The supplement's listing service provides details of almost all of New Zealand's design-related study opportunities. The supplement is delivered free to all secondary schools in New Zealand, but for those that might have missed out on a personal copy, it is also available to download as a pdf here.

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When Pink Floyd commissioned Storm Thorgerson to design the Dark Side of the Moon album cover, they did so with the words “We don’t want another picture, we’re bored of your pictures, we want a cool graphic.” Storm’s reply? “Don’t employ me then.” Their response, “we want to employ you, just to annoy you”. Apparently it worked, it did annoy him but it also produced one of the most recognisable album covers of all time.The man that once set another man on fire for a photograph was the man who really set the stage alight as headliner on the final day of SP 2010. Storm Thorgerson stole the show. He delivered worldly wisdom with a laid back attitude, striking an instant rapport with the audience as he told the fascinating stories behind what are some of the most iconic album covers of the 20th century.

This man is a metaphor machine and it is the aforementioned “boring pictures”, as Pink Floyd so eloquently put it, that really show Storm’s incredible talent. He has always believed album covers don’t sell records, arguing that his main concern “has always been to represent the band and the music”. The stories behind the images and the visual connections he makes are inspiring in themselves, but that’s only one half the story. Storm kept using the words “it’s all real”, repeatedly emphasising that many of his works of art were produced pre-Photoshop. Even from 20 rows back I could see his eyes light up at the memory of staging these magnificent spectacles and it’s that ‘real’ element that really takes his work to the next level.

Thorgerson's amazing sense of humour was evident throughout – not only in several of the pieces of work (one cover shows an orphan perched on a tree ‘looking for his roots’), but in the witty story-telling that kept the audience hanging on his every word. Thorgerson recalled the amazing thought process behind the Pink Floyd Wish You Were Here cover which famously involved him setting a man on fire: it was a metaphor around getting burnt in relationships and not wanting to get too close. He closed the segment with the line, “Actually, thinking about it, the man who we set on fire ended up dying in a fire. Spooky eh?”

One piece which particularly stood out was the cover for the Cranberries’ Wake Up And Smell The Coffee. The shot was staged on a beach, where they built a huge tower and proceeded to launch hundreds of gym balls off the top all at the same time. Thorgerson recalls, “It was so spectacular that the photographer forgot to take the shot the first time round.” The Cranberries cover was shot 10 years ago so it’s interesting to notice its likeness to some rather well-known recent Sony Bravia advertisements. The beauty of those advertisements was in the actual staging of the event, in the dismissal of the technology we’d become so heavily reliant on. It felt liberating.

Thorgerson has been creating covers for decades now. He did Muse’s Black Holes and Revelations only three years ago in exactly the same manner as he always has: travelling to a fantastic location and shooting it “for real”.  He never abandoned this art, even when the Apple Mac of temptation landed on his lap. This is what resonated with me and what I’m sure inspired the largely student-based audience to really want to create something real. I think he summed it up perfectly, in the only way he knew how – through a visual metaphor. He asked the audience to cut kiwi fruits in half, position the halves over their eyes and pose for a photograph. The title of the piece? ‘Fuck Avatar’.

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There is actually more to this “interesting” theory, which Roope  highlighted in his 50 minute talk around interactive design. He proposed that you might have an interesting idea, or something interesting to say, but the platform is now so saturated that you need to find a way to cut through the noise. Roope went on to explain that, as creative director of Poke London, he believes the way to achieve this is with a system. It’s the system behind each idea that makes it work. Luckily for me he didn’t mean web building codes but, rather, the insights behind understanding the audience and working out how to connect with them by analysing their culture and behaviour. In his words, “choreographing a customer experience”. Roope went on to highlight the many successful and largely ambitious projects he has been involved with, each of which taps into human psychology in some way. The first of which was the website he designed for Orange to highlight the unlimited nature of their new mobile plans, the answer, an unlimited webpage. It’s an interesting idea in itself, but the real insight behind the idea is how it relates to human needs and interaction, in this case quite simply the desire to try and get to the end will be enough to lure the consumers in.

Exercising a similar level of ambition, Poke also created the world's most tagged photograph. This may seem trivial – or perhaps not – but s again it's the insight behind that idea that carries it. The picture was taken at the Glastonbury 40^th Birthday Festival. The nature of people’s behaviour at a festival is what made this work. People wanted to find people they had met, identify friends and of course identify themselves; vanity is a strong driver in much of the work Poke do.

On another level, Roope outlined how interactive media can be used to solve problems, large or small. On the smaller scale, the need for fresh pastries, which Poke discovered on their morning pastry run. The result was Baker Tweet, a bakery-installed piece of hardware that sends messages  to Twitter when bread, or pastries, are ready…  (a 'bakery-proof box' is installed in bakery; messages sent wirelessly to Twitter; baker can update their messages and things they're selling using a simple web interface). On a larger scale, an older project of Roope’s is the The Global Rich List, a site on which you enter your income details and the like,  and it tells you how rich you are on a worldwide scale, thus cleverly tapping into the human emotions of vanity and greed. This is all turned on its head heads when you are shown how much poverty there really is in the world. Cue link to a charity donation page. Genius!

These insights and ideas alone would be inspiring, but Poke also manages to execute them skillfully and quite beautifully. So, getting back to the opening gambit, yes, it is safe to say that Roope and Poke are certainly more than “interesting”. As Roope himself said, “there’s too much noise and not enough heart”. Well, Poke London certainly bring the heart and they do it in style.

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For a girl who owns the URL ‘iamobsessedwithmycats.com’ (it redirects to her website) and describes her life as “a solitary existence where nobody showers and you get covered in cat hair”, Jessica Hische is actually a remarkably charming and talented young woman, all be it with a slight feline fetish.

She opened the show at Semi-Permanent this year and provided the audience with just the jump start they needed, real inspiration powered on by youthful enthusiasm for her craft, which is of course lettering, illustration and more recently type design. She began by taking us through some of her student work which, being only twenty-five, was somewhat recent and provided the audience with a good insight into how she entered the industry, not to mention providing a wonderful showcase for her eccentric sense of humour. This showed particularly in the board game she designed as a take on ‘The Game of Life’ only she named it ‘The Game of Divorce’ where you had to choose who to live with, mum or dad.

This may seem like student banter but humour is a great thing in illustration, she laughed, “there’s nothing people like more than dogs doing human things” — except possibly cats doing human things hey Jessica? But it’s not all fun and games. It’s obvious Hische has worked extremely hard to get to where she is today, and at such a young age too. She worked as designer after university for three years for Headcase and Louise Fili before going freelance and has now worked for everyone from the Boston Globe to the publishers of the Twilight novels.

At present Hische is working more and more in font design. She’s designed her first font ‘Buttermilk’ but still approaches the subject with the same humble attitude – talking of how the old type masters mock her when she doesn’t know the terminology. Personally, I’m not sure that matters when you can produce such beautiful pieces of work. A fine example of this is her current work illustrating the book covers of classic novels of the past.

This girl seems to have the world at her feet and she certainly has talent in her fingertips but it was her enthusiasm that really won me over. As designers we all face ‘challenges’ on a daily basis but she had the ability to laugh it off. She said she should make a book of all the bad art direction she has ever received, her favourite being “don’t make the fish look left it’s depressing.” She’s even seen her type on retro romance novels and, not only that; she loved the idea of this. She showed us the result and it looked nothing like she intended, but I think at this point she had won over the audience with her enthusiasm. It really was a bad romance novel but all she could say was “its every girl’s dream to have their type next to shiny lady leg.” Of course it is Jessica!

More:
Read a ProDesign interview with  Jessica Hische
Read Emma Parnell's review of Katrin Sonnleitner's Semi-Permanent talk

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Katrin Sonnleitner finds ways to make the mundane seem interesting again, she takes ordinary objects and shows them in a new light; she believes “small changes in an object that’s everyday can bring it back into a persons perception.” Sonnleitner enjoys the unexpected and for fifty minutes so did I. I had never heard of Sonnleitner before Semi-Permanent, she walked out with her cue cards looking the most nervous of all the speakers, perhaps not surprisingly with English being her second language, but she quickly won the audience over with her amusing observations and interpretations.

Sonnleitner’s work circles around various themes. She enjoys habits in human behaviour, rituals and traditions. She often merges familiar objects or changes them in an unexpected way to make something new. She has created writeable porcelain, drawers that move through walls and the infamous ‘broom-scythe’. Porcelain and drawers are everyday objects we take for granted but Sonnleitner has reinvented them and made us interact with them in a different way creating a whole new experience around an object.

One piece which stood out for me was based around the idea that when we wear an item of clothing once, we don’t want to put it in the laundry, equally we don’t want to put it back in the wardrobe, so where does it go? Sonnleitner has the answer, an object that combines the two, a wardrobe door on the front and a laundry bag on the back. Would I buy this? Probably not, but it’s based on a human observation that people are familiar with and this makes a connection with people. Sonnleitner’s work is generally very conceptual, which is what I loved about it: there is real thought and insight behind each piece. She brings to the surface observations that are already there and ready to be made and people connect with them in a similar way they connect with, for example, observational humour. So is her work art?

Sonnleitner doesn’t really believe in the mass marketing of products as it often involves compromising on creativity, “it’s like losing a baby” she says. She has only designed one product that has made it to mass production, the ‘Puzzle Persian’.

You can buy as many or as few pieces as you like and when the small jigsaw puzzles are assembled they make Persian rug patterns made from durable flooring material. An everyday object has become something new, the difference this time being the high level of interaction making it something people want to be involved in, hence the mass-market appeal.

Sonnleitner’ s work does seem to straddle the ever-debated boundary of art and design but I think one of the main themes to come out of this year’s Semi-Permanent was that of collaboration, and the fact that we no longer need to put people into boxes. It’s time to stop arguing over ‘what is art’ and just appreciate whatever manifestation creativity takes — and with Sonnleitner you should always expect the unexpected. Everyone loves the underdog, and in the company she kept in this year’s line up Sonnleitner could be considered as such, but in my opinion she gave one of the best presentations of the weekend, the perfect combination of intelligence, fun and charm; an unexpected gem.

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The Apple AppStore is a place of wonder and excitement for many iPhone and iPod touch users, but iPad applications are now showing up for those with the “next” portable computer (more later).

Apple's App Store.

New Zealand has a number of application developers for the iPhone platform – some are inhouse, some publish to the store only, others (like my company) will write applications for you to publish. When it comes to the leaders in the iPhone development community in New Zealand, you will probably know of Orsome and Polar Bear Farm – but there are also a number of developers who fly below the radar!To begin development, you have to start with a Mac. You will want a more modern Intel-based Mac with a fairly large screen. (One of my developers has a 27” and 21” screen connected to his Mac). The reason for this is that you need to see your code, the software emulator which is running your application, the console for any messages and a debugger to start and stop your code. Who said Photoshop was the king of palettes?
Once you have your Mac in place, point your browser over here and sign up for the US$99 development programme. Once you have been approved by Apple, you can download the iPhone SDK (Software Development Kit) and start developing your idea.
Once your application has been completed, you can submit this to the Apple AppStore for approval. Be aware that the wait is sometimes longer than you expect – but they are carefully checking your application before approving it for sale.
Now, if this seems a little out of your league, you can contract an iPhone developer to take your idea and code it into an application for you. For more information on this, don’t hesitate to contact me! We have been developing applications for the iPhone AppStore since 2008.
The iPad. For me, the iPad is the first “real” Macintosh. If you look at the original design specification for the Mac put forward by Jef Raskin in 1979, it was about being less computer and more appliance – like a toaster. The iPad fits this bill. You will never have to care about the operating system, fonts, mice or training on how to use it, because everything is touch oriented and simple – you only need a few minutes on it to be productive. The AppStore (with its 150,000 apps) lets you quickly and easily get hold of an application to fill any computing task. This is the future of mobile computing. It won’t replace design workstations, but for administration and mobile users it is a home run.

Apple iPad.

Which model should you get? Well, of course that depends on budget and needs – but for me the 32GB iPad 3G is the most logical choice. It will have enough space to store everything I need to take with me – and it will have 3G for networking where ever I go. Perfect. You will be tempted to go for the wifi-only version, but believe me, you will wish you had the 3G version as soon as you see someone else emailing where you can’t. Hopefully it will be a simple matter of getting a data-only SIM from a local provider. It seems the future of mobile computing is finally here!

Links:

m-works.co.nz
polarbearfarm.com
orsome.co.nz

Contact:

marcus@me.com

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Freedom Space by Neville Brody. Photo © Graham Jepson.

I have to admit, I was hoping the Super Contemporary exhibition would be a bit lighter on text and instead invest in some big, simple, self-explanatory visuals. It's Wednesday afternoon in London during the London Design Festival, Fashion Week, a shed-load of related dos, and a barrage of new information has left my brain hurting.

For example, the greengaged.com morning workshop on Monday at the Design Council, explored sustainable design from the angle of the “nice-to-haves”: fashion and travel.  The event curator, Ed Gillespie, who famously travelled around the world for a year sans air travel and now runs socially responsible communications agency Futerra, sat in the donut hole of an illuminated circular table, surrounded by the four speakers. The event was filmed and broadcast live onto a screen behind them, which mirrored all of their movements with a two-second lag, while as they talked the tech guy was bringing up relevant websites and images and arranging them along the bottom of the screen while the audience’s Twitter posts were fed to the top of the screen, which made it OK to be on your iPhone all the way through the event, as the woman next to me ably demonstrated by surfing the ‘net throughout.

It was a brilliant debate though, and happily free of the usual industry burble and buzzwords. It was not only food for thought, but also a sprawling, all-day Vegas-style buffet that took on everything from green semantics and “guerrilla travel” to the big questions about human relationships and what constitutes a meaningful life. Not to mention some cracking analogies from Mr Gillespie: “Sustainable design is like wetting yourself while wearing a dark suit. No-one notices but it gives you a warm feeling inside.”

Back at the Design Museum after that, I just wanted a quick hit of easily digestible design. However, much like London itself, Super Contemporary was a grab bag of grand ideas and whimsy, all deceptively well-ordered by the designers from Bibliothèque, who were also responsible for last year’s Cold War Modern show at the V&A. Essentially, Supercontemporary was fifteen commissions from different designers with a distinctive perspective on the capital, underpinned by a chronological display running around the gallery walls, charting the events and people that shaped London’s creative terrain from 1960 to the present day. (Given the scope of the content, my hit-and-run approach was better suited to the exhibition of work by the illustrator-designer Javier Mariscal upstairs – somewhat unfairly described by my exhibition buddy Matt as “the Spanish Fido Dido”.)

Super Contemporary visual identity. Photo © Sam Eichblatt.

Super Contemporary contained a number of interactive exhibits along with your standard non-digital ones. Some, like Zaha Hadid’s working model of an “urban landscape tool” – a computer-generated simulation with a touch-sensitive screen allowing visitors to merrily fling proposed buildings around London’s topography like bits of LEGO and watch the effect this had on the surrounding urban fabric – were fun, and with obvious applications for designers and architects.

Zaha Hadid at Super Contemporary. Photo © Sam Eichblatt.

However, Ross Phillips’ Head to Toe, which uploaded images of the head, torso and legs of participants at pods located in three different city locations to be scrolled through and assembled again in the manner of the children’s game Misfits, sounded fun but was on the blink.

Two exhibits in particular stood out for their potential real-world uses. The first, the K9 Post Office Kiosk by Industrial Facility, took the Gilbert Scott-designed red London phone booth and turned it into a mini post office. Users would be able to perform basic tasks like paying bills or parcel shipments by speaking to a remote operator via video screen, a solution which, with the average post office queuing time running around 17 minutes in Britain, would be welcomed by many. Giving new purpose to a beloved but underused urban icon is surely also a stroke of genius.

Another intriguing proposal, Paul Cocksedge's Rain It In is still under research but would no doubt take the city by storm if it was actually found to work. In theory, static electricity would be used to 'bend' water away from an object like an invisible umbrella. Two potential uses would be keeping rain off cyclists and keeping play going during Wimbledon, but any place with an abundance of the wet stuff can no doubt generate hundreds more.

El Ultimo Grito and Urban Salon developed the baffling idea of a sky garden over Trafalgar Square. Where does that leave the Square and the National Gallery? It would bring Nelson to eye level, which is nice but surely not what the population yearns for day to day, at the expense of casting one of the city’s grandest squares in perpetual twilight. The last thing London needs is more shade. Invisible umbrellas, yes. Shade, no.

Lord Nelson at eye level? A sky garden over Trafalgar Square proposed by El Ultimo Grito and Urban Salon. Photo © Sam Eichblatt.

One of my favourites was a very lo-fi piece by Tord Boontje. While not one of the fifteen designers in the show, he contributed a piece to a collection of designers’ personal maps of London. Boontje’s detailed his personal connection to the southeast London suburb he lived in for ten years with tags commemorating key events such as his marriage and his daughter’s birth, along with his trademark organic features, including dried leaves and flowers. It was also nice to discover one of my favourite designers used to live down the road from me.

Toord Boonjte's map contribution details his personal connection to a London suburb. Photo © Sam Eichblatt.

With Boontje’s domestic work in mind, the Guardian–reading killjoy in me wanted to ask why someone hadn’t addressed the social and environmental issues that come with living in one of the world's most complex cities. Ditto London’s feverish consumer culture. Ed Gillespie’s statement at Greengaged, that “the consumer age is over” is all very well, and hopefully the wheels are slowly being set in motion for it to eventually be true, but a quick trip to Oxford Street suggests otherwise. The high street multiples are continuing to multiply like rabbits on Viagra, and to paraphrase Prince, they’re shopping like it’s 1999. Super Contemporary wasn't without a social conscience — Paul Smith's New London Rubbish Bin, a giant bunny equipped with motion-sensor ears that lit up and Tom Dixon's eco-friendly 1949 Bentley with an electric milk-float engine were two examples. However, the Magritte-style surrealist tone rather undermined any serious intent which, unfortunately, made the exhibition seem somewhat behind the curve.

New London Transport by Tom Dixon. Photo © Luke Hayes.

London Transport. Photo © Sam Eichblatt.

New London Rubbish Bin By Paul Smith. Photo © Sam Eichblatt.

Listening Station by Barber Osgerby. Photo © Graham Jepson.

Battersea Gods Home by Nigel Coates. Photo © Graham Jepson.

Image from Mariscal Drawing Life – the Javier Mariscal exhibition at the Design Museum. Photo © Sam Eichblatt.

Image from Mariscal Drawing Life – the Javier Mariscal exhibition at the Design Museum. Photo © Sam Eichblatt.

Super Contemporary runs at the Design Museum until 04 October – www.supercontemporary.co.uk

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Manufractured By Steven Skov Holt and Mara Holt Skov. Chronicle Books, 144 pp, 80 colour images, hardcover, RRP $90

Manufractured, subtitled, The Conspicuous Transformation of Everyday Objects, is in some ways similar to I Miss My Pencil. Most obviously, it’s published by Chronicle Books, but another thing shared is more esoteric – it's a way of looking at things and deciding that they could be better, different, or just plain quirkier. It's about, to an extent, the way that artists and designers  can look at commonplace items and reassess forms and functions.
The basis for Manufractured was the identification of a new trend, a trend that has also hit New Zealand's shores, “the radical appropriation of consumer goods as raw material for art– and object-making”. Yes people, there’s a craft revival going on. Recycling, upcycling, customisation, call it what you will; it’s traditional notions reapplied and relearned for the modern age.
Manufractured looks at the crossover of craft, art, and design. It’s an interesting journey which develops from the premise that industrialisation was craft's death knell. Yet, rather than dying off, a rather ironic thing happened, that is the customisation of the mass-produced (once we hit mass customisation of the mass-produced I'm not sure where we'll be at…).
There's a lot going on in Manufractured, which was published to coincide with an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland, but one particular object that seems to sum up the ethos to me is War Bowls by Dominic Wilcox. Each of these bowls is made from legions of plastic soldiers which are melted together. An "ironic take on the senselessness of war", these bowls "highlight how scandalously mutable the body (and the vessel) can be when subjected to pressure".

– Michael Barrett

Image from Manufractured.

Image from Manufractured.

I Miss My Pencil, Martin Bone and Kara Johnson; Chronicle Books. 272 pp, full-colour photos throughout, hardcover, RRP $130.

Richard Buckminster-Fuller once said, “There is no such thing as a failed experiment, only experiments with unexpected outcomes”, and that seems to pretty much sum up I Miss My Pencil. This canary-yellow cloth-bound tome is based on a series of experiments conducted, you might suspect, for no reason other than the sheer pleasure of conducting experiments.

The authors of this book are Martin Bone and Kara Johnson from the well-respected multi-disciplinary firm IDEO. Bone is a design director at the firm, and Johnson, who describes herself as “a material scientist, almost”, leads initiatives exploring the intersection of materials, design, and brand.
So, what's Pencil all about then? It’s hard to go past the authors’ description: “12 design experiments conceived by designers at IDEO. Each experiment is made real through collaboration, sketching, prototyping, fabrication, and photographing to go beyond the conceptual to the curiously concrete".

Bringing new meaning to the expression "custom printing", these rectangular felt pieces of material were part of experiment to adjust the appearance of a humble printer.

And, what sort of experiments do Johnson and Bone conduct? It all seems to be about seeing commonplace things differently. Smellbell, for instance, is “a doorbell that automatically assigns a unique fragrance to anyone who rings it. Over time the home becomes filled with the combined perfume of the people who’ve visited.”
Trademark aims to counter the stereotype that “Made in China” equals cheap. The authors sought to apply the techniques of traditional craftsmanship to modern industrial design, in this instance merging the intricate handiwork of filigree boxes with an audio speaker.
As expected from a design firm of IDEO's stature, I Miss My Pencil is immaculately presented. Its text more often than not takes the form of a conversation between the authors – and each voice is assigned a font that remains consistent throughout. When you pick up on that, the banter becomes immediately more engaging. For those who might not get around to buying this book, the website is also worth a look – it seems that new experiments will be conducted, and old ones, perhaps, updated.

- Michael Barrett