One Hour Per Second

One hour per second, that’s right, it’s not a typo, it’s the utterly staggering statistic released from the Google Data Arts Team (the same folks who do the Chrome Experiments) looking at the volume of video content uploaded to YouTube around the world!

If you’re still having trouble visualising those astounding quantities then head over to www.onehourpersecond.com for some more help in relating to those numbers.  Oh, and turn your speakers on for the full site experience (but beware the Nyan Cat!).

Just wait until fibre optic connections are readily available, and HD is the norm.  A pretty powerful spectacle I’m sure you’ll agree.

Doodling In Math: Part 2

Here is Part 2 in Vi Hart’s wonderful Doodling In Math series.  Following on from last week’s Part 1 we continue our journey of spiral discovery and the occurrence of Fibonacci numbers in nature.

So now you know how to at least try and think like a mathematical minded plant, and of course how to make the ever-useful angle-a-tron and discover the golden ratio of Phi (Φ).

Part 3 coming soon!

Note: Beautiful spirally non-Fibonacci pinecones are very rare! If you find one, keep it!

Roald Dahl Stamps

I spent much of my childhood reading Roald Dahl and gazing at the beautiful illustrations by Quentin Blake. Timeless as they, Magpie Studio have used them as the basis for designing a new set of stamps for Royal Mail to celebrate 30 years in print for The BFG.

As the original book was only ever illustrated in black and white (which doesn’t translate to stamps so well), I was particularly pleased to discover some brand new illustrations that Quentin Blake was commissioned to do (in colour!) just for this stamp set.

Snozzcumbers and Whizzpoppers and Whangdoodles.

I couldn’t have put it any better myself.

Featuring in amongst the BFG designs are some of Roald Dahl’s other well known characters, all drawn in the distinctive hand of Blake.

Pick up your own copies of the stamps and other Roald Dahl items at the Royal Mail Shop, the 11 card set particularly caught my eye.

Terence Conran – The Way We Live Now

Marking Sir Terence Conran’s 80th birthday the Design Museum are showing a major exhibition which takes a look at his impact and influence on British life and design with The Way We Live Now.

The exhibition follows Conran’s career from his childhood growing up in post-war Kingston-upon-Thames through to his life as a designer, retailer, restauranteur, and all round entrepreneur.

Examples of his philosophy and design works are on show, elegantly summed up as “plain, simple and useful”.  It echoes the sentiment of the principles of good design by Dieter Rams who, in my opinion, is one of the greatest designers we’ve seen.

Evidence of Conran’s work process is on display too.  Numerous iterative prototypes and models refine the ergonomics and form to something beautifully simple and well designed.

As well as a good collection of some previously unseen work from his days at habitat.

As a designer this quote was particularly inspiring to read.  Why should somebody else have to work out how to make your design?  If you don’t know, then it’s probably either too complicated, or not yet finished.

Conran’s own office has also been painstakingly recreated here, over 1000 items show off a duplicate work environment that Conran uses, from photos and books to his desk and chair.  An insight into how he likes to work, and a real presenting touch that highlights even design heroes such as he are human too.

Terence Conran founded the Design Museum back in 1989 and his continual support of it was demonstrated last year when he gifted almost £18m to help fund the planned move of the museum to a new site in Kensington.  A sneak preview of the building and site can be seen.

The exhibition runs until 4th March, so if you’re down near Shad Thames in the next few weeks it’s well worth a visit.

The Page Turner

Rude Goldberg was an American cartoonist, and is probably best known for his wonderous illustrations depicting unnecessarily complex machines and gadgets performing simple, everyday tasks.

These Rude Goldberg Machines have provided the basis and inspiration for kinetic artist Joseph Herscher‘s very own deliberately over-engineered and elaborate page turner.  Takes reading the paper to another level, lovely stuff.

I think my favourite step is the boiling beaker that fills the increasingly heavy scourer with steam, a great touch!

If you fancy trying to create one of these yourself then check out the New York Times site for a full break down of how the machine works.

Doodling In Math: Part 1

After the success of Inspirational Geek’s first mini series on Thought Experiments last year, I’m at it again.  The theme is still based around science and creativity but this time it will be a little shorter, only three parts.

The ingenius series comes from Vi Hart.  She’s no stranger to Inspirational Geek, I’ve featured her world on a Mobius Strip before, and have long been a fan of her mathematically based doodles.

Sit back and enjoy.

I hope that this has more than wet your appetite for the subject of spirals, Fibonacci sequences, and snuggled up slug cats.  If not at least a taste for Vi’s almost magical simplicity and adorable voice explaining seemingly complex ideas through squiggles and pine cones!

Part 2 coming soon.

The Joy Of Books

What happens when a couple spend many a sleepless night moving, stacking and animating books at the Type bookstore in Toronto?  This lovely video, wonderfully titled The Joy Of Books.

The music, that sounds almost evocative of a magical fairytale, was composed by Grayson Matthews.

Via Swiss Miss.

Fotoshop By Adobé

Fotoshop by Adobé, the late-night-tv-inspired beauty product we all want.

Full to the brim with clichés and highlighting the (often) extreme levels of absurdity within the beauty industry.

Transform your look the way celebrities do with this beauty industry secret that’s now available for the first time ever.

Brilliant.  Top work Jesse Rosten.

More images here, behind the scenes video here.

The Obliteration Room

An extremely simple installation opened at Queensland Gallery Of Modern Art in December - The Obliteration Room by Yayoi Kusama.

Comprising of a typical home environment set up and painted uniformly in a glaringly pristine white, it offered a literal blank canvas to all visitors to the exhibition, and in the two weeks that followed every child that turned up got a handful of coloured stickers and was invited to contribute by decorating the room.

With the time almost measurable based on sticker density alone, a wonderful feeling of freedom transpires.   No pattern, no restrictions, no guidelines, just complete and utter indulgence to splash colour about as you feel.  Perfectly suited to a child’s mind and creativity.

The transformation is the vivid and colourful explosion of dots you see here, a kind of child-friendly version of that Sony advert from a few years ago.

Photo by Stupie.  Used with permission.

Thousands and thousands of stickers later the ‘obliteration’ is complete.

Photo by Stupie.  Used with permission.

The bold, block colours are reminiscent of childhood, and add a wonderfully fun dimension to the exhibit with a a real human and interactive element.

If you’re in Queensland you can experience the room for yourself as part of the Look Now, See Forever exhibition at GOMA until March 11 2012.

Light World Tour Interview With Paula Rainha

As a bit of a Christmas treat I recently got asked to interview lighting designer Paula Rainha.  Paula has just finished on a project I’m extremely envious of – the Philips Light World Tour.

The Light World Tour was a chance to follow the experience and travels of Paula as she discovered the world’s most inspirational lighting installations and designs in the world over a three month period at the tail end of 2011.

From the likes of Dubai (a place I’m slightly more familiar with) to Tokyo, Perth, Laukvik and more (places I’m certainly not!).  You can check out the full route here and judging by the regularly updated blog the whole experience looked rather spectacular.

Tokyo

And so given the opportunity to ask a few questions I got in touch and it went something like this…

Inspirational Geek:  So Paula, for my readers that may not be so familiar with you, I believe you trained as an architect, what made you make the move into lighting?

Paula Rainha:  At some point in my life I had to choose between Dance and Architecture, and I eventually chose the latter. When I finished Architecture, part of me still wanted to connect the two subjects and I started looking for a course in light stage design. I ended up finding a lighting master at an Architectural School, which interested me. Since then it just made sense working in Architectural Lighting.

IG:  What inspires your work?

PR:  Creativity and people more than anything. I love the human side of design either by working with people or designing for people as the end users.

Madrid

IG:  It must have been such a fantastic opportunity for you to explore the world, myself amongst many others were quite jealous!  What have you learnt whilst on the WT?

PR:  Light is not something that you can actually see from pretty pictures but you actually need to experience it, if you think that perception is one of the key elements for lighting. So having had the chance of perceiving it myself was a great learning process for me as a professional and as an individual. I always tried to talk to  as much people as I could, not only designers or architects but general people and this was really interesting also because all the cultural differences on how people perceive lighting.  People are not really aware of the importance of lighting and neither how good lighting design can be beneficial for them.

IG:  I’ve been following the WT blog and one of my favourite photos of yours has been the peony petals on the beautiful facade of the Liuli China Museum in Shanghai.  What were the particular highlights and experiences for you?

PR:  I loved that museum too. It was very special. The intensity and speed of the trip was actually determinant on how experienced it. Everything was really intense and is very fresh on my mind, meaning that I still find it very difficult to have enough distance to judge what were my highlights. I think the most interesting part of the trip was actually the human side of it: talking to people, meeting different designers, architects, friends and just learning from what I saw and heard.

Shanghai

IG:  What was your favourite stop off on the tour?

PR:  I love all the big metropolis such as London, NYC, Sydney, Hong-Kong, Tokyo, Berlin, Amsterdam but I also liked the natural landscapes such as Arizona and the Lofoten Islands in Norway.

Dubai

IG:  What was your favourite lighting installation / design that you encountered?

PR:  Most of the light art installations I found were really interesting to experience, from Janet Echelman´s sculptures in Sydney, Phoenix & Porto to Victoria Coeln´s light-colour paints in Vienna or Olafur´s installations in Oslo & Copenhagen amongst others.

Janet Echelman light sculptures in Sydney and Phoenix.

Victoria Coeln’s Chromotop in the Stephansdom, Vienna

IG:  What are the biggest differences in lighting design you encountered between different countries and cultures on the tour?  How does LD in the far east for example, compare to Europe?

PR:  I was actually quite surprised to realise that Lighting Design is not that well known or developed as I had imagined, even in bigger cities or more developed countries. Obviously with the actual economic situation across Europe the development of light design might become slower than actually some places in the Far East. In China for example I heard that clients and investors are becoming more aware of the potential of light and asking for lighting consultants to be part of the design teams.

London

IG:  Has your perception of lighting industry changed since you’ve been on this tour?

PR:  Yes, it has changed in the sense that the lighting industry actually should be raising the importance of good lighting around the world. The more I learn about light, the more I think this would be crucial and beneficial for all of us.

Olafur in Oslo

IG:  The tour has been quite full on for you, what do you plan to do now you’re back?

PR:  I would like to be more involved in raising awareness of the importance of light in our own environments. Nevertheless I´m still thinking of what to do with all the information I gathered throughout these three months, it would be interesting to turn this into something more physical either a publication or an exhibition. These are just some thoughts for now…

IG:  Does anything frustrate you about the industry?

PR:  There is nothing major that frustrates me about the industry but I´d like to see manufacturers and designers pushing towards the same goal and that would be good lighting.

IG:  Which project or piece of work of yours are you most proud of?

PR:  I would like to see the Mayfair & Belgravia lighting masterplan in London being implemented from when I worked at BDP Lighting. Every time I pass a COS (Collection of Style) store around the world I know that I was part of this when I developed all the roll out manual with Campbell Design. Or recently, a temporary exhibition for the Triennale of Architecture in Lisbon, where overcoming the challenge of time, budget and design and the site constraints was very self rewarding.

IG:  Who, if any, are your design heroes?

PR:  I´m not sure if I have design heroes but I find that many light artists are a real source of inspiration. Secretly I feel that one day I´d like to do amazing things such as the ones of James Turrel and Olafur Eliasson´s for example.

Your Blind Passenger in Copenhagen

A big thanks to Paula for taking the time out to answer my questions, and to Philips in their support of the World Tour itself.  You can check out loads more great photos over on the Light WT Flickr stream, and there are some lovely videos on the Philips You Tube channel too.

All photos and images used here with permission.  Copyright © Paula Rainha.

Have you just finished an exciting trip or project you’d like to get featured on Inspirational Geek?  Or is there somebody you would like to see interviewed?  Then please get in touch or leave a comment below.