How can you draw customers inside your shop, when exposing wares in a window is not an option? This framed wooden butcher’s shop might be an answer. Although it is unclear to what uses this framed life-like model of a butcher’s shop might have been put, the fact that it is framed and behind glass,...
Seventeenth-century Dutch socialites Petronella de la Court and Petronella Oortman, the dauphin of France, Queen Victoria, and Queen Mary had them: dollhouses and miniature replicas of masterworks of furniture and decorative arts, through which they could recreate their larger-than-life existence. The popularity of these Lilliputian marvels extended well into the twentieth century, when doll-sized houses,...
One participant, frog’s Robert Fabricant, captured the day’s conversation with a series of sketches. The one-day Social Impact Design Summit, held on February 27, 2012, brought together individuals who engage in socially responsible design every day: public-interest architects, industrial designers, planners, civil-society designers, landscape architects, engineers, and inventors from Australia, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the...
This is the fourth in a series of posts about my new book, Designing Media James Truman, December 2008 I was lucky to be able to interview James Truman in Napa Valley, not so far away from my home base, where he was staying in a visitor’s cottage on the Francis Ford Coppola estate. He...
On September 24, Design Watch Members were treated to a rare look into the Richard Meier & Partners Model Gallery in Long Island City, overlooking the Pepsi-Cola sign and the East River. A mammoth model of The Getty Center greeted viewers: made of basswood and birch, the 25’ x 25’ model rested on 16...
Most people go to exhibitions to look at the objects. Eggheads go to read the labels. Design geeks (and museum professionals like myself) want to study the installation itself. How are the platforms and cases constructed? How are the texts laid out? How are supplementary graphics handled? Cooper-Hewitt’s new exhibition Design for a Living World...
Nutrition in Bolivia Positive Deviance Study In this growing area of design innovations are evident in numerous forms. Not limited to current technologies these designers sample from current, emerging and out-moded technologies to provide low cost effective solutions to benefit the poor and marginalized. Working across disciplines and sectors they partner in innovative ways. They...
