Tabla de contenidos para September - October 2019 en Frame

Journals are alive. They quite literally report on the developments du jour. We live in a time in which changes take place at breakneck speed. This applies to the industry – spatial design – as well as to the way information about the industry is collected and shared. A medium as popular among designers as Pinterest has only been around for ten years; the possibly even more attractive Instagram had its big breakthrough less than five years ago. These image-based platforms allow both professionals and amateurs to immerse themselves daily in a never-ending stream of kitchens, bedrooms and living rooms as well as offices, shops and hotels. But what does it mean, this avalanche of pink, flashy and resin-packed projects? Why are they mediagenic at this particular moment in time?…

The Fabricant auctions the first item of virtual ‘haute-couture’ for $9,500; Carlings launches a collection that customers can pay to be edited onto a photo of themselves, which sells out in a week; Nike releases two pairs of limited-edition Jordans for your Fortnite avatar to wear. Over the last 12 months, fashion has gone digital in a big way. Is there any way for ailing brick-and-mortar retailers to take advantage of this enthusiasm for the intangible? Selfridges certainly believes so. Its AW19 campaign – The New Order – is a thinly veiled response to its customers’ increasing pixel fixation. ‘The digital realm has shifted the limits of fashion – we’re no longer constrained by what is humanly or materially possible,’ says Selfridges head of creative Emma Kidd. ‘Our new » digital…

After graduating from the interior-design programme at Konkuk University in 2013, Seoul natives Kee Min Park and Jin Ho Jung initially went their separate ways. Park founded his own studio, while Jung joined a company called Base to learn more about the design process within the ranks of an established firm. Despite working separately, they kept in touch during that time, each becoming the other’s sounding board. It was during those conversations that Park and Jung realized just how aligned their design philosophies were, prompting them to team up as Labotory in 2016. Since then, the studio has populated its portfolio not with mere spaces but with what it calls ‘brand experiences’. The designers think of brands as human beings – ‘as people we want to understand on an intimate…

01 DON’T GO IT ALONE While it may seem to make sense to give one staff member – or even one team – ownership of social media, bringing in a broader range of staff will ensure quality and give a more accurate impression of a company’s ethos. 02 CONSIDER THE INTERNAL BENEFITS That’s particularly key if you’re also using the platform to reflect and reinforce your company culture, a benefit of Instagram that many firms fail to take into account. Always celebrate employee achievements alongside the practice’s. 03 PLAY TO THE MEDIUM That doesn’t mean lowering the bar in terms of image selection, however. And if the picture alone isn’t carrying the message, then it isn’t working. 04 TRACKING IS ESSENTIAL Running an effective social strategy is a process of…

VALENCIA Nostalgia strikes again: as digital communication has become omnipresent in the industrialized world, the notepad is making a comeback – sales of Moleskines, for example, have tripled in the past decade. In Spain, heritage player Cuadernos Rubio is betting on the pull of penmanship by opening its first flagship store in its hometown of Valencia. Founded by a schoolteacher in 1956, the company specializes in calligraphy and math-friendly notebooks for children, but later expanded to add lifestyle notebooks for adults. With this new physical expansion, the Rubio team had an intriguing request for spatial designers Masquespacio. ‘They wanted this new store to bring together the past and present of the publishing house,’ explains Ana Milena Hernández. In markets such as the UK, the 16 to 24 age bracket is…

She goes by the name Shoplifter. No, the New York-based Icelandic artist didn’t steal the first set of hair extensions that initiated a lifelong love affair with the medium. The pseudonym is an acquaintance’s misinterpretation of Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir’s distinctly Icelandic forename. ‘Shoplifter stuck,’ she says. ‘I never worried about having a signature medium and I didn’t want an artist name. Be careful what you wish for.’ Set on embracing New York City’s cultural melting pot and vibrancy, Arnardóttir relocated to the Big Apple in 1994 and received her Master’s degree from the School of Visual Arts two years later. ‘I wanted more punk, more exposure to pop culture and electric energy than I could find in Iceland.’ With recent projects that include the Icelandic pavilion at the Venice Art Biennale,…

Our contemplation of mortality is perhaps at its most stark under fluorescent strip lighting, seated on an antimicrobial vinyl chair. There’s nowhere to hide from the resonance of worried thoughts as they are amplified and reverberated between windowless, wipe-clean walls. In the greige, blue and white imagination of the conventional clinic, time itself seems to slow down, the universal presence of old magazines signalling only stasis. The post-war provision of mass health care required radical industrial efficiency to meet society’s demand for swift and safe delivery of such services. The spartan, streamlined and generally nondescript design of clinical settings helped normalize the idea of the ‘body as machine’ – a cog in the system. Accordingly, recognition of humans as organic, feeling beings relied solely on the social skills of health…

PEOPLE What Nike refers to as ‘unleashing human potential’ includes attracting and developing an increasingly diverse, engaged and healthy workforce, as well as investing in communities PROCESSES Alongside supporting the needs of workers both in and outside its factories, the apparel brand is moving towards sourcing 100% from sustainable manufacturers ENVIRONMENT In addition to investing in renewable energy, Nike will increase sustainable materials in footwear and apparel, and eliminate footwear manufacturing waste to landfill or incineration. Other areas of focus include reducing water use and substituting hazardous chemicals for safer ones…

WILKHAHN INTRA Adapting synchronously to user movements and weight, the Intra conference chair, designed by Phoenix Design for Wilkhahn, is a dynamic seating option for workplace settings. The agile model, with its high backrest, complements a range that already offers compact and medium-height backrests. wilkhahn.com GENESIS MANNEQUINS ELEGANT DISPLAYS Looking for a way to spruce up your shop? According to German mannequin manufacturers Genesis, a complete form isn’t always necessary for compelling product presentation: its range of floating torsos and limbs promotes flexible staging for visual merchandizers and store planners in compact or expansive retail settings.  genesis-display.com MATTIAZZI FRONDA For Italian company Mattiazzi, Industrial Facility – the London studio of designers Sam Hecht and Kim Colin – created Fronda, a clever seat that incorporates a shelf for items. Made of…

A decade ago, Indian homes were in a form of post-colonial, post-socialist limbo: design was functional, furniture was heirloom, and pale colours were unthinkable in a country so prone to dust. I remember a time when almost every friend’s home I visited seemed to have a cabinet dedicated to showcasing a mismatched array of china figurines and glass ornaments, the standard attempt to create aesthetic value. It’s been some time now since one has crossed my path. ‘There’s been a shift in the mindset,’ interior designer Rukmini Ray Kadam explains to me. Kadam’s social feeds embody contemporary Indian design in all its characteristics: an affinity for whites, pops of paisley, house plants on bookshelves, and the occasional colonial antique. ‘People are spending a lot more and the idea that “this…

06:00 GIORGIA LUPI: I wake up pretty early and start thinking about work straight away. It’s a force of habit, from spending the last seven years in New York communicating with my team at Accurat, the company I cofounded back in Italy. By the time I woke up here, 40 people over there had already been working for six hours. Since joining Pentagram earlier this year things are slightly more relaxed. I try to not open my emails for at least 15 minutes, and never while I’m still in bed. I also often try to squeeze in either a yoga class or a walk before I get to work, so there’s a bit of a buffer. 09:00 Once I get to the office, as you can imagine, my days vary.…

TINA NORDEN: Design has always been part of my life. My father was a landscape architect and from when I was very little he would take me along to sites that he was working on. I’m not particularly green-fingered, but I realized from a young age that you could make a living through design – and doing something you love. He died of cancer at the same age I am now – a brutal experience, but one that made me very independent. My first intention was to become a diplomat, not an architect, as I loved foreign cultures and languages. That seems to be at complete odds with design, but I discovered very soon that there are, in fact, many similarities. As designers we have to act as the connecting…

There’s something slightly off about Marina Abramović’s avatar in Rising, her first virtual work of art, on display during the 2019 Venice Biennale. The face that launched a thousand MoMA seatings is almost pristinely replicated in the stand-in, but the body belongs to a previous, slimmer iteration of the Serbian artist. This glitch is too calculated to be a technical deficiency. It seems that even an agelessly sensual woman, one whose well-known modus operandi is to humbly use her corporeality as a messenger, has body issues. Outside the climate catastrophe scenario Rising depicted, I stood in a small open corner, with about one metre’s worth of manoeuvring room, putting on my VR goggles. Aware that her work often elicits knee-jerk reactions, I asked the male attendant to leave the room…

CHINA’s very recent history has seen the rapid rise of both Western desserts and dairy consumption. Between 2003 and 2016, China’s bakery industry reportedly averaged 20 per cent growth, and the country is predicted to become the largest producer and consumer of baked goods (source: Global Times). Dairy consumption is similarly ballooning. Euromonitor International announced that annual dairy product sales in China are predicted to grow 16.8 per cent to 480 billion yuan by 2023, while an article in The Guardian revealed that the average person’s intake has catapulted from ‘barely drinking milk at all to consuming about 30 kg of dairy produce a year’. Let’s put it this way: if it’s got butter, it’s better. Or, in the words of architect and KCA founder Kostas Chatzigiannis: ‘The dairy industry…

SEOUL Offering unique pieces not available online, the new flagship store of cult Korean fashion brand Juun.J is darkly triangular, with a shadowy interior, a coffee shop called Felt, and a surreal garden featuring a floating tree. The shop, designed by Seoul-based office WGNB, sets out to translate the signature style of designer Jung Wook-jun – acclaimed for his radical layering techniques and sculptural silhouettes – into a mysterious space located in Dosan Park, the hippest part of Gangnam. Perhaps surprisingly, it is electronics giant Samsung, owner of Juun.J since 2012, that is picking up the bill. Earlier, it had sponsored the fledgling brand via its fashion fund. According to the Juun.J team, Samsung might not be well-known for its fashion division, but it has always focused on the keywords…

Like human skin, the architectural and interior finishes wrapping our environments become the largest organ of design – a porous, layered interface between our senses and our spaces. As if to demonstrate this, Italian ceramics brand Ariostea’s latest tile collection blends organic looks with high technology to create nuanced but powerful environments. Ultra is a collection of maxi-size porcelain slabs that are only 6 mm thick, but reach dimensions of 300 x 150 cm and 300 x 100 cm. The slabs come in marble, stone and cement looks and 72 colourways, allowing designers to both dress larger spaces with their slender 4.5-m2 surfaces and give them more material and more applications by which to turn their imaginations into reality. This strength of character and expressiveness of Ariostea’s Ultra are now…

HEALTH AND SUSTAINABILITY The Swedish furniture giant wants to ‘inspire and enable more than 1 billion people to live a better everyday life within the limits of the planet’ CIRCULARITY While Ikea obviously wants to grow, it aims to become climate positive and regenerate resources in the process EQUALITY Ikea is taking a broad view on social impact, seeking to positively impact everyone across its value chain…

15 potted plants are supported by the 19” Living Rack: Garden – varieties such as the bamboo palm and peace lily were chosen for their air-cleaning properties 4 elements make up the Cloud of Cards kit: physical objects, smart objects, digital codes and programming libraries 49 parts make up the 19” Living Rack: Garden 36 months was the duration of the design research 3 variants of 19” Living Rack are offered: Office, Home and Garden, designed by Léa Pereyre at ÉCAL 257 elements are needed for assembly, some of which require preliminary CNC cutting 192 TB of storage can be mounted The kit was developed as part of design research led by Patrick Keller for ÉCAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne, in collaboration with Nicolas Nova for HEAD – Genève…

Less than five years since The New York Times pronounced midcentury modern design passé, a nostalgia trip for the Space Age has landed in the city. It seems only yesterday that the Memphis revival had hit its peak in the wake of the mid-century backlash. Now, as the allure of the squiggle subsides, the pendulum swings back again. But much has changed in those few years, and in 2019 a backward glance no longer reads as innocent. Design holds a mirror up to society, and principles of taste can act to hide the politics of distaste. In July, several arts institutions in New York mounted exhibitions to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the moon landing by NASA’s Apollo 11 – a scientific triumph for mankind (if a problematic Cold…

1974 Born in Hamburg, Germany 1994 Studies architecture at University of Westminster 1997 Joins Conran and Partners for a year-out placement 1998 Studies for an MA in Architecture and Interior Design at the Royal College of Art under Nigel Coates and David Adjaye 2000 Joins Conran and Partners on a fulltime basis 2002 Works alongside Sir Terence Conran on landmark hospitality projects including Skylon restaurant in the Royal Festival Hall 2003 Completes the Roppongi Hills Club, Tokyo, her first of many projects in Asia 2015 Completes the multi-award-winning German Gymnasium project in King’s Cross for D+D – Conran and Partners’ 100th restaurant project 2018 Appointed partner at Conran and Partners 2019 Working with Hyatt Asia Pacific on two new Park Hyatt projects in Jakarta and Auckland…

01 One of the biggest players in the cinema space – iMax – announced at the end of last year that it was closing the final three of the seven VR centres it had opened globally since 2017. The end of VR outside the home? No. Rather, the end of thinking that VR experiences can be shoehorned into existing multiplexes and adopt the same dark-grey, box-room aesthetic familiar to chain cinemas. 02 When start-ups enter the location-based entertainment (LBE) section of the VR market, they thrive. The Venture Reality Fund, a venture capital firm that tracks the industry, reports that LBE was one of the key drivers of investment in VR last year, while Hong Kong-based LBE company Sandbox VR raised $68 million at the start of 2019. 03 The…

NEW YORK CITY If you were to play word association with the Ace Hotel brand, you’d perhaps come up with terms like ‘hip’ (still remarkably accurate), ‘busy’ (often), ‘noisy’ (invariably), and ‘party’ (arguably the Ace mission statement). Few hospitality chains have influenced the sector as much as Ace, which quickly redefined the lobby as a social breakwater between transient guests and the local community. Soon every new boutique hotel had to have a lobby bar-cum-co-working space. It’s notable, then, that the one word that seems to keep surfacing in conversation about Ace’s new spinoff – Sister City – is quite so diametrically opposed: ‘sanctuary.’ It’s also notable that, in a period in which New York has seen an unprecedented number of new hotel openings, some from major marques and under…

We live in confounding consumer times. E-commerce has opened up a new frontier of acquisition, with endless products scrolling in front of our eyes like multicoloured sweets in a vast digital candy store. The real-world impact of our online actions has become increasingly opaque, leaving many of us unsure of how to make sustainable decisions. But might shopping in real life offer the answer? Here we dissect six innovative in-store solutions. The need to address environmental issues in retail is no longer up for debate – the briefest of Google searches will pull up endless studies pointing to 70 per cent of consumers agreeing that packaging has a strong influence on purchasing decisions (courtesy of Ipsos Mori) or 91 per cent of UK shoppers wanting to see entirely plastic-free aisles…

WATER AND ENERGY With the help of new technologies and practices, Starbucks believes its next-gen establishments can deliver 30% water savings and 25% avoided energy. The brand will also power stores with 100% renewable energy through investments in country-specific solar and wind projects IN-STORE EXPERIENCE New Starbucks stores will promote wellness for staff and customers by addressing lighting, temperature, air quality and noise MATERIALS All materials and products for stores will be responsibly and sustainably sourced WASTE Stores will be designed and operated with waste reduction in mind ENGAGEMENT Starbucks wants to ‘inspire a culture of sustainability’ by educating its employees about environmental issues and encouraging them to engage in sustainable practices…

MAKE TEACHING TRANSPARENT Rather than using temporary or back-of-house areas, place learning spaces at the centre of properties to peak consumers’ interest in your sustainability programme. REIMAGINE MERCHANDIZING METRICS Consider how concepts such as rental, repair and modular design will require merchandizers to start communicating products as open and evolving systems rather than finite objects. CREATE A THEATRE FOR REUSE Consumers love to watch material and manufacturing processes, so capitalize on the spectacle by situating recycling schemes in-store. UNPACK YOUR ADVANTAGE Develop display systems and media overlays that can carry displaced product info in order to help physical retailers – especially in the FMCG sectors – reduce or entirely eliminate packaging. QUESTION CONVENIENCE Encourage shoppers to slow down and consume in-store rather than grab-and-go as it makes it easier to…