We were at the Singapore Design Festival Hub at City Hall after the Standard Chartered Marathon in the morning. Initiated in 2005 by the DesignSingapore Council, the Singapore Design Festival is a biennial platform to promote design and the design industry in Singapore, create opportunities for networking and exchange of ideas, and enhance Singapore as a vibrant and creative international design city.
At the Utterubbish: A Collection of UseLess Ideas, designs were exhibited on an incredible multi-disciplinary collection of more than 30 international and local designers / presentations. With an entrance fee of SGD$5, the exhibits covered 2,000 sq metres on the 4th floor of the City Hall.
UseLess memorabilia and books from Basheer at the UseLess Shop
Designer cardboard wastepaper baskets going at SGD$12
The theme for the Festival: "Always a Better Way", is inspired by the essence of design-thinking: through design, design challenges itself to find a better solution or alternative. With a theme like this, its easy to fall into the mold of the much talked about "Saving Gaia" global environment designs. There were few designs and concepts that really stood out with an underlining meaning to bring home.
Personally, I liked these:
Mads Hagstrøm - FLOWmarket
The FLOWmarket room which I thought could have better been displayed like a real supermarket with grocery trolleys, shelves and even a cashier
FLOWmarket 'grocery' items which we took to pose with
FLOWmarket was initiated in 2004 and is the working label of danish designer Mads Hagstrøem (b.1976). FLOWmarket works within the field of sustainability, design and commercialism. FLOWmarket has due to its simple and universal form been able to succesfully cross cultural boundries between Europe, US and Asia where it has recieved numerous recognitions.
FLOWmarket is a shop designed to inspire consumers to think, live and consume more holistic. The core of FLOWmarket is the scarcity goods collection where present imbalances from the 3 FLOW dimensions (individual, collective and environmental flow) have been adressed and transformed into physical products. Scarcity goods products in the shape of aesthetically designed (empty) packings with humorous and thought awakening prints that consumers can buy in the venueshops or via the online shop. Further on FLOWmarket collaborate with designers and artists around the globe that fits with our mindset, humour and aestetichs.
Jonathan Harris - We Feel Fine
Jonathan Harris my personal hero. I have noticed and admired his work way back in 2004. He is an artist and storyteller working primarily on the Internet. One part computer science, one part anthropology, and one part visual art, his work seeks to explore and understand the human world through the artifacts people leave behind on the Web.
We Feel Fine is an exploration of human emotion.
Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.
The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine's Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.
The interface to this data is a self-organizing particle system, where each particle represents a single feeling posted by a single individual. The particles' properties – color, size, shape, opacity – indicate the nature of the feeling inside, and any particle can be clicked to reveal the full sentence or photograph it contains. The particles careen wildly around the screen until asked to self-organize along any number of axes, expressing various pictures of human emotion. We Feel Fine paints these pictures in six formal movements titled: Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics, and Mounds.
At its core, We Feel Fine is an artwork authored by everyone. It will grow and change as we grow and change, reflecting what's on our blogs, what's in our hearts, what's in our minds. We hope it makes the world seem a little smaller, and we hope it helps people see beauty in the everyday ups and downs of life.
The We Feel Fine project is still capturing data daily, each experience on the site will be a new refreshing one. It give you a sense of what the world is feeling... He is one of those dudes that makes Flash go WOW!
Harris has made projects about human emotion (wefeelfine.org), human desire (love-lines.org), modern mythology (univese.daylife.com), science (phylotaxis.com), news (tenbyten.org), anonymity (justcurio.us) and language (wordcount.org), and created the world's largest time capsule (timecapsule.yahoo.com), which was translated into 10 languages. He studied computer science at Princeton University, and was awarded a 2004 Fabrica fellowship. The winner of two 2005 Webby Awards, Harris' work has also been recognized by AIGA, Ars Electronica, ID Magazine, and the State of Vermont, has been featured by CNN, BBC, Reuters, NPR, USA Today, Metropolis and Wired, and has been exhibited at Le Centre Pompidou (Paris), and The Museum of Modern Art (New York).
Erik Kessels - do box
I think we really "killed" this exhibit with all the aggressive punches and flying kicks! In some ways I felt bad... but the project is called "do box"
Combine extreme brutality and recycling. do box is a new way to practice Gross Bodily Harm and save the world at the same time. Where conventional punchbags come filled with foam or sand, do invites you to bring a more considered approach to mindless violence. Why not fill your environmentally friendly boxing bag with worn-out shirts, tea-stained cushions or difficult employers? Pound old news- papers into pulp. Karate chop all those plastic bags accumulating under the sink. Transform yourself into a globally aware Chuck Norris with do box.
By the time we had our fill of messing around, we left the room with a couple of boxing bags dangling on 1 or 2 supports.
Other crazy inputs we contributed at the festival:
My Tank design from a couple of pictures and shapes
Some emo dude drew a french fry kid and we decided to rival it with a Wuppet!
The other levels of the Design Festival included the 'Brazilian Design Perspectives' Exhibition and Archifest 2007; Anne felt right at home at this one.
I realised that unless the showcase of architecture is ridiculously outstanding or have a space-age or sci-fi angle to it... I honestly ain't too interested. I ended up spending some time looking through interior design books for my upcoming Chongqing Apartment. Sort of decided on the modern wood look that is both practical and classic.
After many hours walking around the exhibition, Wendy and I decided to chill for some ice-cream after mass at Dome. I still love the outlet at the old SJI, now Singapore Arts Museum. It's never too crowded and has an old charm to the deco. I ordered myself a 3 scoop Gelato Banana Split. It was so satisfying... that was all I had for dinner...
More Singapore Design Festival 2007 Pictures
At the Utterubbish: A Collection of UseLess Ideas, designs were exhibited on an incredible multi-disciplinary collection of more than 30 international and local designers / presentations. With an entrance fee of SGD$5, the exhibits covered 2,000 sq metres on the 4th floor of the City Hall.
UseLess memorabilia and books from Basheer at the UseLess Shop
Designer cardboard wastepaper baskets going at SGD$12
The theme for the Festival: "Always a Better Way", is inspired by the essence of design-thinking: through design, design challenges itself to find a better solution or alternative. With a theme like this, its easy to fall into the mold of the much talked about "Saving Gaia" global environment designs. There were few designs and concepts that really stood out with an underlining meaning to bring home.
Personally, I liked these:
Mads Hagstrøm - FLOWmarket
The FLOWmarket room which I thought could have better been displayed like a real supermarket with grocery trolleys, shelves and even a cashier
FLOWmarket 'grocery' items which we took to pose with
FLOWmarket was initiated in 2004 and is the working label of danish designer Mads Hagstrøem (b.1976). FLOWmarket works within the field of sustainability, design and commercialism. FLOWmarket has due to its simple and universal form been able to succesfully cross cultural boundries between Europe, US and Asia where it has recieved numerous recognitions.
FLOWmarket is a shop designed to inspire consumers to think, live and consume more holistic. The core of FLOWmarket is the scarcity goods collection where present imbalances from the 3 FLOW dimensions (individual, collective and environmental flow) have been adressed and transformed into physical products. Scarcity goods products in the shape of aesthetically designed (empty) packings with humorous and thought awakening prints that consumers can buy in the venueshops or via the online shop. Further on FLOWmarket collaborate with designers and artists around the globe that fits with our mindset, humour and aestetichs.
Jonathan Harris - We Feel Fine
Jonathan Harris my personal hero. I have noticed and admired his work way back in 2004. He is an artist and storyteller working primarily on the Internet. One part computer science, one part anthropology, and one part visual art, his work seeks to explore and understand the human world through the artifacts people leave behind on the Web. We Feel Fine is an exploration of human emotion.
Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.
The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine's Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.
The interface to this data is a self-organizing particle system, where each particle represents a single feeling posted by a single individual. The particles' properties – color, size, shape, opacity – indicate the nature of the feeling inside, and any particle can be clicked to reveal the full sentence or photograph it contains. The particles careen wildly around the screen until asked to self-organize along any number of axes, expressing various pictures of human emotion. We Feel Fine paints these pictures in six formal movements titled: Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics, and Mounds.
At its core, We Feel Fine is an artwork authored by everyone. It will grow and change as we grow and change, reflecting what's on our blogs, what's in our hearts, what's in our minds. We hope it makes the world seem a little smaller, and we hope it helps people see beauty in the everyday ups and downs of life.
The We Feel Fine project is still capturing data daily, each experience on the site will be a new refreshing one. It give you a sense of what the world is feeling... He is one of those dudes that makes Flash go WOW!
Harris has made projects about human emotion (wefeelfine.org), human desire (love-lines.org), modern mythology (univese.daylife.com), science (phylotaxis.com), news (tenbyten.org), anonymity (justcurio.us) and language (wordcount.org), and created the world's largest time capsule (timecapsule.yahoo.com), which was translated into 10 languages. He studied computer science at Princeton University, and was awarded a 2004 Fabrica fellowship. The winner of two 2005 Webby Awards, Harris' work has also been recognized by AIGA, Ars Electronica, ID Magazine, and the State of Vermont, has been featured by CNN, BBC, Reuters, NPR, USA Today, Metropolis and Wired, and has been exhibited at Le Centre Pompidou (Paris), and The Museum of Modern Art (New York).
Erik Kessels - do box
I think we really "killed" this exhibit with all the aggressive punches and flying kicks! In some ways I felt bad... but the project is called "do box"
Combine extreme brutality and recycling. do box is a new way to practice Gross Bodily Harm and save the world at the same time. Where conventional punchbags come filled with foam or sand, do invites you to bring a more considered approach to mindless violence. Why not fill your environmentally friendly boxing bag with worn-out shirts, tea-stained cushions or difficult employers? Pound old news- papers into pulp. Karate chop all those plastic bags accumulating under the sink. Transform yourself into a globally aware Chuck Norris with do box.
By the time we had our fill of messing around, we left the room with a couple of boxing bags dangling on 1 or 2 supports.
Other crazy inputs we contributed at the festival:
My Tank design from a couple of pictures and shapes
Some emo dude drew a french fry kid and we decided to rival it with a Wuppet!
The other levels of the Design Festival included the 'Brazilian Design Perspectives' Exhibition and Archifest 2007; Anne felt right at home at this one.
I realised that unless the showcase of architecture is ridiculously outstanding or have a space-age or sci-fi angle to it... I honestly ain't too interested. I ended up spending some time looking through interior design books for my upcoming Chongqing Apartment. Sort of decided on the modern wood look that is both practical and classic.
After many hours walking around the exhibition, Wendy and I decided to chill for some ice-cream after mass at Dome. I still love the outlet at the old SJI, now Singapore Arts Museum. It's never too crowded and has an old charm to the deco. I ordered myself a 3 scoop Gelato Banana Split. It was so satisfying... that was all I had for dinner...
More Singapore Design Festival 2007 Pictures
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