Popwuping

March in Northern Thailand (2006)

2009-11-22T15:12:29Z

Traveling through Paak Nua via small van, we stop amongst many settlements, some sinister but most ethical. Either or, the villagers are willing to talk and discuss. A year passes and we decide to relocate to the old home for one and new home for another.

by Michael Paul Young.

8 Duffle Bags

2009-11-21T08:27:07Z

A duffle bag when I was growing up more commonly referred to something we carried our gym clothes with or those beautiful large bags that the Canadian military used. The name itself comes from Duffel, a town in Belgium where the thick cloth used to make the bag originated. Today the duffle bag typically refers to the specific style of bag, in a wide range of sizes and materials.

The following is a small collection of duffle bags of various styles perfect fr short or long term getaways.

Joy Overnight Duffle

I like this duffle from Mandarina Duck but why oh why must they price their product so high? With this bag Mandarina Duck are using different materials as a more 'eco-friendly' alternative to the usual oil based derivatives. Using a food based material may reduce environmental impact but it also helps drives up food prices thereby causing hardship for those in countries where every changes in food prices might mean missed meals.

Joy, the travel and business line with soft, feminine shapes and respect for nature.

The Joy line is made with Sorona, an innovative material created and registered by Dupont with a view to supplying the market with non-oil derivative materials, hence reducing the environmental impact of "synthetic" products.

Sorona is made from corn through a series of fermentation and processing stages that transform sugar into a fibre that is used to make fabrics. It is a natural fabric in support of renewable energy sources.

Mandarina Duck Joy Overnight Duffle

Mismo Travel Duffle

A repost for a duffle I dig. I'm going to feature more from Mismo in the future.

I love just about everything about these canvas travel bags from Danish brand Mismo (all but their website). Exquisite materials, construction, and design. M/S Travel duffle features a large inside zipper pocket as well as two outside pockets on each gusset for you small gadgets or passport. The leather handles are long allowing you to carry the bag by hand or over your shoulder. The heavy canvas material has an added water repellant coating.

Mismo - Refined Classics for a Vibrant Lifestyle

Porter Boston Bag

This bag from Porter is perfect for overnight excursions or as a day time carry-all. Made with nylon with double seams. Has inside zippered and exterior velcro pockets. Love the style and quality.

Porter Boston Bag. Translated version.

Billy Work Bag

Certainly the name aptly describes the look of this bag. Great detailing. "Soft irregular hand-dyed leather outer with nylon twill interior lining. Metal zip closure. Adjustable shoulder straps. Measures approximately 42cm x 9cm x 28cm".

Check it out at Blackbird

Waxed Canvas Safari Bag

This bag from Mulholland takes its inspiration from classic tradesmen's bags and as such has the fortitude to withstand all kinds of abuse. Of course that doesn't mean you have to use it only on your next "safari to Botswana", as this bag will look good for years no matter where you take it or for what occasion. The Safari Bag is made of waxed canvas, leather strapping, nylon lining, and has more than enough room for a weekends worth of gear. The top of the bag opens wide, and stays open, to display all the contents, useful for security at the airport. Lastly it has an interior and exterior pocket and a strap.

The Waxed Canvas Safari Bag is available at J.L. Powell.

Siamod - Amore Duffel Bag

Beautiful travel bag combining stylish design with functionality - perfect for the style conscious traveller. Features: quick, accessible front pocket for pens, business cards and small devices and compartments separated by a secured zipper divider. Made with oil pull-up leather.

Amore Duffel Bag

Surface to air weekend bag

This bag's great looks caught my eye. The weekender from surface to air is made with smooth calf leather and has a front zippered pocket above the horizontal detailing and top zipper for the main compartment entry.

Surface to air weekend bag.

Incase EO Collection Travel Duffle

While I am unsure about the color, the modern space age styling and innovative fabrics make for a unique and attractive line of bags. Featuring water, dirt, and smell resistant NanoSphere fabric by Schoeller Textiles of Switzerland, the new Incase EO Collection includes messenger, duffel, and overnight bags. Add a laptop sleeve and their neat modular accessory pouches and you have all the bags you might need for casual travel.

Their travel duffle features: a leather handle with built-in hidden pocket, heavy-duty anodized zipper pulls with leather tabs, velcro closures on the exterior ﬂap, a large exterior sidewall pocket with custom Topo lining and custom faux-fur lined pockets, quick-release buckles, and a waterproof abrasion-resistant rubberised base.

Incase EO Collection Travel Duffle

Link Love: Taiwan, Bangkok, and Collaborative Systems

2009-11-20T07:28:43Z

Small pieces, loosely joined. Some of my favorite links of the week found on twitter and elsewhere.

Some thoughts on Biking (in Taiwan). Michael Turton's excellent article on what biking means to him.
Biking Weekend: Biking in Taiwan
One Taiwanese Would Kiss All of Paris
Cultural and Art Map of Bangkok
Parc Paragon takes on new colours for the next fortnight, evolving into a hip vodka bar as darkness falls. Leave it to Siam Paragon to come up with something more exclusive, expensive, and hip than your typical beer garden.
How to Choose the Right Collaboration Software. Although e-mail remains the primary method of office communication, businesses are increasingly turning to programs designed specifically for office collaboration.
45 Basecamp Alternatives. More extensive than my own 12 alternatives to Basecamp.

From the Popwuping archives:

A Few Tips for Managing Interruptions
Disconnecting from Distraction
5 Felt Cases To Keep Your Laptop Warm -- it's getting cold out!
5 Messenger Bags For Your Urban Adventures
Top 10 Carry-on Bags
Why Mandarin for our children

Please check out Careerbags if you are looking for business cases, laptop bags, handbags, and travel accessories. Ellen Hart, the President of Careerbags, has been involved in designing and marketing business cases for women since 1990, so she knows her stuff.

Wytze's graduation project for Cannondale

2009-11-20T05:05:22Z

"The Dutchess, a new concept bike designed by Wytze van Mansum, a design student at the TU Delft for Cannondale. According to a company statement, the bike was "designed for women keen to express their style amongst the fast paced and ever changing urban vibe."

More pictures.

What a Nokia product designer thinks about the iPhone

2009-11-20T02:12:33Z

Nokia, the leading mobile phone producer, uses exploratory design research in an almost anthropological approach to study user behaviour in order to get fresh ideas for new products and applications. We talked to the product and interaction designer Younghee Jung, leader of one of Nokia's global research teams, about the difficulties of exploring future trends in the mobile communication, the importance of local user behaviour and she finally confessed that the iPhone was actually, a positive thing to happen -- both, for Nokia and the entire mobile phone industry.

A Litl netbook

2009-11-19T08:00:54Z

A new netbook ideally suited for those living and working within an urban network topology that supports always on connections. If your mobile lifestyle means computing in your kitchen and then moving to your living room than this may be of interest to you.

Litl is an innovative new web computer, or webbook, that marries the communication functions of a laptop and TV. Small, portable, and equally at home on a kitchen countertop or a living-room coffee table, the webbook is designed for families with multiple users who like to keep in touch and socialize. Litl is always connected to the web (with access to Wi-Fi) and flips upright like an easel for TV-like viewing of photos and video. It has no hard drive, files or applications of its own, but instead runs on the "cloud," using web-based applications like webmail, Google, Flickr and Facebook.

What interests me most is the UI which is more akin to appliance, iPhone, or WebOS -- forget Windows 7, this is the kind of interfaces devices like this should have or the kind that companies should be at least exploring. The interface work was done with the assistance of Pentagram.

Unfortunately the Litl at $700 feels overpriced.

Via Pentagram.

Blauvent Parachute Backpack

2009-11-18T07:43:25Z

Great combination of materials, color, and pattern in this unisex backpack from Blauvent. The Parachute Backpack takes its' inspiration from, yes, parachute bags and is the ideal bag to carry your laptop, a4 sized materials and more. It's fairly economical in size but should allow you to carry most of what you will need through-out the day.

Lots of original and beautiful design coming from this Spain based company. Love it.

Blauvent Parachute Backpack

Classic Waxed Canvas Backpack

2009-11-18T07:14:52Z

I like the unique combination of materials in this simple backpack from Fabric Horse. Handmade with waxed canvas and nylon it's miles ahead of other American bags in this category -- especially those outsourced to factories in Guangzhou or Shenzhen. A perfect day pack.

Fabric Horse aims to preserve the ritual of the handmade with all products designed and sewn in their studio in Philadelphia.

Fabric Horse Classic Waxed Canvas Backpack

The Messenger by moop

2009-11-18T05:59:07Z

Hard to believe that it's been two years since I last featured fine work from the moop store. It looks like her craft continues to improve. This, or the, Messenger is handmade of provincial corded canvas with charcoal cordura lining. The flap hides two deep pockets. The interior is rather capacious and includes 2 pencil slips, 2 pouch pockets, 1 large zipper pocket and 2 d-rings for your keys. A very versatile unique bag.

The Messenger - in provincial blue

Inspiration: Paper Couture

2009-11-17T11:19:27Z

Test Shoot Gallery is a creative online project committed to documenting unique art and fashion collaborations. Their aim is to unpack every aspect of fashion image-making; from the generation of ideas through the various stages of production to the detailed and fastidious problem solving that characterizes a perfect execution. Test Shoot Gallery is run by a small team of devoted fashion image professionals.

Paper Couture: From brown paper, toilet paper and tracing paper to old magazines and newspaper, this series is a nod to the sheer ubiquity of paper in urban life, and an indictment of its wanton waste.
But a little imagination and some assistance - in the form of gum tapes, raffia string, aluminum foil, cling wrap, egg trays, bubble wrap and last but not least, trash bags go a long way in transforming rubbish into wearable art, a truly modern artefact, or what we like to call, paper couture.

With paper, you can scrunch it up to create crinkle effects, as well as twist, braid, weave, pleat and fold to achieve astonishing and remarkable shapes, details and texture.

In everyday life, many people treat paper thoughtlessly, mindlessly. There is some poetic justice then that recycling and rescuing used paper demand hard work and incredible thought. Ashburn Eng and his design assistant spent 2 weeks conceptualizing and experimenting with the designs and materials, and another 364 hours to complete the outfits. Each of the outfits were painstakingly put together through multiple fittings, piece by piece of recycled paper, commanding the attention to detail worthy of fashion's best.

Test Shoot Gallery

Cyclus Pangolin Backpack

2009-11-17T06:06:06Z

Fantastic design for this aggressive looking backpack by cyclus. Handmade with recycled truck tire inner tubes the bag's form takes its' inspiration from the protective scales on the back of an animal called the pangolin. Thankfully unlike the pangolin the protective scales on this bag are not razor sharp. Using the bag is intuitive with the pieces retracting inside one another when opened, with the opposite occurring when closed. The bag is held closed by magnetic closures. The bag is large with plenty of pockets on the inside for your various analog and digital gadgets.

Great concept but the end product may be, like many products that use rubber as their base material, heavier than you are accustomed to.

Cyclus Pangolin Backpack. Via Design Boom.

Prodigal Daughters

2009-11-17T05:32:00Z

Tis The Final Conflict #2 - Hung Liu

10 Chancery Lane Gallery is presenting the works of Chinese-American artist Hung Liu in an exhibition entitled, Prodigal Daughters. Taking her inspiration from the 1949 film, Daughters of China, Liu reinterprets scenes from the black and white film in vivid color. With intense thickly applied brush strokes, Liu paints ruddy earthen portraits with splashes of bright colors, these eight heroic women who chose to die rather than being captured by the Japanese. In this series, Liu addresses and revisits the intensity and innocence of communist ideology and her development as a person and artist as a result of it. The series of large works will be shown in Hong Kong for the first time [source].

2009/11/20 - 2010/01/24
10 Chancery Lane Gallery
G/F, 10 Chancery Lane SoHo, Central, Hong Kong
+852 2810-0065
http://www.10chancerylanegallery.com/home/

Every week I share some of the highlights of cultural events from the parts of Asia I know best. As most of my readership is based in the US, I do this partly out of my own interest, and partly as it's interesting to catch a glimpse of what is happening in a city different from your own. This is one of the benefits of leading a mobile lifestyle, being a digital nomad, traveller or whatever label you choose -- you get to experience great events from many different cultural perspectives. Hoards of people are blogging about the art scene in New York but who, in English, covers or even mentions the events in Bangkok?

Japanese Love Hotels: An Oasis In The City

2009-11-16T05:45:51Z

Chapel Christmas by jpellgen

Researcher Younghee Jung describes in great detail the design of Japanese love hotels:

The entrances of love hotels are characteristically discreet. It is impossible to see the inside of the lobby from outside. There are many entrances to the building. Once in the lobby, you see the big board with pictures of all rooms. The pictures with backlight on indicate that the rooms are available now. Any good love hotel would minimize or eliminate the need of human contact completely in the check-in/out process. This board with backlights usually spit out the room key when you press the button. This also marks your check-in time. There is a reception window but no one is visible behind it except a pair of hands.

A few rooms are equipped with an outdoor or a very large bath tub at the same room rate. But reservations are impossible at the love hoel so those rooms function as an effective lure for return customers fishing for better luck.

When you go up to the room, the flashing light on top of the room door once again indicates that it is an empty room to be checked-in. The door is lockable only from inside. There is basically no key to the door - i.e., guests are not expected to come out of the room during their 'rest' or 'stay'. There are no common facilities outside the room such gym, restaurant, or lounge area, anyway.

An Oasis In The City

Popweekly: Digest for 11.16

2009-11-16T01:46:30Z

Hong kong by bartpogoda.

Popweekly is a weekly report (at the beginning of the week instead of the end) which contains a digest of news, events, and issues of interest to Popwuping readers. It's something new I am trying as a means of sharing all that I read over the course of a week. It's subject to iteration of course - especially this opening paragraph.

The HIV travel ban is lifted. HIV-positive people will at last be allowed to visit America.

For 22 years America has banned HIV-positive people from entering the country without a hard-to-get waiver for fear of the virus spreading. It has not hosted a big international AIDS conference in more than a decade either, because many HIV-positive activists would not be allowed to attend. Only a dozen other countries, including China and Russia, have similar restrictions, and there is no evidence that these bans halt the spread of AIDS. Instead, many say, it makes things worse by stigmatising carriers of the virus.

Drugs, scams and beat downs. Just another night of 'Big Trouble in Tourist Thailand'

A new documentary has the Thai tourism industry scrambling to clean up its act. "From adrenaline fuelled drug busts, organized tourist scams, scorned lady-boys, violent brothel disputes, bar room brawls, brutal murders, street robberies and sexual assaults, the series is filmed in the popular tourist hotspots of Koh Samui, Phuket, Bangkok, Pattaya and Chang Mai."

World's Best Business Hotels 2009.

These top hotels combine service, technology, and comfort--everything that today's business traveler needs on the road. All would agree, however, that the best business hotels first and foremost make it easy to accomplish the work you came to do. At the very least, that means a central location, efficient check-in and checkout, reliable and high-quality technology, comfortable work spaces, attention when you need it and quiet when you don't.

Picture Show: Four Days in Dubai.

Dubai can seem more like a mirage than any place on Earth--even in the shade, it's marvelously bright. Whether the city is the most precious gem in the United Arab Emirates' crown or merely a piece of costume jewelry is up for debate; regardless, its very presence is remarkable. But for all its pomp and extravagance, there are real people who work and live there. Through the lens of the photographer Dustin Aksland, who recently traveled to the famed metropolis on a separate assignment, the city takes on a strikingly humble tone. What follows is a selection from Dustin Aksland's "Four Days in Dubai."

GigGuidetw.

It's unfortunate that Taiwan/Taipei (one and the same to many people) lacks a good cultural events calendar. There are so many great things happening here which are incredibly difficult to discover outside of the personal networks we all develop. Steve Leggat's GigGuide helps keep people informed about the latest live music happenings in the indie music scene. He hopes to reduce those "What!? [insert band name here] played in Taipei and I didn't know about it? How did I miss that?" conversations that we all inevitably experience. It's an excellent effort and very well designed. If he could only be persuaded to expand his coverage to include other types of events then we could all stop complaining about what we missed and start complaining about how we have no free time to see all that is available.

Singapore Design Festival 2009

From 20 to 30 November 2009, design will once again take centrestage in Singapore. The third Singapore Design Festival will continue to be a meeting place for designers, design thought leaders and design clients of the world to establish how design can make a difference to improve lives and create possibilities for tomorrow.

Bangkok Opera: 2nd World Opera Week

World Opera Week 2009 features three shows at Thailand Cultural Center's Main Hall November 23-29. Ode to Joy is a tribute to Beethoven's final symphonies and will be performed by the Mahler Siam Philharmonic Orchestra on 23 November. The show starts at 7.30pm and tickets are priced 100-1,000 baht. The most popular opera in the world, La Boheme, will run for two nights November 25-26. The performance will star Nancy Yuen and Israel Lozano, who return to Bangkok after co-starring in Madame Butterfly two years ago, with music by the Siam Philharmonic Orchestra and the Orpheus Choir of Bangkok. Curtains up at 7:30pm and tickets cost 500-3,000 baht. [source]

Domenica Sport

2009-11-15T15:23:55Z

Like the Domenica before it the Domenica Sport by New York's Bertelli Biciclette Assemblate is more design object than urban workhorse. This just released vintage fixie is absolutely beautiful.

Features include: Nitto dropbars, 36cm width, on a rare Titan stem made in Belgium; Alien track frame 55 black and silver wheelset. Gran Compe ss white tires. The saddle is a rare swallow Wrights W3SW, made in England. Vintage sr custom seatpost.Chrome straight fork. Gipiemme special cranks, Campagnolo 46T chainring on 16T rear cog; MKS track pedals, soma double-gate toeclips and MKS toestraps.

Domenica Sport by New York's Bertelli Biciclette Assemblate. Via ViaComIT.