Related Stories
01.30.20
Shopping
If You’re Looking for a New Set of Flatware, Your Search Stops Here
When I first set out to do this story, it was purely for selfish reasons: I was looking to replace a now out-of-stock Ikea flatware set (with bizarrely tiny forks) that I'd purchased as a cheap placeholder years ago. Why not share the results of my search? For fun, I polled some design friends on Instagram and that's when the floodgates opened. You guys. I had no idea people had so many opinions about flatware.
06.08.12
Sighted
Tools for Everyday Life, by the Designers in Residence at Northumbria University
It seems ironic that the design school at Northumbria University's two most famous graduates would be Max Lamb and Jonathan Ive. At one end of the spectrum is Lamb, a designer so consumed with the act of making and the transparency of process that he films himself fabricating each piece from start to finish and posts the results on his website. On the other is Ive, who’s responsible for an object that’s more of a cipher, one that conceals its mechanics within and successfully erases any questions about how the way it works or the context in which it was made. But perhaps the difference between the two designers is as simple as the difference between their concentrations at university: Ive graduated from a Northumbria program known as Design for Industry, which focuses on consumer experience, while Lamb finished a course called Three-Dimensional Design, where the act of making is as paramount as the artifact itself. It’s the latter program that's yielded the Designers in Residence who have exhibited at ICFF, for two years running, a collection of products known as Tools for Everyday Life, and it’s in Lamb’s footsteps that those designers follow.
06.30.18
Saturday Selects
Week of June 25, 2018
A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week — a particularly rough one in America — was, naturally, all about escapism: A visit to the impossibly serene studio of Muller Van Severen (above), a theory on why design's current obsession with "cute," chubby furniture might be a salve for our political and economical troubles, and an incredible art park that has us daydreaming ourselves to New Zealand.