Surfers

Surfers have remained a bit heroic for me. I wish I could spend my life according to the tides and braving the sea's fury for thrills. Photographer Joni Sternbach has found that the spirit of surfing entered her photography by serendipity. Here are some beautiful shots, almost anthropological in appearance and very soulful.

A short by Johnny Abegg Films of her artist in residence in Byron Bay here

Example of a good design event

At showroom parties I tend to grab the closest drink and find some friends to kill time with whilst I keep an eye on where the free food is coming from. Sad, I know. I usually try to avoid them as much as possible. However, the other night I attended Viaduct Furniture's dinner to flesh out and mull over design and food.

Viaduct's table talk

The agenda for the intimate evening was a charming cast of speakers who talked to us about their views and experience of food and design... or as Viaduct put it "about how great food and design can improve the quality of life. By exploring some of the links between food, creative design, urban regeneration and communities..." My friend James' latest passions and interests seem to find their way into the events calendar for his showroom. In my experience this kind of his personal approach is a rarefied thing in today's design community. The event had a whimsy and intelligence that dodged the typified design events of cocktails and back-slapping.

The evening was linked to the exhibition Show 4 - Food and Chairs Shared, a collaboration with local chefs to come up with menus to go with chairs. Three amazing restaurants participated with some pretty funny meals. I have included some menus in my earlier post.

Back to the dinner... first up to talk to us was Daniel Charny, curator, designer and senior tutor of the Design Products Programme at the RCA, who pondered if design is in a requiem or a renaissance. He reminds us that craftsman's skills are being lost at an alarming rate, even in food production. Reassuringly, he shares some examples that subvert copyrights and manufacturing norms with more an open-source approach to making through DIY-type experimental design. This process is about pulling things apart and experimenting with processes and materials which the aims to take the power away from the large scale manufacturers. This hands-on approach may help create new crafts and skills.

Which leads us into the realm of DIY with the food industry, such as allotments and foraging as talked about by Sam Clark. Can foraging in the city help to increase knowledge of what is local, seasonal and reconnect city dwellers to their community? Watch this if you like some encouragement.

Rebecca Hossack, (gallerist and pioneer of the proposed Noho Square allotments project) and Euan Mills (Planner and Chatsworth Rd visionary) both talked about their bloody-minded determination to save their local borough's trees and community markets. Both these projects were fundamentally linked to bringing communities together through buying, growing, selling or eating food.

Fleet Architect's Jaime and Kerry at Chatsworth Rd Market

Ultimately, design events are all too absent-minded within furniture and interior supply industry and dumbing down is everywhere. Every decision we make as designer has an impact on the environment and quality of life. Encore Viaduct! ...plus some bloody nice babaganoush too!

For more from the dinner listen to Monocle's interviews

Excellent food website 

See Viaducts food & design recommendations, read here.

Cradle to Cradle

I wanna eat this chair...

Viaduct furniture's exhibtion, Show 4 - Food and Chairs Shared. Do we select our dining room furniture to suit our cooking styles? This is the starting point for the latest exhibition at Viaduct, who collaborated with some local chef's in Clerkenwell: Fergus Henderson, St.John; Sam Clark, Moro; Michael Belben, The Eagle. Here are some of my favourites...

SM05 mesh chair from Pastoe by Fergus Hendersen

Like a futuristic oyster, beckoning its diner. Will you become its pearl, or just another bit of grit.

Oysters have a wonderfully minerally  and metallic taste. I recommend licking this chair for heightened sensation (Tabasco optional)

Tom Dixons Peg Chair by Sam Clark

Although growing up in Battersea in the 70s . I would often sneak across the river to Chelsea's glamorous Kings Road. There, one of the many iconic shops was habitat. These chairs reminds me of habitat in that era. And with it the food influences that were many in the street. Most of all asterix gallet house, serving the most delicious gruyere and ham pancakes. Habitat and pancakes were a big part of my early life.

Houdini chair from e15 by Sam Clark

The top half of this chair looks like the most elegant new design for a  barbecue. With a few modifications how beautiful would it look in your garden? Unfortunately without a working prototype I will have to burn the whole chair.  With care and love of course.

Hot smoked Wilde salmon.

Place a lightly salted salmon on a baking tray on the seat of the seat. Drizzle with a little olive oil and cava wine. Cover the whole top of the chair tightly with tinfoil.  When you're ready to eat light a blowtorch and set light to the front lip of the chair. The fish should hot smoke within 15-20 minutes. Remove the tinfoil, wipe off any ash with a damp cloth. Serve hot or at room temperature, with mayonnaise.

Colour & Light Delight

LED lighting is something, as a designer, I'm having to get used to working with. I don't really fully understand the behaviour of light and colour in all ways but ever since I opted to study it for my science project at school age 13 I've been fascinated.

Lighting is always the the bit of magic in a space and the lighting piece/experiment by Dennis Parren below is magic! Apparently it's called 'additive mixture' as your eyes perceive both colours of both light sources... Back to school -

You are probably used to mixing colors as pigments—like paints or food coloring. In such situations, colors subtract. The more colors you put in, the less color you get; that is, you get closer to black, the absence of color. In pigments, for example, blue and yellow make green.
Lights are different. When you put more light in, the colors add. The more colors you put in, the closer you get to white, the mixture of all colors. With light, though it seems weird, red and green make yellow. The other two combinations are more intuitive: Red and blue make MAGENTA; blue and green make CYAN.

Read here if you want to try understand this.

Dennis Parren of the Design Academy Eindhoven 2011 grad show...
CMYK Lamp Colored shadows with Led light 
It is not designed to demonstrate how and why, but to show that light is the true custodian of color... Taking advantage of LED-light technology, I have been able to create a lamp that has never been.