Ett Hem (a home in English) is a new hotel in Stockholm situated in a classic townhouse in a peaceful residential area called Lärkstan. Ett Hem just got 12 rooms and each of them are designed individually in a personal and relaxed manner by Ilse Crawford.

We wanted to continue the story of this house by giving it a meaning for the future, says the designer Ilse Crawford.

Ett Hem offers a nice recreation and feel of a eclectic private Stockholm home, with all the comfort a modern hotel has to offer.

Transforming the house into a hotel has been a delicate process: its personality had to remain intact. Yet it also had to offer all the services required by modern travellers. The result is that Ett Hem is again filled with the best collection of furniture, Scandinavian antiques and design. Things that frame moments in life, says Jeanette Mix, owner of Ett Hem.

The goal of the campaign entitled NICE (Nordic Initiative Clean and Ethical) is to have the industry join forces, share knowledge and change the way business is being done by raising consumers’ awareness of choices and responsibilities, helping them make conscious choices and thereby changing their behavior.

We hope that the fashion industry, opinion leaders, NGOs and experts will join the movement and help raise awareness to the issues and solutions which again will help improve the impact fashion has on people and on our planet, says Eva Kruse, CEO of Danish Fashion Institute and Chairman of Nordic Fashion Association.

With that in mind more than 1,000 industry stakeholders (international tastemakers and troublemakers) gathered at The Opera House in Copenhagen to participate in the world’s largest summit on sustainability in fashion – the Copenhagen Fashion Summit 2012 – to share know-how and opinions on what could be done in order to move the industry in a more sustainable direction.
 Below is a video sharing some highlights from the summit.

Architech Judith Benzer has made a striking summer house situated in the Southern Burgenland region of Austria.

The architecture is oriented by the style of the Kellerstöckel (wine house) which are typical in the region and the summer house is designed to fit perfectly in the surrounding environment.

You will find a wine cellar in the basement and residential areas on top. The facade is surfaced with raw larch planks and the external shutters may be closed during winter months. The outdoor terrace acts as a shadow from the shape of the house.

Photos by Martin Weir.

Norwegian jewellery engineer Sigurd Bronger receives the 2012 Torsten and Wanja Söderberg Prize of  SEK 1,000,000 (approx EUR 110,000).

Sigurd Bronger is a jewellery designer who works in the sphere of the delicate and small scale; between early 20th century mechanical industrialism, humour, love of the material, time and the finely polished. Bronger’s jewellery crosses the genders, even though the process is playfully male – with gearwheels, precision mechanics and wonderful hand-made packaging. He treats time as a material, alongside brass, precious metals, diamonds and wood – all meticulously selected and worked during a long, sterling process. When the jury visited his studio in Oslo, he told us that he creates three or four new pieces a year. Industrial romanticism characterises Sigurd Bronger’s jewellery and his inspiration stems from instruments and machinery. When I look at and touch Bronger’s jewellery, I feel like a young boy at a funfair or caught up in a wonderful mechanical fairytale world – I forget everything else around me. Sigurd Bronger’s design art changes my perception of what is possible. Says Ted Hesselbom from The Röhsska Museum prize committee for the Torsten and Wanja Söderberg Prize.

The Torsten and Wanja Söderberg’s prize was inaugurated in 1992 by the Torsten and Ragnar Söderberg Foundations, two of Sweden’s most important donors to Sweden’s research and development. The foundations were formed in 1960. During the year 2011, Torsten Söderbergs Foundation and Ragnar Söderbergs Foundation allocated ca SEK 260 millions to scientific and corresponding purposes.

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