Since Marcel Breuer’s Wassily Chair of 1925 the formula for comfortable seating has been known: create a right-angle, open it up a tad, and tip it backward, so that the seat places the bottom lower than…
Having recently attended my university’s graduation ceremony, I noted again what seems to have become a global trend — design is becoming a field where the majority of practitioners are women. I have made…
The Blickensderfer 6 portable typewriter. Designed by George Canfield Blickendsderfer, USA, 1906.
Powerhouse Museum
In everyday life we are surrounded by a dizzying array of technological gizmos. The ones we love and use the most are often the ones that have been designed with humans firmly in mind. Those that aren’t…
Every Thursday, I go to the Prahran Market in Melbourne and buy, among other things, cut flowers. Since moving into a mid-rise apartment from a flat with a garden, I arrange flowers for my dining room…
Learn to think like a child.
Boy in hard hat via parinyabinsuk/Shutterstock
It makes perfect sense. If you need to design a new school or playground, who better to help than the children who are going to use it? Gradually, more architects and landscape designers are bringing young…
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…
What happens when designers go off the rails? Feral Experimental shows the results can be stunning.
Photo: Britta Campion. Feral Experimental
What happens when designers stray from familiar territory and go “feral”? This question has been at the forefront of curator Katherine Moline’s mind. She proposes answers in Feral Experimental: New Design…
Having returned recently from a 20 days study-tour plus indigo workshop in India, I have been pondering the social and economic value societies assign to craft. I ask, how is craft valued in Australia…
Do architectural competitions lead to unrealistic design directions?
AAP/ Paul Miller
There’s a perverse irony in the apocryphal tale of the design competition for the Sydney Opera House in 1956. The story goes that, after the selection of the group of finalist designs for the competition…
In the third of my series of interviews with designers and illustrators on collaboration, Hobart-based comic maker and publishing entrepreneur Josh Santospirito discusses self-publishing as a way to grow…
Palludarium Shigelu by Azuma Makoto and marmoreal engineered marble designed by Max Lamb for Dzek.
UCCA/ Asialink
What happens to design when it migrates? This is the question posed by Australian design studio Broached Commissions which opened its latest exhibition, Broached Retreat, at the Ullens Centre for Contemporary…
While design alone cannot solve global poverty, the Moneymaker pump is making a difference for many Africans.
Esther Havens/ Kickstart.org
Designers aim to change peoples’ lives, ideally for the better. The American co-founders of design and development company KickStart, Martin Fisher and Nick Moon, set themselves a particularly difficult…
With 3,000 employees, 2,473 points of sale, seven different fashion and furniture labels (to say nothing of his makeup, skincare, chocolate and flower lines), 16 cafés and restaurants, two hotels, a basketball…
A Japanese jeans maker has found a new way of capitalising on zoo animals. Zoo Jeans are producing jeans “designed by dangerous animals”. Denim is wrapped around tyres, which are then thrown to the lions…
Irrespective of your button pressing technique, unfortunately the wait will always be the same.
Dave Young
We are more likely to thump this instantly recognisable design, on a daily basis, than to give it much thought. The PB/5 pedestrian button, a type of “Audio-Tactile Pedestrian Detector” (ATPD), is a successful…
The classic Queenslander, whose design can be easily modified to suit our contemporary lifestyles.
Wikimedia Commons
The Queenslander house is a classic piece of Australian architectural design. With its distinctive timber and corrugated iron appearance, it breaks the monotony of the bland, master-planned display villages…
The Call for Entries is now open for the 62nd annual Australian Book Design Awards which are seeking the “bravest and brightest, the most original and beautiful” books published before December 31, 2013…
In 1999, the Mini was voted the second most influential car of the 20th century.
Flickr
Car enthusiasts say the Mini has endured because it is fun - fun to drive and fun to look at. However, as a design, the Mini endures because of how its designers worked within the constraints they were…
Le Corbusier drew influence from the machine age for Villa Savoye, inspired by his fascination with steamships.
End User
Some 33 kilometres outside of Paris, in the town of Poissy, sits a true “design classic”, Villa Savoye. The work of seminal Swiss architect Le Corbusier, Villa Savoye is a constructed experiment, a manifesto…
When we want what we write to be clearly communicated to a reader, we generally try to use a typeface that is clear to read. But few people realise how quickly your choice of typeface affects that process…