We Asked 10 Designers to Make Us a Birthday Card — Here Are the Results

For our last bit of 10th anniversary content this week, we followed a tradition set forth on our first and fifth birthdays — asking a select group of designers to make us a "birthday card." This year, without any prompting by us, most of the submissions centered around something we often try to publish on the site — sneak peeks into a designer's practice in the form of as-yet-unpublished designs.

02.05.13

Sighted

Örnsbergsauktionen 2013

When Fredrik Paulsen, Kristoffer Sundin, and Simon Klenell organized an auction for independent design in the basement of their Stockholm studio last year, it was with a bit of trepidation: Would anyone come? Would the pieces sell? Would the Swedish design market, with its thirst for Scandinavian midcentury classics, be open to more unique and sometimes weird works? Apparently the answer was yes on all fronts, for the Ornsbergsauktionen — which was one of our favorite exhibitions of 2012 — is back this year in conjunction with Stockholm Design Week, complete with a gorgeous new graphic identity by Bergen, a sharp new website from Konst & Teknik, and new editions by returning favorites like TAF as well as newbies (and Sight Unseen friends) Gemma Holt, Hilda Hellström, and Silo Studio. In Stockholm, the viewing is open until the night of the auction, February 8, but you can get peek of the goods above (that's Paulsen's stained pine and Valchromat Prism shelf up top) and below, as well as on the auction homepage where pre-bids are being taken.

07.05.11

Sighted

The Making of Tom Price’s Meltdown Chairs on Tales of the Hunt

Sighted on the new design-art documentary website Tales of the Hunt, a video chronicling the making of Tom Price's Meltdown Series, for which the London talent employs inventive heating methods to transform commonplace objects like PVC pipes, polypropylene rope, and even polyester clothing into dramatic chairs and tables. The site itself is the creation of the precocious young Belgian design-art dealer Victor Hunt, whose interests lie particularly in objects that are created by hand using highly experimental processes; his collection contains not only finished products but prototypes, failures, and abandoned one-offs that further highlight those processes. It was only natural that Hunt would launch a video series dedicated to showing his clients and the design-art world at large the stories behind the works he supports, and likewise that Sight Unseen would want to become a partner in the endeavor. From time to time we'll share with you new videos posted on the site, starting with Price's. Watch it after the jump, then head to Tales from the Hunt to view the other offerings so far, including a behind-the-scenes look at how Maarten de Ceulaer's Balloon Bowls are created.

09.17.10

What It's Like

To Make 30 Objects in 30 Days, by Dominic Wilcox

If London designer Dominic Wilcox's illustrated blog Variations on Normal is like a comic diary of conceptual one-liners, it's also filled with ideas that often seem too good to be true — what if we really could buy a device to remind us of people's names in awkward social situations? And who doesn't need a little "hill-walking easyfication" sometimes, even if wedge-shaped strap-on shoe platforms aren't exactly a commercially viable product? So when Wilcox was invited to participate in this year's Anti-Design Festival at London Design Week, as part of an exhibition called "Mistakes and Manifestos," he set himself a challenge: to execute one creative project per day for 30 days, with a budget of 10 pounds per day, in effect testing his ability to bring his idea-generation skills off of a sketchpad and into real life. "Speed Creating," as the project is called, documents his attempts to fabricate his cleverest, most fleeting whims — for better or for worse.