Smart street furniture can do a lot of things at once. Some of these functions offer the public clear benefits, but the data collection and surveillance capabilities raise a number of concerns.
The Ori ‘Cloud Bed’ is lifted and lowered from a ceiling recess to create space that doubles as bedroom and living room.
Ori/YouTube (screengrab)
With space at a premium, robotic furniture can transform a room in seconds. How will this affect our sense of belonging and feeling at home, when everything can change with a voice command?
Illustration of ‘Axminster’ linoleum, in ‘Catesby’s one-piece linola squares’, Catesbys Colourful Cork Lino (1938).
BADDA 181, courtesy of the Museum of Domestic Design & Architecture, Middlesex University, www.moda.mdx.ac.uk
Margaret Re, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Knoll is best known for transforming the design of America’s corporate offices. But she was also on the front lines of a State Department effort to promote American ingenuity and capitalism abroad.
The on-paper designs for furniture belong to the designer, just like any other artists. But things get more complicated when designs become physical objects.
Shutterstock
How are furniture designers protected by law, and what is an ‘original design’ when aesthetics meets functionality?
Peter Thomas of the Winnipeg Art Gallery (left), Marcel Dionne of Roarockit (centre) and Jaimie Isaac, curator for Indigenous/Contemporary at the Winnipeg Art Gallery (right), are seen building a skateboard using a do-it-yourself kit in this 2017 photo. Art and design schools should reward those who actually build and create more than they do design theorists.
(Author provided)
Even as our world goes digital, there will always be an appetite for craftsmanship, for art and for the work only human hands can truly bring to life. Art and design schools should celebrate creators.
Ingvar Kamprad’s Ikea revolutionised retail by popularising flat-pack furniture and building maze-like stores.
Cities and their residents’ needs in public space have changed, but the type and function of the furniture are stuck in the past.
Carlos Neto/shutterstock.com
With cities becoming more dense and housing more crowded, people rely more than ever on well-designed public spaces, so why hasn’t the furniture changed with the times?
Poul Henningsen’s Artichoke Lamp, viewed from below at London’s Park Plaza Hotel.
Doc Searls/Wikimedia Commons
In our personal and working lives, there are some lines that should not be crossed and others that must be. As a designer, crossing the line that exists between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian…
George Rose’s light is one of the products on display at this year’s Fringe Furniture exhibition.
Anna Lorenzetto
Every product is a blabbermouth; it has a tendency to answer every question – and then some - Del Coates. Coates, an American industrial designer and design academic, is right. The processes and outputs…
Why has David Foulkes Taylor again been left out of the history of mid-century Australian design?
Ted Snell
In 1982, I wrote an introduction to a survey exhibition of the work of Western Australian furniture designer David Foulkes Taylor lamenting that so little attention had “… been directed towards the recording…