*Fun thing to read.
*Somebody needs to explain which "hacked furniture" is good, and which efforts are not so good; an issue I've been rather harping on in the blog here, lately. If "the geeks are inheriting the earth," they've got to be held to account for issues other than the sheer lulz of g33kitude.
*If "hacking furniture" is the big deal at the Milan Furniture Fair, it's gonna get majorly trendy. Because the Milan Fair is much less about the everyday chair business now, and rather more like SXSW Interactive, a continent-scaled, social-mediated, flash-mob.
*There's a lot more going on here than those trendy canapes fabbed out of Nutella. That geek-inherited earth is visibly trembling now.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/apr/23/milan-furniture-fair-design
"One of the perverse pleasures of going to Milan for the furniture fair in April is being forced to window shop so far beyond your means it's funny. Wander the streets around the Duomo and you'll pass the Prada store in the Galleria and the Valextra store on via Manzoni, where the Platonic ideal of the leather suitcase will set you back €6,000. Milan revolves around the luxury industry, and the furniture fair is part of it. This year, however, there was an alternative group of designers subverting the traditional logic of the event. These were the geeks and hackers challenging the very notions of luxury craftsmanship and mass-produced furniture – and stealing the limelight from a thousand glitzy chair launches.
"A stone's throw from the Duomo, some of them were gathered at the Palazzo Clerici in a show called The Future in the Making, curated by the Italian design magazine Domus. Seeing these designers huddled around their laptops in an opulent baroque setting, it seemed entirely plausible that the geeks shall inherit the earth.
"In a show all about alternative means of production, here was Dutch designer Dirk Vander Kooij's Endless Robot, which prints out chairs made of recycled fridge plastic. There was also a series of furniture collected under the title Autoproggetazione 2.0, a homage to Enzo Mari's 1974 project, where he gave away the designs for a series of DIY furniture pieces that people could knock together with planks and nails – except these new ones, of course, are the digital, open-source equivalent, made with computerised cutting machines...."
