Furniture Reporter

How much do you want this ‘Decoupage Chair’ by Artel?!

Modular furniture is all the rage these days and the Volvo seating unit is no exception. This inviting chair, made of cardboard layers, grabbed the first place as sustainable project designed for “Volvo For Life Design Awards”. The unique seating system takes its inspiration from the tail lamps of a Volvo car. The chair looks to be just another seating system on the first sight, but it comes with integrated ottoman and side table. The ottoman and the magazine rack can be detached from the chair for the ultimate in lounging. Once you are done, you can again put the ottoman and side table back into the chair for easy storage and transportation. The Volvo seating unit not just flaunts an uncomplicated design, but cardboard finish makes it eco supportive as well. Though, it can be used both indoors as well as outdoors, but it’ll make a unique attic or pool side seating unit.

Add cool ambiance with the Pod Lens outdoor lighting from designer Ross Lovegrove and Luceplan. This simple hanging outdoor light offers a festive look in four colored UV-resistant and waterproof polycarbonate diffusers.

In 2007,  Gary Hustwit directed Helvetica, a small budget, feature-length documentary about the 50-year old typeface. A niche film with an undeniably nerdy topic, Helvetica soon became a global phenomenon. One of the film’s greatest achievements was the way in which it managed to convey both Helvetica’s extraordinary designer status and its truly impressive universal success as possibly the most ubiquitous and generic typeface in common use.

Now Hustwit is at work on stuff. Moving from graphics to objects, his next project, due to premiere in Spring of 2009, is aptly called Objectified. Here’s how the Objectified website describes the project:

Objectified is a feature-length independent documentary about industrial design. It’s a look at the creativity at work behind everything from toothbrushes to tech gadgets. It’s about the people who re-examine, re-evaluate and re-invent our manufactured environment on a daily basis. It’s about personal expression, identity, consumerism, and sustainability. It’s about our relationship to mass-produced objects and, by extension, the people who design them.

And here’s the trailer:

Objectified looks set to become another runaway success with the design crowd, but the trailer really makes me wonder whether it will manage to provide us with any interesting views on our everyday relationship with things - with generic things. The beauty of Helvetica was that through the passionate and obsessive following of one font, the film took us deep into what most of us experience daily as no-design-land, the land of cinema tickets, road signs, TV news - just life, no designer tag. Objectified seems more concerned with designers and their creative process, a hardly innovative approach to the world of objects that yields little real insight into the average human relationship with manufactured goods, but lots of talk about ‘good design’ and ‘user needs’. But I might be mistaken. I really hope I am. I guess I just didn’t like the trailer. That’s funny, because I thought I did.

Suitable for the non-smoker

Blow inflatable armchair (1967) in red by Jonathan De Pas (1932-1991), Donato D’Urbino (b. 1935) and Paolo Lomazzi (b. 1936).