June 24, 2009

• Minimalism rules in Wallpaper’s concept stores

Loved some of the design architecture in Wallpaper’s pick of concept stores from around the world. Luxurious minimalism and a Zen-like calm is the new look. Beautiful gallery-style stores for Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto and Guiliano Fujiwara - all Japanese designers with a pared-back aesthetic. Chanel’s concept store is disappointing though, very clinical and no sense of their French heritage.

June 24, 2009

• Newsmap - a neat visual system for aggregating Google info

Aggregating and organising the vast volumes of information on Google is the next horizon for the internet. Newsmap is an interesting visual system for organising news stories by topic (business, world, technology etc.) and by importance (depending on the number of associated stories on a particular topic, that topic is awarded visual real estate on the home page).

The future of print news media is the subject of hot debate at the moment with the fall in advertising revenue, the rise in blogging and the general drift of younger audiences away from print to online. Print journalists and the ethics community argue that the inherent danger in online is that people will increasingly personalise their news feeds, creating a situation where they are not exposed to wider points of view. This was expressed eloquently in a presentation by Nicolas Negroponte of MIT Labs late last year (view his presentation on Slideshare) with his Daily Me concept.

Newsmap is an early foray into developing a user-friendly system for organising news in a way that allows people to self-edit according to areas of interest but also stay open to opinions from all perspectives. Check out Marcos Weskamp’s Maramushi site for other interesting information visualisation projects that he has developed.

June 19, 2009

• Eco Fashion gets some Philippe Starck magic

Philippe Starck has teamed up with Ballantyne to produce a range of “responsible clothing”. Ticking all the right boxes (made in Scotland, natural cashmere, minimalist aesthetic, non-faddish) I predict that this range will be hugely desirable amongst nonsumers (my term for people who’ve turned their backs on mass disposable consumption). According to Monsieur Starck, “The public will take maybe three years to understand the concept. It’s not fashion. We won’t be very big in the newspapers. The clothes are non-photogenic. But intelligent people will know to discover us.” Shameless reverse psychology to stimulate desire, but I’ll still be first in line…

June 10, 2009

• Can Mayan Civilisation show us the future?..

David McWilliam’s wrote an interesting article in the Sunday Business Post over the weekend drawing comparisons between the collapse of Mayan civilisation and the demise of the Celtic Tiger. I have had precisely the same discussion with friends recently (we watched the immense Apocalypto and it sparked it off) but to me the most interesting question arising from his article is: how do you recreate for a modern age the Mayan’s balanced and wealthy economy with its harmonious co-existence with nature?

Simon attended a global conference in the UK last year called Responsible Retailing Summit and after listening to many interesting speakers talk about their carbon-reduction initiatives a senior representative from The Body Shop stood up and asked a question that silenced everyone, “How do we continue to make profits while selling less?”. This is the elephant in the room that nobody seems prepared to face in Irish politics. Here are some thoughts…