another diamond project (Wong loved to subvert their conventional glamour), he set brilliant-cut, solitaire stones backwards into pronged engagement ring-style settings to form glittering, dangerous spikes.

He was also playful and ready with punchlines, as with one of our favourite designs, smoking mittens: 

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In the realm of industrial design, Dieter Rams is Yoda. The foundations were laid during a 40-year tenure as design director of Braun, a German electronics manufacturer. Rams helped to usher a functional modernist agenda into households the world over.

Elevating audio speakers from the carpet and removing the record player from its heavy wooden tomb, Rams ignited a design revolution with a philosophy of “less but better”. He took a functional and aesthetically streamlined approach to everything from alarm clocks to cigarette lighters, and then to arm chairs and shelving units while at Vitsoe, an international furniture manufacturer.

His Ten Principles of Design are routinely referred to as “commandments” in the field. Designers such as Jonathan Ive, Jasper Morrison and Naoto Fukasawa hew closely to Rams's precepts, such as “design is consequent to the last detail” and “design is as little design as possible.”  read more »

"Slash: Paper Under the Knife", a new exhibition at New York's Museum of Art and Design (MAD), showcases work by artists who manipulate paper in unexpected ways. Its title feels provocative, daring viewers to understand paper as a profoundly mutable material–not just a two-dimensional plane to be used in the service of some other vision. This paper is an end in itself.  read more »