When the Masonite manufacturer in Rundvik closed, it was the last of its kind, a downturn that we want to help counteract by maintaining domestic production as far as we can and by highlighting quality craftsmanship in our exhibitions, says Thommy Bindefeld, Marketing Manager at Svenskt Tenn.

The ’Masonite: Memoriam’ exhibition can be seen in the Svenskt Tenn store at Strandvägen 5 in Stockholm until June 10.

The Widlund vacation house by Swedish architects Claesson Koivisto Rune is like a funnel of light, space and sea views. The location is the west coast of the Baltic island of Öland. The white concrete box is “corsetted” in the middle, creating slightly sheared wall and roof angles. This gives the house both its direction and character, while also marking the difference between the rear private two-storey bedroom part and the communal double ceiling-height front part.

Precast concrete is perhaps not the most common choice for a private house at this scale, but was ideal for achieving the ultimate precision in manufacturing tolerance and colour/finish, says Eero Koivisto from Claesson Koivisto Rune.

The concrete is not painted or surface-pigmented but solid white, which gives it a wonderful glow. The joints between the concrete elements are carefully designed and positioned so that – instead of interfering with – they become part of the building’s geometry and expression. The sealant in between is gray to enhance the graphic effect rather than matching the concrete surface.

The new X2 is handmade at Leica’s headquarters in Germany, and features a new APS-C-format professional CMOS image sensor with over 16.5 megapixels. In combination with the high-performance Leica Elmarit 24 mm f/2.8 ASPH. lens, a classic focal length for photojournalism, this sensor ensures maximum image quality and sparkling brilliance. The Leica X2’s large sensor and fast lens make it ideal for shooting in available light.

Also the autofocus system has also been enhanced. The camera’s profile is complemented by numerous setting options from full manual control to automatic functions and an intuitive handling concept. These features make the Leica X2 the ideal premium-class compact camera for discerning photographers who wish to concentrate completely on their subjects and appreciate creative and true-to-life pictures.

The linearity of its design and its compact, handy form are reminiscent of the Leica M-cameras. This, in combination with its robust, all-metal construction and premium, high-grip leather trim makes the X2 a classic Leica camera in both looks and feel. The camera is available in a discreet black or elegant silver finish.

Do also check out the new Leica M Monochrom - the first full-frame, 35 mm format digital camera to be designed exclusively and without any compromises for black-and-white photography.

Renowned shoe artist Christian Louboutin makes his mark at The Design Museum in London to celebrate the brand’s 20^th Anniversary. The exhibition takes you through his journey from life as a cobbler through to travel inspirations, leaving fashion for garden design and finally creating the ultimate shoe of every woman’s dreams.

With 200 pairs of shoes carefully selected for display from a period of two decades, each pair expresses its own personality of materials from feathers, lace, frills, studs and fur. Red velvet is draped over displays, shoe’s dangled around a carousel and light bulbs rimmed around mirrors. Walking through the exhibition feels like you’ve snuck into the backstage of a showgirl’s dressing room. There is a playful yet erotic atmosphere to this exhibition as you are soon guided from bright lights to no lights in the fetish department, which features Louboutin’s collaboration with David Lynch back in 2007. This area showcases designs that are merely a work of art rather than to be worn, accentuating heels and pain as a sculpture of ideas. The fetish side also demonstrates that Louboutin shoes are not just for women but for the visual appeal of men also.

He describes his shoes as a work of art, a sculpture of engineering that structure a woman’s body, making a statement, a shoe that needs a confidant woman to carry it off, a woman like Dita Von Teese.

She pays tribute to the designer with a hologram burlesque performance that is definitely worth saving until the end. The exhibition runs from 1^st May-9^th July 2012. Tickets are £10 per person.

As a part of the design process, considering whether you are working with a product/ concept that requires instant payoff or an extended payoff time, is of importance. Does your product/ concept need to be easily decoded? Or would it add quality to the aesthetic experience to purposely prolong the payoff time?
Instant payoff is connected to instant decoding, instant understanding, instant connection. When working with instant payoff as a strategy you acknowledge and meet your receiver’s expectations and avoid initial confusion. Instant payoff concerns understanding (who you are talking to), acknowledging (who they are), and applying (their expectations and assumptions into your product).

The aesthetic experience connected to instant payoff is not characterized by being complex or by a “hard to grasp factor”; it is characterized by an immediate connection between the object and the receiving subject. Instant payoff is not a comfort zone breaking experience, but a comfort booster; you get what you expect. Your assumptions are nursed. The object is exactly what you initially thought it was, and touching it is exactly like your eyes expected.

As a designer of houseware objects, prolonging the payoff time might not be the correct strategy. Forcing your receiver to wonder how to use a potato peeler or to consider, for more a few seconds, how use a coffee maker is, in most cases, nothing but a source of frustrations. You can work with prolonging payoff a tiny bit (if your feel it will add value to the experience), but only just. The user of houseware wants to immediately understand how to use and decode the product; functionality and instant payoff are core words. The product has to tell how it’s used. It must be easily decoded.

Working with instant payoff as an aesthetic strategy can also make a lot of sense within clothes design. You don’t always need power wear. Some days you need comfort wear. You need to be covered in soft materials, you need contours to be blurred by over sized garments, and you need to be surrounded by comforting, soothing colours. You need to blend in. To not be loud. To not stand out. And in certain situations you need other people to instantly feel comfortable in your presence. One of my good friends is a very talented feature journalist. And when she conducts her interviews, she doesn’t wear “loud” garments that make the person, she is interviewing uncomfortable or distracted. She needs to be, in a way, neutralized.

Instant payoff within clothes design is about comfort wear, blending in, and neutralization. And as blending in may be the new black, instant payoff could be the new big trend.

Things to consider when working with instant payoff as an aesthetic strategy:

• the product/ concept must be quickly decodable
• acknowledgment of what is expected by your receiver/ target group (and meeting these expectations) is crucial
• non-complex structures and harmonic expressions are often easier to decode and “take in”
• familiar references create an instant connection to the receiver, and therefore a thorough knowledge of you target group’s habitus is of great importance

There is noting permanent, but change. – Heraclitus (535-475 BC)

According to the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, we now live in a “Liquid Society” where reality keeps changing at a very fast pace and individuals need to adapt smartly to survive. By splicing together an unending series of short-term projects, the episodes do not add up to the kind of sequence to which concepts like “career” and “progress” could be meaningfully applied. Such fragmented lives require individuals to be flexible and adaptable — to be constantly ready and willing to change tactics at short notice, to abandon commitments and loyalties without regret and to pursue opportunities according to their current availability. Social form and institutions no longer have enough time to solidify and cannot serve as frames of reference for human actions and long-term life plans, so individuals have to find other ways to organize their lives. Therefore, the individual must act, plan actions and calculate the likely gains and losses of acting or failing to act under conditions of endemic uncertainty.

It is a kind of chaotic continuation of modernity, where one can shift from one social position to another, in a fluid manner. Nomadism becomes a general trait of the liquid modern man, as he flows through his own life like a tourist, changing places, jobs, spouses, values and sometimes even more. We are being faced with re-negotiating our identities, how we define ourselves and how we want to appear to the others. The fact that society is ‘liquid’ can be perceived both as positive and negative. On the one hand, it is exiting as individuals are given the opportunity to choose their course of life and become something different and better. On the other hand, future becomes completely unpredictable and things happen unexpectedly. This generates great insecurity. It is a struggle between freedom and security; they are two opposing aspects, both necessary in society but which need to be combined and reconciled.

The need to belong is a fundamental one for human beings. While in the past we used to belong to a community, nowadays we belong instead to a network. The two are, however, very different. In a community, individuals are offered the opportunity to belong, while in a network they have to build their own web of relations, creating their own identity and sense of belonging. In the past the community used to look after the individual offering him or her a secure place to be. This was, however, done at the expense of freedom as the individual was expected to obey strictly the community rules. With networks, individuals have much more freedom. They can choose what they want to be, shape their identity as they wish and build their network of relations accordingly. Networks are unstable and insecure, as the relationships are good as long as they last; they are not permanent bonds.

In this context, the boundaries of all types of human actions are crumbling down, which means that the age of limitless competition is now in progress. The role of management in the liquid life needs to get out from fixed paradigms. Like water flows forever without drying up or stopping, it should be mighty and simultaneously considerate that it goes wherever with great mobility. So, no matter where it goes, it can go in and out, and purify everything there.

It’s Liquid – / Not everything in the digital environments is fixed, but continuously changing. It creates a society where there are no borders. How to best navigate the complexities of modern society?

This is a post by David Report contributor Jaeuk Jung.

There are very few good looking slimline bike lights. Copenhagen Parts wanted something that looked good, worked well and, most importantly, could be fitted and removed instantly. The answer was – magnets.

Magnets and steel tubes are an obvious match but we’ve spent a lot of time working on selecting the right components and perfecting the details so that they will fit to different tube diameters and stay there’. And the cleverness doesn’t end there. The lights turn on when placed on the bike and automatically switch off when removed, says Mads Kjøller Damkjær, co-founder of the company.

We have been riding with the prototypes for 6 months. They are so easy to fit anywhere on the frame and they stay put – regardless of the road surface. And they just pull off to keep them out of the grasp of thieves’ says Anthony Forsyth, bike-geek and one of the designers for Copenhagen Parts.

The only drawback is that they only work on steel frames. However the vast majority of people still riding steel-framed bikes. It’s a nice feature that it automatically turns on when you put it on the frame, and turns of when you remove it.

Just this morning I read an article from yesterdays paper about Coursera – a new free online and interactive education system initiated by two American professors, Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller from Stanford University in San Francisco.

We offer high quality courses from the top universities, for free to everyone. We currently host courses from Princeton University, Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, and University of Pennsylvania. We are changing the face of education globally, and we invite you to join us.

While it seems almost to good to be true, it isn’t! Together the two have set out on a mission to transform and “revitalize” the world of university education and make it available to everyone who wants to join.

When you join one of our classes, you’ll also join a global community of thousands of students learning alongside you. We know that your life is busy, and that you have many commitments on your time. Thus, our courses are designed based on sound pedagogical foundations, to help you master new concepts quickly and effectively.

The education is based around a series of online lectures mixed with student interactions, video chatrooms, exercises, essays and finally exams – just like any regular education, except this is on a global scale which means it also allows for everyone with access to a computer and internet to join in. One of the test-courses had more than a 100.000 students in just 1 course – Just imagine the level of brainpower!

We are a social entrepreneurship company that partners with the top universities in the world to offer courses online for anyone to take, for free. We envision a future where the top universities are educating not only thousands of students, but millions. Our technology enables the best professors to teach tens or hundreds of thousands of students.

Through this, we hope to give everyone access to the world-class education that has so far been available only to a select few. We want to empower people with education that will improve their lives, the lives of their families, and the communities they live in.

The project has just received funding from Silicon Valley so they they also have the financial backing to move forward. The funders believe that once you are able to reach this many with something that seems so crucial and relevant, the right business model will eventually develop and prove it’s own worth in time, just like Google and Facebook eventually did…

- And just like that I’m signed for “Introduction to Sociology” starting June 11, who wants to join me?

But we want to see more of “official” knowledge sharing and clever discussions. More design critisism. More companies that actually are interested to discuss uncomfortable but important subjects – can we go on and just produce more and more? And honestly – do we really need another chair? It’s a lot of powerful companies here – we would like to see them lead the discussion about how they can use their power to really make a change – and not only provide for more consumption.

It’s too much of business as usual. We say like Richard Branson – screw business as usual! Be good, drive positive change and you will make good business. The quote by Mahathma Gandhi at one of the walls inside Superstudio says it all; You must be the change you want to see in the world.

Here are some snapshot experiences. Unsorted. Uncommented.

Finally some design tourism from Via Tortona: