To celebrate the centenary of the death of one of Brazil’s most famous and respected writers, Machado de Assis, the country’s biggest television network, Rede Globo, created a mini series inspired by the book Dom Casmurro, one of his most brilliant books.
The series, entitled Capitu, targeted an audience that traditionally does not watch television, to promote the show and start a conversation with an younger audience, Rede Globo called LiveAD, a company that focuses in innovation in communication and is part of the Box 1824 group, who then created, developed and produced a very special project called One Thousand Casmurros.
The project is a mixture of collective reading with an online social network. The book was divided in one thousand parts and a website was setup to allow people to choose and record (through the use of a webcam) themselves reading that part of the story. Important figures in brazilian media were them invited to contribute to the project to stimulate internet users to take part in the project.
In about a month the reading was completed, generating one of the first and most incredible collective readings in the internet. The repercussion and spontaneous media attention was worth the equivalent of 6,67 million of US dollars and around 106 million people read about the mini series and the project with the press coverage that followed the initiative. One Thousand Casmurros was considered to be the best tribute to the centenary of Machado de Assis and the action has just won a Gold Lion in Cannes in the new category of Public Relations. To understand better the project, take a look at the video case that was awarded the prize.
Room Room is an architectural project to help during emergency situations, created by a partnership between Encore Heureux and G Studio.
It proposes rethinking as a way to solve one of the most critical moments of one’s existence, when people are unable to fullfil some of their most basic necessities, like having a roof over their heads. For that, the studioes created a versatile enviroment that can be moved in different ways and it needs minimal space to be “parked”, turning into a resting place and also a storage space.
The mobile house was conceived and developed through an invitation made by the NAMOC (China’s National Art Museum) that presented in may several projects in that style, created by 17 architects from all around the world. The exhibition, called “Crossing: Dialogues for Emergency Architecture”, had as primary objective to shed light over social reconstruction in areas where natural disasters happened, and also to remind the world about the Wenchuan Earthquake which happened over a year ago.
Build in the 30’s and closed in the 80’s the High Line was an elevated railway that crossed through a part of Manhattan.
Recently reopened, it has passed by a reinterpretation of its spaces and now it is the first elevated park in the americas and the second in the world. The first project to use abandoned railtracks as a base to the contruction of a park was the Promenade Plantée, which crosses through Paris and exists since the 90’s.
The american High Line has another diferential, the first people that thought about giving it a makeover were the inhabitants of the neighborhood, which were tired of living with that abandoned space and founded the Friends of the High Line association. Soon after that, they presented a rennovation project and finally, gathered the support from the city hall. In 2003, it was launched a competition for designing the new High Line, which attracted more than 700 teams from over 36 different countries.
With the approved project in hands and all legal procedures well on their way, the rennovation of the first part of the High Line started in 2006. The project keeps being build, because only the first section is finished and opened to the public.
Since the end of last year, Motorola has been developing a project called Motorola 2033. In it, designers from five different offices of the company dedicate a little of their time to think about possible innovations in mobile communication for the next 25 years.
Motorola points to a future that mixes augmented reality and cloud computing. In their official release, the company affirms that people will live conected, in human enviroments that will work as interfaces, abolishing the use of softwares as we know.
Idea of a Tree is a machine that produces benches, boxes and lampshades. It can produce one object per day and it is inspired in the productive process of a tree, because it needs sun light to work.
The light is absorbed by panels, which start the machine when the sun rises and stop it when the sun comes down. All the energy is used to move the gears to make strings attached to it slide through a small tank full of resin and paint. After that, this little strings roll around a circling mold which is also powered by sun light.
The final product is made with these colored, resined and molded strings. The color and the shape depend only on the intensity of the light received, not on human action, just like a fruit from a tree. In sunnier days, the objects produced are thicker and have more vibrant colors, in rainy days, thin and opaque objects are made. This innovation has gained the project recognition and a prize at the International Design Festival Berlin. According to the creators Mishcer e Traxler, the idea is that the machine will work as a metaphor related to nature, because it produces things that are seeded through the day and then ripped when they are ready.
Vertical Farming is a concept that proposes to take agriculture to urban structures. With that, the growing of vegetables could be made in buildings, integrated to the day by day of big cities. And The Pyramid Farm, is a vertical farming project in the shape of a pyramid that reinvents the concept.
According to Dickson Despommier, the creator behind the structure, new answers are a growing necessity inside the megalopolis. The main reason for that is that world’s population is increasingly faster than our food production capacity, which could make something as big as 3 billions people suffer from hunger in 2060.
The project, created through the University of Columbia, is a self-sufficient structure that has different eco-systems, capable of reusing their own residues to produce a diverse range of food. From simpler culture like leafy vegetables, until complex systems like bird farming.
Besides being beautiful, the kids chair Parupu (a japanese word that means cellulose pulp) is revolutionary. Created by a trio of swedish designers Claesson Koivisto Rune, it draws attention specially because of its composition, a mixture called DoraPulp, product of research made by the Södra Pulp Labs.
DoraPulp is a material that is recyclable, made with paper and reinforced with a biodegradable plastic, created by mixing sugar cane and corn starch.
The most amazing thing about this process is that it manages to keep some qualities associated with paper, like lightness, and some characteristics that are usually found in plastics, like being resistant and water proof.
Parupu still is the first industrial use of the DoraPulp, but it certainly will not be the last, as atests Mårten Claesson, from the Claesson Koivisto Rune, when he says that the chair practically created itself when confronted with the possibilites of the material.
The concept, developed to create sustainable housing in 2020 in China, is called “Off the Grid” and tries to understand cities as eco-systems that are always changing and evolving, to achieve a more organic approach to building, they integrate functional characteristics using electronic and bio chemical into the build material so that it could sustain its own energy needs.
The idea is to use intelligent materials to construct the buildings, like the exterior panels would have a protective quality that would work like a membrane, changing accordingly to external conditions and conserving energy. So the exterior of the building could reflect the light to lit up indoor accomodations, could capture and store rain water to use for drinking and cleaning, channel the wind to act as air conditioning and to transform sun light into electricity. With all this intelligence in a building, it wouldn’t be necessary to conect it to a power or water grid.
The development of limited editions has been a recurring practice in the market, specially when you talk about Pepsi and Coca-Cola. The newest line of cans is made by Coke and its a homage to the summer in the northern hemisphere. Five cans were redesigned to receive iconic images like sunglasses, a beach ball, a surfboard, a barbecue grill and stars and stripes, the classic illustration of the american flag (this one to celebrate USA’s independence day). The illustrations will also be used in a merchandising campaign created by Wieden + Kennedy, to be applied in store fronts, t-shirts, baseball caps, beach towels, etc.
Last summer, Coke cans showed the brand’s relation to China, that was home to the latest Olympic Games. The traditional red can has been being reworked into colectable editions since the 90’s. We’ve had editions with polar bears, splashes, drops, bubbles and last year one of the biggest changes was the brand’s redesign, which was based on a quest for a more simple design.
The current edition joins the collectible factor with the new and cleaner look that has been associated with the brand in its recent history.
Hero 365 is a canadian design studio that has as its main objective to create beautiful and eco-conscious objects. In this year’s ICFF the group has shown its vision of the future of design. Two of their main projects were introduced, and they both rework traditional ideas to be more friendly to the enviroment and more functional at the same time.
The first one is the DR-1 Drying Rack, which can be used to dry clothes indoors or outdoors. It has rotating arms to hang the clothes from and movable surfaces to dry small objects. It’s an excellent alternative to more traditional heated dryers which use electrical power. The second project is the RC-1 Rain Colector, which has the purpose to collect and store water from rainy days. The system is capable of holding aproximately 45 gallons (or 170 liters) and has a very good filtering capacity. Easy to assemble and dissasemble, both are made with aluminum which can be recyled and is coated with a rust proof finish.
