temporary

Cardbord-Cathedral-Christchurch-Shigiru-Ban

Transitional church
Plans are announced to build a 25-metre high cathedral constructed with 104 tubes of cardboard. The structure will be a temporary replacement for the iconic stone ChristChurch Cathedral, which was ruined last year in an earthquake 
The Japanese architect, Shigeru Ban, has used cardboard as a material for other temporary buildings, including a "paper church" which is used as a community center after the 1995 Kobe earthquake in Japan.

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/ipad/nz-to-get-cardboard-cathedral/story-fn6s850w-1226328585996

Transient truth

Wiki truth

In her final exam project Kyra van Ineveld visualizes her so called “transient truth” in the shape of four gigantic Wikipedia encyclopedias were she touches upon the topic of the overload of information and the unattainable, never complete answer resulting in a constantly evolving truth.

Wiki Truth is a project in which the designer states that truth isn’t fixed anymore but transient. Quote: ‘The digital Wikipedia is dynamic, the information is created, changed, criticized, deleted and updated every second, we have to decide for ourselves when an answer is complete’.

This transient thruth is made tangible by making a physical encyclopedia that presents the evolution of four major Wikipedia subjects within a certain time slot. On the bottom of the book you read the first sentence that was ever written in this article; and at the top of the book you see the article as it is now. (and by the moment I write it, as it was than).

The encyclopedia is telling the story of transition.

Flexible framework

Das House 2012

The theme of endless transition challenges to actively re-examin basic assumptions about  how space is used and experienced.

The project "Das House" presented by the designers Nipa Doshi and Jonathan Levien,  during the  "Imm Cologne" fair in January, offers a good scenario of  how to make an existing framework more flexible, more dynamic, creating space for improvisation.

Quote “Das Haus is about domestic activity and redefining traditional spaces, structuring the house into functional zones and challenging cliché notions of what is a bedroom, kitchen or bathroom. Every part of the house connects and redefines, intersecting volumes of the kind you might find in industrial buildings to create fragmented spaces. Walls with varying degrees of transparency and frames with mesh-like coverings. A microcosm in which all the spaces are interconnected”

http://www.doshilevien.com/projects/installations

Traces of time

Lex Pott, true colours, detail

With his 'true colours' collection Lex Pott visualizes, in a series of metal plates, the origin of the materials as well as how the material has been manipulated. The product itself communicates the story of the production process.The designer shows a fascination for where things come from and how they are created and states that 'a product gets a deeper meaning by telling a story about the material qualities'. 

The chemical process that that is applied generates controllable randomness, an approach that needs flexibility curiousity and talent for improvisation. The transformed materials communicate the story of the color which is directly linked to the process and therefore becomes genuine, true. 


http://lexpott.nl/

Capture the moment

More and more designers are challenged by the process, material properties or artisinal skills. 

Tim Simpson and Sarah van Gameren from studio Glithero focus in their work on the transition of an object during the production process. Their leitmotif is  “To capture and present the beauty in the moment things are” This quest is superseding the importance of the finished product, they create experiences, the end product becomes the medium, the process the message.

 'A brief moment of happiness' which is being developed in support of the Vauxhall Collective, is a collection of ceramic objects whose decorative surfaces have been captured through the process of blueprinting.


http://www.glithero.com/

Transition

A never ending story

Transition is about the dynamics of change.

There is a growing awareness (uneasyness?) of the increasingly speed in which information is updated and in which things evolve. The  fast expanding amount of available choices results in a need to get more grip. 

There seems to be a connection with the emerging attention for mindfulness courses where the focus is on the experience of the moment, the transition, promoting to exchange our western pro-active approach for a more Asian “being” or “laissé faire” attitude.

In the design world there is a fascination for the ephemeral and the temporal elements of a process, this mentality can be found in projects where the focus is on trying to capture and to archieve the process, to visualize the history of the process within the product itself. A shifting attention from the end result to everything that happens before, visualising the neglected moments. It is a reflective, philisophical approach, slightly linked to the art world.

The new consumer

Excerpts from a paper Philips published in April 2011;  

‘Rethinking value in a changing landscape’

‘The control that business exercised over communication and media channels effectively evaporated. Today there are multitudes of peer-to-peer and group discussions about brands, products, services and solutions over which brands have no control’

'The era of using brand slogans to claim and promote a particular positioning is coming to an end. ......'

'Instead of talking, businesses are being forced to start listening. Finding ways of participating in on-line dialogue requires very different tools, talent and thinking than in traditional top-down brand management practices'