THE HAPPY FILM, support the new doc by Stefan Sagmeister

Watch the smile-inducing trailer.

What does it mean to be happy? How do we measure it? Is happiness like a muscle we can flex at will, and if so, “is it possible to train our mind in the same way we train our bodies?”

A short while ago, artist and designer Stefan Sagmeister decided to put these questions to the test with a three-part practice involving meditation, cognitive behavioral therapy and prescription drugs – and make a documentary about his experience called THE HAPPY FILM. Through experiments and explorations (“from the sublime to the ridiculous”) loosely based on his pivotal book “Things I Have Learned in My Life So Far,” Stefan will test “once and for all if it’s possible for a person to have a meaningful impact on their own happiness.”

Redesigning Venice works in theory only

The 2011 Venice CityVision Competition is like lots of other city-based urban redesign contests in that it challenges architects, engineers and designers to come up with innovative ideas that make use of new and sustainable materials and building methods in a way that’s visually arresting and ultra modern while also making reference to the city’s history. It’s a lot to ask, especially when you consider that the winning proposals are hardly ever implemented.

Paul Rand on design

Want more design? Stay tuned for QUIRKY, premiering in August on Sundance Channel

If you don’t know the eminent graphic designer Paul Rand by name you definitely know his work. He created the logos for IBM, UPS, ABC and Enron, to name just a few. He’s also one of the originators of the International Typographic Style, also known as the Swiss Style (though he’s a Brooklyn native), which was created in the 1950s to emphasize minimalism, sans-serif typefaces and gridded, asymmetrical layouts.

Ji Lee lecture

2011/03 Ji Lee from CreativeMornings on Vimeo.

One of my first posts here on SUNfiltered back in the spring of 2009 (insert aphorism here about how time flies and holy father I’m getting old) was a spotlight on my design crush Ji Lee, then creative director at Google Labs until his recent move to Facebook as their first creative director. Ever since I first learned of him and his work years ago, his ability to channel his creativity into both personal projects and his soaring career has long been a source of inspiration for me. In the video above, Ji Lee gave a recent talk at Creative Mornings (a monthly series of short lectures) discussing how the pursuit of personal passions and interests can have a positive, unintentional consequence on one’s career. If you’re in a rut this is a must-watch video.

Billboard swing set

This billboard converted into a swing has been circulating around the blogosphere but I think its particular blend of imaginative urban design, architecture, and playfulness would appeal and resonate with our classy readers here. Conceptualized and created by Didier Faustino for Bureau des Mésarchitectures, “Double Happiness” was presented at the 2008 Shenzhen & Hong Kong [...]

Low resolution versions of famous book covers

“Low Res Books” is a series created by RISD MFA graduate Benjamin Shaykin (and former art director of Mother Jones, one of my favorite news magazines ever) where he distills the familiar covers of popular editions of novels into their most basic pixelated form, whereby “they become abstract, mere suggestions of books” and “…while seemingly abstract, they act as a kind of semaphore, signaling a shared cultural connection between anyone who can decipher them.”

Consumer brand badges

Hope Chu adapted the military’s ribbons and decorations and created these “consumer badges” for her MFA thesis at RISD. Display your brand loyalties proudly!

Coffee cup design a day

Bernat Cuni took the basic coffee mug and designed thirty different concepts for his One Coffee Cup a Day project. Most of the designs remind me of the flawed function product project that I previously blogged about here.

Giant comb bike rack

The founders of Knowhow Shop LA, a design studio and cooperative artist space, created and built this 400-pound bike rack for a public art initiative in Roanoke, Virginia. It reminds me of a functional utilitarian Claes Oldenburg piece.

Build your own LEGO skull

This is just so cool: Clay Morrow created this LEGO skull. You can build your own by downloading the instructions provided here (pdf). Speaking of LEGO projects, check out this hack of an IKEA table decorated with LEGO bricks to give it a pixelated decorative design.

Classic Penguin covers mash-up with video games

I really enjoy Olly Moss’s “Video Game Classics” series where he “redesigned covers for some of [his] favourite video games, based on the classic Penguin Marber Grid.” This “marber grid” was a distinctive style guide created by Polish designer Romek Marber for Penguin book covers. [Via]

Stefan Sagmeister talks about what inspires him

If there’s one name aspiring young designers think of when it comes to inspiration, it’s Stefan Sagmeister. The inimitable Austrian designer has put his mark on everything from advertising to film, art installations and furniture. He hardly needs an introduction at all. It only seems fitting, then, for theinspiration.com to conduct an interview with Sagmeister about what inspires him, a question he broke down into three parts.

Upcycling a billboard into a bag: Relan

Vinyl, aka PVC, is everywhere… and, as we’ve noted before (and as the film BLUE VINYL argued), it’s pretty nasty stuff. The best thing we could do is to stop making and using it, and substitute more environmentally benign materials. Second best… make use of all that vinyl that often goes to landfills.

Manhattan versus Brooklyn

For those unfamiliar, there’s always a bit of friendly banter and rivalry among New York City boroughs. Things however had been calm until one Etsy’r launched a shot across the bow-klyn bridge at Manhattan with his artisan hand screen printed poster above. Well, Manhattanite James Campbell Taylor returned the fire with his own poster that was “designed using an international software giant’s latest creative suite,” “mass-produced by the overworked, underpaid slaves of a Manhattan-based corporate behemoth,” and most decidedly “not available on Etsy.”

Portable pocket pillow concept

Key Portilla-Kawamura and Ali Ganjavian of design studio Kawamura Ganjavian created this concept called “OSTRICH (pocket pillow for nap, 2011)” to help provide some portable comfort for those power naps at your desk or at the library

Unique pottery plates

Maxime Ansiau created a four piece set of plates that puts a unique architectural-themed spin on Delftware blue and white glazed pottery.

Green tech finds (6/2/11)

Mini electric Hummers, solar-powered prisons, and the climate risk posed by biodegradable products… this week’s green tech finds.

• Autodesk meets sustainability: Design/engineering software suite Autodesk has now added a tool that allows users to generate environmental impact assessments of their creations.
  
  
• Biodegradable products may not be climate-friendly: Turns out that biodegradable disposable tableware and such may have a real downside — the creation of methane in landfills (most of which aren’t set up to capture the potent greenhouse gas). (via @conservationval)
  
  

Boxsal – the compostable picnic

Last week Gilt Groupe had a sale on the fashionably recyclable picnic boxes made by Boxsal. Or wait, was it Gilt Home or Gilt Taste? Oh, who can keep track anymore. Unlike most Gilt deals, the sale didn’t actually save buyers any money – the picnic boxes still go for $25 on their own website, but at the price who’s complaining? No, the “sale” was really more of a promotion and, well, it worked.

Boxsal, which calls its products “part Oscar de la Renta, part Oscar Meyer,” claims to be “bringing the picnic back into fashion,” and with recyclable cardboard picnic boxes available in three different designs (see images below), it just might.

Graffiti cocktail shaker

This spray can shaped cocktail shaker from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago combines two of my interests: well-mixed cocktails and street art.

Want/Need glass

Clever glass with an opening from Alesina Design reminding us of that thin line between necessity and conspicuous consumption. Each is hand finished, numbered, and signed.

A Taxonomy of Office Chairs

For designers, the chair is the ultimate object. Designer Ross Lovegrove puts it well. “Chairs,” he says, “are an infinite source of potential to explore material, structure, technology and form…all related to the human body and its elevation.” But given its status, Jonathan Olivares, who heads a design consultancy in Boston, was surprised that he was unable to find an objective reference manual on the subject. Books about chairs are popular, to be sure, but they’re skewed towards the author’s own personal tastes. So Olivares decided to write the book himself, an unbiased compendium that designers could refer to in order to get the whole history, not just one person’s historical preferences.

Toby Wong retrospective

Portrait made from dice by Frederick McSwain

Toby Wong was a Canadian designer I once interviewed for FULL FRONTAL FASHION. He was a product designer and a subversive artist. His designs weren’t for everyone. He made gold coke spoons cast from McDonald’s coffee stirrers and diamond rings, inverted, so the diamond point was on the outside. That design was called “Killer Ring” obviously. This New York Times slideshow is a great reference of his work.

It is Design Week in NYC this week and a retrospective called Brokenoff Brokenoff, in Toby’s honor, will run May 14-17. It’s a celebration of Toby’s work including many close friends’ contributions.

Making of a Marc Newson hourglass

The Hourglass from Ikepod on Vimeo. Watch this gorgeously shot video directed by Philip Andelman of the creation of a hourglass re-imagined by superstar contemporary designer Marc Newson, typically “known for his unique style of ‘biomorphism’ to achieve organic forms through high-tech materials.” The great accompanying music is by the aptly named Philip Glass. Of [...]

Artsy animated GIF images

GIF images have historically resided in the seedier corners of the Internet, in profiles of message board users and the like, but these looping animated images have started to emerge as a medium of some artistic merit in their own right. New York City photographer Jamie Beck and designer Kevin Burg have gained some viral [...]

Designer Mind Games

“The Statistical Clock”

Design/art collective Dunne & Raby don’t actually call themselves artists. Anthony Dunne is a design professor at the Royal College of Art in London and Fiona Raby has a background in architecture, but unlike design studios that specialize in creating fonts or objects or furniture, Dunne & Raby make projects that “use design as a medium to stimulate discussion and debate about the social, cultural and ethical implications of existing and emerging technologies.” Their work is in the permanent collections of the MoMA, the Victoria & Albert Museum, Frac Ile-de-France and FNAC.

To give you an idea of what those discussion-generating projects are like, let’s take a look at “Do You Want to Replace the Existing Normal?” (2007/08), a four-part installation that anticipates design in a “time when we will have more complex and subtle everyday needs” as opposed to our current “unimaginative and practical” desires.