OK Go – This Too Shall Pass

You might remember OK Go from their last all conquering video outing the choreographed visual treat that was ‘here it goes again’ with them running simultaneously on treadmills but I think this last goes one better.

Directed by James Frost it was filmed in a two story warehouse and took the band and a team from Synn Labs several months to design and build.

It’s true ingenuity at it’s complicated best that really represents design as I like to see it – It’s got to look great and it’s got to work great.

Amazing Old School BMX polaroids

More at http://blog.defgrip.net/

High Hope for Parkour as the sport’s popularity grows.

One of the ‘Architecture for Everyone’ workshops in Sheffield will be working with a couple of Parkour experts.   The signposted interview below provides a good contribution towards including Parkour as a healthy method of movement through a city. Design possibilities galore…..

Go to the address below to see some of the positives parkour can have within an urban environment:

Parkour: 'The art of movement'

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/1/hi/england/8153857.stm

The Seed Pavillion, China Design Expo 2010.

The british pavilion sits on a landscape which resembles an unfolded piece of paper.

The concept behind thomas heatherwick’s british pavilion at shanghai expo 2010, is an enclosure that throws outwards from all sides, a mass of long radiating cilia.

The centerpiece of the pavilion is the seed cathedral, a six storey high cube-like structure, pierced by approximately 60 000 7.5m long slim transparent acrylic rods which sway gently
in response to any wind movement. During the day each of these rods will act like fibre optic filaments, drawing on daylight in order to illuminate the interior. At night, light sources at the interior end of each rod will allow the whole structure to glow from the outside.

The pavilion will be situated on a landscape which resembles paper which once wrapped the building, but now lies unfolded on the site. The surrounding space will provide an open venue
for public events and along with shelter for visitors.

David Ope

David Ope’s hallucinational and abstract animated gifs are as close to online art as you can come.

Headset Concept Design by Pierre Dutoit

Ron Arad: Restless

Barbican Art Gallery stages the first major survey in the UK of the internationally acclaimed, London-based design maverick Ron Arad.

Ron Arad: Restless explores three decades of Arad’s designs from his early post-punk approach of assembling products from readymade parts to his exclusive and highly polished sculptural furnishings. Featuring a dramatic exhibition design by Ron Arad Associates using the latest LED display technology, Ron Arad: Restless also includes architectural designs and immediately recognisable mass produced pieces.

Highlighting the significance of experimentation, process and materials in Arad’s work, the exhibition offers a timely insight into the development of objects from initial idea and fabrication to finished design.

Stormwater Transformation

Mount Tabor Middle School Rain Garden in Portland, Oregon, designed by Kevin Robert Perry with Brandon Wilson and built in 2007.

Here, most of the rainwater falling on the school grounds are captured and allowed to infiltrate the soil rather than piped away on aging sewers.

BEFORE :

This highscohol’s car park has been transformed, now it cleanses the water of pollutants, cools the school’s south-facing classroom and provides an on-site, real-world example of environmental design.

Great Street Games

Here is an interesting interactive installation set to come online at the of the month in three UK cities. Created by KMA, Great Street Games will be a “huge, participatory, high-tech athletics tournament” in which participants in Gateshead, Sunderland and Middlesbrough compete against each other virtually in real-time using the city as platform.

KMA will use projected light and thermal-imaging technology to create interactive ‘courts’ in which human movement triggers light effects. The physical movements of players determine the outcome the games, which will run on ten-minute cycles. Participants develop their game-playing skills as they progress through a number of levels to help their area to victory or to simply have fun.

KMA describes the rules:

The ‘courts’ created by projected light; each court comprising a central playing area and two zones representing the other two locations. Balls of light appear from the centre of each court – these projected images can be moved by players physically ‘touching’ them. The aim of the first game is for each location to gain points by moving as many balls as possible to the other locations. Games last 90 seconds and 5 games make a series – through which the games increase in complexity as players become more familiar with the rules. The town or city with the most points at the end wins.

You’re walking home alone one night through pedestrian unfriendly, darkly lit corridors. All of a sudden, you trigger a sensor and projectors spray the pavement with technicolor lights.

“Wanna play,” a disembodied voice rings out from a speaker.

“Umm, sure,” you instinctively respond, even if you don’t how to play what is to be played. “I’ll learn along the way,” you say to yourself.

And then it’s hours later; the sun is about to rise and wash out the lights. The two of you promise to return the following night (tonight, actually) to continue the game, with friends to make it a team competition. It’ll be Chicago vs. Manchester.

A week or two later, you find out on Twitter that there are other similar game spaces installed throughout the city, but their locations are a secret. There’s no iPhone app for it yet. So you set on a walkabout, hoping that you might again trigger a sensor.

Matt Stuart

These are the fantastic photographs of ’street photographer’ Matt Stuart. I think its amazing that he has been able to capture these moments in everday life, that are not staged.  You can see more of his work here: http://www.mattstuart.com/