Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Hyatt is hardly a boutique brand, but the international hotel chain is taking an increasingly bespoke approach to its properties. After a handful of successful, locally minded collaborations, New York-based architecture and interior design firm Stonehill & Taylor recently completed work on the chain’s Minneapolis location that boasts a “made in America” ethos throughout the whole site.

The large scale renovation encompassed all major public areas, including the lobby, bar, and addition of a new marketplace, as well as 533 guest rooms on a somewhat tight timeframe of 12 months, as opposed to the standard 18. Stonehill & Taylor was asked to spend as much of the budget as possible in the US. “It’s a commendable directive, and one that was almost absolutely required by the accelerated schedule,” principal Mike Suomi tells Co.Design. “There wasn’t time to have things made by the cheapest bidder–who may not be in our country–because it might not have made it on deadline.”

Research into the city’s history revealed three main, milling-centric industries–timber, grain and flour, and wool–that revolved around a waterfall at the junction of the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers. “These became the source of a lot of our design ideas. Then we looked for manufacturers who were still working in these fields,” Suomi says. Everything from blankets to pottery, raw logs to corridor art, came from this deep dive into the area’s heritage. Stroud, a purchasing agency, did extensive legwork to gather quotes from vendors who would handle some of the bigger orders, such as large quantities of casegoods or seating. “They ended up identifying a lot of manufacturers we’d never heard before.”

The approach represents a potential sea change in strategy when it comes to domestic building. “Up until very recently, projects that were moving forward were set on spending as little money as possible–by taking a long time, they could aggressively bid and rebid to get costs down,” Suomi explains. “When the time saved is of less value than the actual dollars, people scour the earth to find things with no regard to the carbon footprint.” And as for the Minneapolis Hyatt, the shift away from outsourcing has been a success–there’s already plans to renovate an adjacent complex for Hyatt in the same spirit.

The time is nigh for foot-powered washing machines. Though the concept has been explored before, two recent projects are garnering attention for their real-world feasibility in alleviating the struggles associated with laundry in regions without easy access to electricity or running water. GiraDora, created by a pair of Art Center College of Design students, is receiving accolades, and Philadelphia University industrial design students Eliot Coven and Aaron Stathum have concurrently developed a similar product with a different approach; Up-Stream is an analog appliance built around the ubiquity of five-gallon buckets, allowing users to adapt the piece with materials from their region.

The way it works is quite simple: leg strength agitates loads within the vessel, then that same motion–on the same unit–is used to spin the excess moisture out. Coven and Stathum worked with a goal of making Up-Stream as accessible as possible, and as a result, the framework can be customized with indigenous, recycled, or found component parts. “We see the bucket as the common object. But the metal pipes could be replaced with bamboo shoots, for instance. By making it so DIY-centric, people everywhere can use their available resources, but also use their own personal ingenuity and creativity,” they tell Co.Design. “We hope to lay the groundwork for washing and that people will continue to design this object to fit their needs.”

Each durable five gallon bucket can hold about five articles of clothing, and needs only a touch of powdered detergent, or even a bar of soap; a single load takes about 20 minutes from start to finish (not counting drying time). In lieu of a traditional scrub board, which breaks down textile fibers quickly and causes premature wear-and-tear, Coven and Stathum conceived a neoprene sleeve that provides means for spot cleaning. Location was also a consideration. “Many people clean directly in the rivers, contaminating the water for everyone downstream; we isolated this problem by moving Up-Stream on to land,” they say. The duo are looking into a Kickstarter campaign to fund targeted testing and further development, and hope to see the backbreaking task of laundry become a thing of the past.

(H/T Inhabitat)

Origin stories are de rigueur these days when it comes to design; it’s almost not enough to simply see a finished piece without also knowing the details of how it came to be. This year at Design Miami, W Hotels incorporated this narrative theme into its third annual Designer of the Future award, given to three up-and-comers who embody the brand’s design-as-experience spirit. The recipients–Markus Kayser, Philippe Malouin, and Tom Foulsham–were tasked with creating pieces around the concept “From Spark to Finish,” with the goal to illuminate part of their methods in the final works.

“We wanted to turn the lens in on the process itself,” Mike Tiedy, W’s Senior Vice President of Global Brand Design and Innovation, tells Co.Design. Considering the polished results, it’s impressive that the designers had only about a month’s notice to create the custom works, having received word of the nod during Milan’s Design Week in April then presenting these projects in Basel this month. The open-ended brief was intended to elicit disparate results. “We’re looking for people who aren’t following a typical path,” Tiedy says. “We appreciate their experimental nature.”

Both Kayser and Malouin played upon the “spark” aspect with lighting projects: LIGHTzeit is an installation that elegantly explores the connection between nature and technology, with fixtures that revolve to mimic the path of the sun (more about it here); Daylight transforms the vernacular of plantation-style shutters into a series of geometric Tanagram shapes, displayed alongside drawings, prototypes, and pictures that further illuminate the progression of the idea from conception to completion. The generation of energy acted as Foulsham’s muse, and his Go-Round is a bit more esoteric–a balancing device, sturdy enough to hold the weight of two adults, that is also agile enough to be triggered into rotation with nothing more than a powerful exhale.

Now that they’ve debuted, the works will make their way to W properties worldwide, popping up in conjunction with design week activities, lectures, and events. And you can expect to see more collaborations between the brand and the designers themselves. “More and more we’re trying to bring them in as we have hotels being built. We want to use their talents to come up with new ideas,” Tiedy says. “That’s our ultimate goal–to involve them in actually crafting the identity for these hotels.”

It’s a youngster’s rite of passage to awkwardly wield a pair of safety scissors, snip into a sheet of construction paper, swipe a glue stick across the scraps, and see the whole masterpiece stuck up on the fridge at home. Artist Michael Velliquette has taken the basic skill of cut-and-paste to a whole new level with his incredibly intricate paper sculptures. Ripon College in Wisconsin hosted his most recent solo exhibition, which showcased a survey of his work over the past seven years. “The title of the show–One From Many From One–was about the expansion and contraction of an artist’s process, the evolution of a body of work over a lifetime,” he tells Co.Design. “It was a chance to see the various ways technical, formal, and conceptual threads have woven together during a period of intense personal and creative growth.”

Velliquette’s passion for craft predates his paper explorations, but his desire to derive the biggest impact out of the most modest component parts has always been a major motivator. “I’ve long had a love of sparkle and camp, and gravitated towards things that were bright, flashy, glittery, and ornate–things that could easily be added on to make something banal into something fabulous,” he says. “As a resourceful young artist I used mostly found materials or cheap things from the craft store. Over time these evolved into elaborate objects and large-scale installations that spoke about a kind of imaginative transformation of everyday materials like cardboard and string into something ‘special.’”

He transitioned to using paper exclusively in 2005, and has since experimented with watercolor, drawing, and card stocks from all over the world, plus acrylic inks, paste, and “straight up” hot glue to achieve the effects he’s after. “Last year I began coloring my own paper in an effort to get more complex colors and to add visual texture,” he says. “But most all of my cutting is done with a standard pair of flat-edge paper scissors–nothing fancy.” It takes a solid 40-50 hours a week for Velliquette to keep up with his projects, which start as a mere twinkle in his mind’s eye. “I usually ‘see’ the piece in my head, like through a fuzzy lens, and then do a very loose sketch. I’ll then refer back to that sketch regularly as a work evolves, and sometimes take digital images of it in progress, print them out and draw on the photos to refine the composition,” he explains. “Even though the drawings can be quite detailed, there are still many improvisational ‘moments’ in them–the liquid nature of the media I’m using, the hand-cut quality of the paper, etc. Most of the art that I respond to has that same mix of planning and happening going on in it.”

In addition to his own projects, Velliquette teaches introductory classes at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as well as weekend workshops for younger folks, and feels that the lessons learned will benefit even those who aren’t generally attuned to a hands-on kind of lifestyle. “More and more research proves that individuals in all types of professions perform better by being skilled with the creative process,” he says. “Plenty of people in all types of careers engage in their own work environments in very similar ways to what I do in my studio; they start with a raw material–maybe theirs is data, research, a theory, or diagnosis–then engage with a series of interpretive (and often imaginative) steps to ultimately create some sort of meaning from it. I truly feel that one of the ways we remain vital to contemporary society is by being teachers of that process.”

Maybe it’s his all-inclusive spirit shining through, but looking at his work there is a sense, however slight or improbable, that given a crack at those safety scissors again, you too could make something truly magical.

Purchase Velliquette’s monograph Lairs of the Unconscious here.

PowerPoint can be incredibly convincing when done well, but sitting through the much-maligned scourge of presentations is, all too often, mind-meltingly, sleep-inducingly, soul-crushingly, dull–not to mention completely ineffective. What makes this basic medium so difficult to master? Ravi Mehta, CEO of recently launched Slidevana, believes it’s a matter of understanding the format. “Unless you’re a graphic designer, you’re generally used to thinking in words and prose. PowerPoint is a type of visual communication; a lot of people go into it without shifting their perspective, which is why they can end with something that looks more like a teleprompter,” he tells Co.Design. His company aims to take the guesswork out of creating slides with a set of 150 templates–”a complete toolbox”–that will, in theory, help direct users to a more compelling means of getting their message across.

Mehta designed all the slides himself, but he is not a designer.* Instead, his experience comes from years in the tech industry, both giving and observing presentations in all their glory (or infamy). As for the design of the slides themselves? Well, they look pretty standard-issue. The key for Mehta is ease of use. “We present prefab slides so people can dive right in and start working on telling their story,” he says, stories that will either appeal to emotions, with image- or quote-based slides, or reason, with data-centric diagrams. In a conscious choice to cut down on unnecessary clutter, only two themes are offered: Dark, which suits dramatic keynote addresses in large, dimmed rooms, and Light, a better choice for more intimate roundtable talks or printed presos. Inserting your own content is done with an easy drag-and-drop, and it’s possible to customize throughout a deck.

One-time customers are able to access any new additions to the collection, and the service is offered for PowerPoint for both Windows and Mac, as well as Keynote. It would have been interesting to see what Mehta would have created in collaboration with a design professional to refine the format, because there’s certainly ample room for these PowerPoint presentations to improve their aesthetic appeal. And ultimately, to achieve the kind of professional transcendence implied in Slidevana’s company name, you’ll have to really distill your mission statement. “The most important part of the presentation is the moral,” Mehta says, and no pie chart in the world will help you fabricate that.

*Our advice: Hire a designer. Quickly. Because these things need a ton of work.–Ed.

Image: Jiri/Shutterstock

The act—and art—of bending plywood has preoccupied architects and designers the world over for ages, offering the idealistic promise of practical, functional, and affordable construction from a very modest material. The Dragon Skin Pavilion, a recent collaboration between the Laboratory for Explorative Architecture and Design (LEAD), a Hong Kong- and Antwerp-based firm, and the Tampere University of Technology in Finland, further explores the potential of this customizable lumber.

An early prototype of the self-supporting, free-standing form was developed after two workshops, and the structure was then “drastically reworked” for the Hong Kong and Shenzhen (HKSZ) Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture, LEAD’s founding director Kristof Criolla explains to Co.Design.

Cutting, milling, and molding each of the 163 squares of post-formable plywood—which has layers of adhesive film that eliminate the need for steam or extreme heat to curve—took place in Finland, but the assembly happened on-site in Hong Kong. “After a few false starts trying to figure out the best strategy, the puzzle was slotted into place by roughly nine people, in about three hours,” Criolla says.

And though the piece was only temporary at the pavilion, he feels there are lessons to be learned from its unique configuration, which “connects geometry with mechanics in one single integrated system” and can be scaled to suit a variety of environments. “The evolution of digital fabrication and manufacturing technology has brought us to a point where we need to revisit today’s building premises,” he says. “By actively working with this material’s basic properties and pushing its structural performance, the unlimited design freedom we experience digitally can be grounded and materialized in a sustainable way.”

The team is now looking for a second home for the Dragon. Any takers?

The Rotterdam duo of Ward van Gemert and Adriaan van der Ploeg have been designing products as Nightshop since 2010, and their latest piece allows for a bit of personal interpretation. The plastic P.O.V. (point-of-view) vase changes color based upon where you’re standing in relation to the object.

Six different styles are currently offered, ranging from The First One’s bright, playful stripes to The Red One’s deep exploration of that particular shade, but they both agree that the Rainbow–aka The Bright One–is their favorite. “Apart from the fact that this one stands out the most, it’s also the closest to our original idea,” van der Ploeg explains to Co.Design.

Though it looks to use some kind of lenticular technology to achieve the effect, van der Ploeg is remaining mum on the subject of what makes the hues transform. “In Holland there’s a famous saying–het geheim van de smit–which loosely translates to, ‘That’s the secret of the blacksmith.’ In other words: It’s our secret.”

The series will be on display in the up-and-coming, super-hip Ventura Lambrate district during Milan’s design week, happening now.

(H/t MoCo Loco)