Now available again "The Story of Eames Furniture"

Now available again, this lavish publication tells the story of Eames furniture in ­unparalleled detail on 800 pages with more than 2,500 images.
In this unique publication, Marilyn and John Neuhart tell the story, to paraphrase Charles Eames himself, of how Eames furniture got to be the way it is. The Story of Eames Furniture is a biography —not of an individual person, but of arguably the most influential and important furniture brand of our time. Brimming with more than 2,500 images and insider information, this two-volume book in a slipcase sheds new light on the context in which the furniture of Charles and Ray Eames was created. It documents in unparalleled detail how the design process in the Eames Office developed as well as the significant roles played by specific designers and manufacturers.

Marilyn and John Neuhart, The Story of Eames Furniture, Gestalten, 2015

Available at nb-notabene bookshop, via Bellezia 12c, Turin (Italy)

Ikea’s New Chairs Knock Off All Of The Mid-Century Greats !

The swedish manufacturer borrows generously from the likes of Eames and Vitra.

Eames molded chairs are a timeless classic that’s experiencing a full-out renaissance. Find me one respectable startup that doesn’t have them surrounding the perimeter of a walnut conference table. But at $300 and up, it’s hard to resist the temptation of a shoddy, outsourced knockoff.
Now, Ikea—the king of cheap furniture—is offering a line of chairs that are clearly deeply inspired Eames and the other mid-century chair design gods. In fact, when you really deconstruct the new line, it’s like a Frankenstein collection of greatest hits, from the curvy seat of the Eames molded chair, to the legs and connective tissue of the Jasper Morrison Hal Tube(which was actually made in 2012), to the high arms of the Vico Magistretti Maui chair, to the cello back of the Arne Jacobson Ant Leg chair (technically 2005), to the wood veneer of Jacobson's Series 7 chair.
Ikea is offering the options to mix and match these pieces to create your own hybrid, starting at a mere $34 and peaking out at $60.
Of course, a lot has been lost in translation. While all of the original designs were also the products of mass manufacture, Ikea’s chairs simply look cheap. None has the almost impossible to define visual harmony at play in the original specimens. It’s as if you can see the literal corners that have been cut to shave fractions of pennies off the build to make a few extra bucks at scale.
But maybe the worse sting is that dorm rooms everywhere will soon approach the same design sensibility as your carefully manicured apartment.

Via fastcodesign.com

All photos by Ikea

21 Classic Eames Elephants Reimagined By 20 Contemporary Designers

Vitra will auction off the designs for charity.

Plywood is at the essence of Charles and Ray Eames's work. But they also extended the technical experiments into children's toys. The Molded Plywood Elephant, one such example, never went into production back then due to high fabrication costs.
But Swiss manufacturer Vitra started producing plastic replicas in 2007, and now, at the London Design Festival, it is auctioning off 21 of these elephants that are customized by 20 top designers of today. The proceeds will benefit Teddy's Wish, a charity that supports research into sudden infant death syndrome.
Reflecting the quirks of their designer, each elephant has its own unique traits. British designer Philippe Malouin did up his like a woolly mammoth; Swedish firm Claesson Koivisto Rune covered theirs in gray leather; Neri & Hu kitted out the animal with rockers and a saddle that holds accessories. Bids for each will start at about $460 (it's for a good cause!), and you can see a selection above:

 

Chairs Installations

(above) Hill St Bonfire by Design By Toko: a visual protest against replica furniture.
Aussie furniture stores commissioned creative agency Design By Toko to design a sculptural ‘Bonfire’ of furniture fakes. This installation was on display at Hill Street in Surry Hills as part of the recent Sydney Indesign. Do not fret – no real furniture were hurt in the process. Only the dirty, filthy, disgusting fakes. Hooray!

(below) Black Whole Conference by Michel de Broin.
This installation consists of a group of Eames chairs attached to each other at the legs to create a sphere. In this utopian architecture, each element ensures and shares in solidarity with the others, the stability of the whole. This spiky structure forms a kind of immune system, a geometry configured in order to protect itself from the outside world.

Source: www.yellowtrace.com.au/chair-installations/

Learning from Eameses: short tips by Bradford Shellhammer, Founder & CEO at Bezar

The Details Are Not The Details...

"Charles Eames, arguably the most important designer from the Mid-Century, famously once said “The details are not the details. They make the design.”
He was right.
When building a brand you need a myriad of things to come together to make magic. It’s calculated. Like baking. Like architecture.
You need a mission bigger than you are. At Bezar we’re aware we’re not stopping war nor curing cancer. But we are helping small businesses compete with big box retail giants and we’re defenders of the intellectual property rights of makers, designers, and artists. So, we’re doing good. That’s a detail.
You need a point of view. Retail’s lame, especially ecommerce. It’s stale. It’s calculated. And it’s lowest common denominator, focused on quick shipping and lowest prices. But style, curation, and the artistry of old-fashioned retailing (think of your favorite boutique, do you recall the same love for an online store?) are valuable and worthy of celebrating. And need to be coupled with best in class analytics and technology and operations. That’s a detail.
You need to build something the world needs. The world does not need another soulless online store. That’s the truth. Ecommerce companies desperately need to connect with consumer’s emotions the way social companies have. Instagram is emotionally addictive because it’s inspiring (you get to see the world through other’s eyes). Pinterest is emotionally addictive because it’s empowering (you get to collect your inspirations from around the world). Facebook is emotionally addictive because it’s connective (you get to see the world and likes of people you know). Is Amazon emotionally addictive? Not for me. But no one can get you books, Pampers, pencils, and the like faster and cheaper than Amazon. No one. And that’s awesome. The world does not need another Amazon. Sorry, Jet.
And you need to be obsessed with the details when courting consumers who already are overwhelmed with choices.
At Bezar we’re obsessed with the details. With the products we sell. With our own brand’s identity. With our customer’s experience. With our running a sustainable commerce brand. With our designers’ livelihoods. And with standing out and standing for something in the world.
And we’re just getting started".

Bradford Shellhammer via LinkedIn

Read all at: www.linkedin.com/pulse/building-bezar-takeaways-from-creating-brand-five-shellhammer

Harrods shows ageless appeal of furnishings with in-store installation

British department store Harrods is putting a spotlight on “Timeless Design” through an in-store exhibit spanning its home and furniture departments.
Coinciding with the London Design Festival, the display features both modern and vintage wares, all of which would be fitting additions to a contemporary home. Becoming a part of the festival enables Harrods to reaffirm its place in the design community, showing that while its brands may look back to their heritages, they are still trendsetters.

In this exhibition Vitra shows the impact Charles and Ray Eames have had on the home furnishing space throughout time, including archival imagery paired with its iconic seating.

“We wanted to highlight the variety of brands stocked at the Harrods Home department and also hero the rich design history these brands have,” said Annalise Fard, director of Home & Design at Harrods, London.
“The Timeless Design exhibition was the perfect way to showcase these credentials to the discerning Harrods customer as well as design enthusiasts visiting London during London Design Festival.”

A led tour of the exhibition will begin at 3pm every day from 19th to 27th September. Visitors should meet at the Timeless Design Exhibit on the Third Floor.
Harrods, 87-135 Brompton Road, Knightsbridge, London, SW1X 7XL

About Plastic Chairs

In 1950, after a decade of experiments, Charles and Ray Eames introduced a chair that looked and performed like no other. It was lightweight, flexible, comfortable and affordable—and all because it was plastic.
In the past decade alone, some 500,000 Eames Molded Plastic Chairs have been sold globally, fulfilling Charles Eames’s ambition to make “the best for the most for the least.” (The price of the classic currently starts at $319.)
Originally made of a fiberglass-reinforced polyester resin used for World War II shock helmets, the Eames chair was produced until 1989, when Herman Miller, the chair’s manufacturer for North America, discontinued it because of the material’s health threat to factory workers. In 2000, the chair was brought back in polypropylene, which bore no risk and had the advantage of being recyclable. In 2014, Herman Miller released a safe, recyclable fiberglass version.
Few chairs are more versatile: The collection includes models with and without arms in a variety of colors, with bases of wood or metal that sit squarely or rock.
Or more influential: The Eames classic has seen many offspring over the years, and the category continues to thrive. Among the descendants shown at the international furniture fair in Milan in April were chairs by Jasper Morrison, for the American company Emeco; Alfredo Häberli, for the Italian company Alias; and Simon Legald, for the Danish company Normann Copenhagen.
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The market for plastic chairs is insatiable, interior designers say, because of their many virtues. “They’re practical; you can wipe them. You can put them in any room,” said New York-based Vicente Wolf, whose clients have included Twyla Tharp, Egon von Furstenberg and Clive Davis. The protean material can be easily contoured for comfort or visual drama, Mr. Wolf added, and he appreciates the color range. He is partial to bright, sinuous Panton chairs, which are effectively $310 pieces of sculpture.
Ghislaine Viñas, a fellow New York designer known for colorful interiors, said a plastic chair “is hip, it’s not precious, and if you’re tired of it inside, you can move it outside.” Ms. Viñas also noted that world-class designers frequently create the chairs, so if you want relatively inexpensive furniture by, say, Ron Arad or Philippe Starck, here’s your chance. She singled out Mr. Arad’s Tom Vac chair ($455) and Mr. Starck’s Toy chair ($972 for four) among her favorites.

Courtesy Wall Street Journal

Read all at: 

http://www.wsj.com/articles/64-or-1-500-guess-the-price-of-these-plastic-chairs-1441295616

The Barbican autumn highlight puts spotlight on Charles and Ray Eames

A major exhibition focusing on Charles and Ray Eames and on the work of the Eames Office is to go on show at the Barbican Art Gallery in London in October.

At the Eames Office, the husband and wife design team — together with their collaborators and staff — produced pioneering furniture, architecture, graphic and product designs that came to mirror post-war culture in the US.

The Office was also the site of lesser-known creations in the fields of painting, drawing, film, sculpture, photography, multi-media installation and even education, and that lesser-known work will also have a place in the Barbican show.

In all, more than 380 works will be on display as part of The World of Charles and Ray Eames, which is being produced in collaboration with the Eames Office.

Among highlights is a full-scale model of La Chaise (1948-1950), on loan from New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and representing the Eameses’ first go at the moulded plastic chairs for which they are perhaps best-known. An experimental study for the plywood nose cone of a military aircraft also comes by way of MoMA, and a newly commissioned 1:50 scale model of the Case Study Houses #8 and #9 has been produced by Roger Stirk Harbour and Partners.

Works from other fields include a selection of the duo’s films and a large-scale installation of the multi-screen slideshow Think, shown at IBM’s Pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair.

Charles and Ray Eames’ associations with leading figures such as Buckminster Fuller, Alexander Girard, Sister Corita Kent, George Nelson, Isamu Noguchi, Eero Saarinen, Saul Steinberg and Billy Wilder will also be highlighted.

The World of Charles and Ray Eames runs from October 21, 2015 to February 14, 2016 at the Barbican Art Gallery.

Design lessons from the Eames studio that can aid start-ups

"The crossover is about much more than just aesthetics", writes Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia

*   *   *

We hear a lot about design these days — in technology, in the boardroom, in every area of our lives. But what does that really mean?
In the early part of the 20th century, industrial design meant making a new world of machines beautiful for humans, with finned automobiles and appliances that exuded warmth and familiarity. In our digital age, Apple has pioneered an emphasis on design that has brought the term outside of physical products and into the way a brand approaches its overall vision.
I was trained as a designer at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), and that mindset has shaped the work we do at Airbnb. Rather than design a physical product, we design the service that delivers the experience — a combination of digital and analogue mediums. On a larger scale, what we are designing is how members of our community experience and share with one another in the real world. As the co-founder and chief product officer, I have have seen firsthand how design informs leadership.
Lessons learnt from design icons such as Charles and Ray Eames, the duo behind the Eames chair and hundreds of other design innovations, are as useful in leading Airbnb as they would be at any design studio. Here are a few of the insights I took straight from their design process:

Never delegate understanding 

It is easy as a leader to get removed from what is happening in your company, with your product, and with your people. As Charles Eames put it, if you are designing a chair, you have to talk to who is going to build the chair, who is going to buy the chair, and who is going to maintain the chair.
Leadership is the same. One must understand what the people around you want and what they need to develop. You do this by talking to them. As with design, to lead is to be in a state of inquiry, to ask and understand. I have learnt to ask questions of my team, to accept bad news and admit my own mistakes, and listen when colleagues speak.

Connections, connections, connections 

When designing, the Eameses focused their attention on “where the materials meet”; for instance, where the metal legs of a chair connect to the moulded plastic bottom. These are the points of greatest tension and where the most support is needed.
Similarly, I have learnt to focus my attention on where different disciplines, departments, and functions meet. Making sure that operations connects with design, design connects with engineering, engineering connects with customer experience: these are the critical tension points in the company. If there is not clear communication, the figurative chair of our company could collapse.

Bases are under appreciated 

When the Eameses were designing a travelling art exhibit, they ran into the problem that the bases for many of the pieces were too heavy to transport. So they designed hollow bases that could be filled with sand upon arrival. They built the foundationn necessary to the task.

In any company, foundations are important in whatever you are bringing to market. It does not matter how beautiful or useful it could be if it does not stand or is not stable. This is also true in the foundation you build with your team. There needs to be compassion, trust, collaboration, and a willingness to disagree in order to facilitate success.

Empower your people to find solutions 

The Eameses’ granddaughter, Llisa Demetrios, tells the story of when she did not like borscht at dinner, Charles asked her: “What would you have done differently?” She admired that, despite her complaining, she was engaged to help fix the problem.
Being a leader does not mean being the one that fixes everything. It means empowering others to find solutions. To design is to look at the world and say, “Why is it like that? How would I make it different?”
“Design thinking” is talked about a lot these days as a framework for innovation. But to me, it is not just another tool to come up with the latest hip product. Instead, it is a way of looking at the world and pushing to find better answers. When leaders embrace design, they are able not only to ask how things can be different, but to empower others to ask the same question.

Joe Gebbia

via Financial Times

www.ft.com/cms/s/0/01f8d2ec-46a5-11e5-af2f-4d6e0e5eda22.html#axzz3l9iE3x1B

Eamesian Mood in Tokyo by Sasaki Architecture

Sections of wall appear to hang from the ceiling of this former warehouse club in Tokyo, which was converted into offices by local studio Sasaki Architecture. Wall Cloud is situated a former waterfront warehouse that operated as a popular nightclub in the early 1990s. The space was only 2.1m at its highest point with only 1.7m under the beams, creating an oppressive feeling in the space. To increase the height, the designers removed the existing false ceiling and added sections of wall under the beams to segment the space into individual offices. Slices of glass span the gap between the base of the walls and floor, allowing light to penetrate the floor plate. Solid horizontal panels set between walls house concealed desks and shelving, while the glazed section provide office workers with interesting glimpses into adjoining spaces.

via yellowtrace.com
read all at www.yellowtrace.com.au/ryuichi-sasaki-wall-cloud/

Taking an Empathetic Approach to User Experience. An interview to Chokdee Rutirasiri by CIO Insight

As the founder of Story+Structure, CEO Chokdee Rutirasiri has been designing human-centered solutions for the private and public sectors since 1995. He's led projects resulting in new user experiences in higher education, human resources, publishing, manufacturing, health care and non-profits. Prior to founding Story+Structure, Rutirasiri held roles as a strategist, designer and developer for UMass Boston, MassArt and Worcester State College. He also spent some time on muni bond trading desks in Chicago and Boston. Rutirasiri took time to speak with CIO Insight on a variety of topics, including the elements of good design, empathy in a capitalist world and what it means to be a good host.


CIO Insight: You recently lead a discussion at the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium on taking an empathetic approach to the user experience. Can you expand a little on what that means and why it’s important to take this approach?

Chokdee Rutirasiri: Empathy is the key to opening up the wants, needs and behavior of what people are seeking in their experiences. Whether you’re a services company or a product company, at the end of the day you’re in the people business. Staff. Clients. Customers. Constituents. Stakeholders. Stockholders. All people. People are beautifully complex and ever evolving. What we say and what we do are often two different things. When you practice empathy, you begin to develop a deep understanding of those you’re serving. And with this understanding, you can be more intentional with your strategic decisions.

CIO Insight: You’re the CEO of Story+Structure, a design firm that puts a strong emphasis on human-centered design. How does this differ from other established approaches to the workplace specifically and technology in general?

Rutirasiri: Lots of times people try to solve a problem by throwing a piece of technology at it or designing for their preferences, ignoring the fact that they are not the end user. Then solutions end up being overly engineered or complicated, leading to poor user adoption. This is because you were addressing your own frustration, not your customer’s. A human-centered approach simply puts the human being right at the center of every question. What do you need? How does this make you feel? How might this solution help you reach your aspirations and goals? An empathetic approach is respectful and intentional.

CIO Insight: I understand designers Charles and Ray Eames were a big influence on you. How so?

Rutirasiri: Oh my, where does one even begin? What made the Eames Office a special shop was imagination. Charles, Ray and the whole shop looked at life in a different way.

The Top 3 lessons for me include:

1. Design flows from learning and knowing who you are serving.This is fundamental to the iterative, rapid prototyping process at the core of human-centered design. You gather information about your target audience. You prototype solutions quickly and cheaply. You test it. You find out answers to some basic questions. You learn. You go back to the design and iterate. Repeat.

2. Design is about being a good host.When you invite someone over for dinner, you usually clean your place, set the table, prepare delicious foods your guests would enjoy, offer a drink when they enter your home, catch up on life, and then sit down to eat at the proper time with more wine and banter. Your actions show thoughtfulness and intention. That is what good design is. Is it meeting basic needs? Is the experience enjoyable? Do I feel an emotional connection to the experience or the people involved?

3. Eventually, everything connects.We live in an ecosystem. Everything eventually connects. Good design is about being mindful of that connection. It’s about thinking and being holistic in your approach to designing, developing and supporting solutions.

Read all at CIO Insight:
www.cioinsight.com/it-management/innovation/taking-an-empathetic-approach-to-the-user-experience.html

News: Knock on Wood

From their workshop in Cherkasy​ in Ukraine, husband and wife team Elena and Dmitry Olshevsky​ , from Atelier Article, make a range of decorative items for the home. They've paid homage to Eames' house bird, with their own reinterpretation of the iconic black wooden figure. The original was frequently used by Ray and Charles as an accessory in photos of their iconic houses, while Atelier Article's plywood version (pictured) has been injected with a shot of colour in the form of blue. It's available here through its global shopping partner "Down That Little Lane".

Eames bird remake
Atelier Article, through Down The Little Lane,
downthatlittlelane.com.au