Stop Sitting Up Straight! The Right Angle For Your Task Chair

Your mother was wrong: Sitting up straight is bad for you. Scottish radiologists confirmed in a study last year that a 130-degree angle of recline between torso and thighs reduces pressure on the discs in the lower back. This (and its sleek design) is why the ubiquitous Aeron chair was so ahead of its time in 1994. It deeply reclined by pivoting at the hips.

But designers find that the features of chairs like the Aeron (see image below) are lost on most sitters. The array of levers and knobs—recline tension, lumbar support, seat-pan depth, forward tilt—are commonly ignored by users, who only think to change the chair’s height.


above: The revolutionary Aeron Chair

This neglect has manufacturers such as Herman Miller and Humanscale looking toward the next frontier: a self-adjusting chair. “We’re working on a chair that will listen to who’s sitting on it and adjust itself to their weight,” says Bill Dowell, director of research at Herman Miller, which makes the Aeron.



Humanscale’s Freedom chairs (shown above) include a counterbalance system that adjusts itself like scales to the sitter’s weight as he or she reclines, eliminating the need for recline controls.


above photo by Nick Kaloterakis

Or perhaps the chair of the future isn’t one at all. Chairs contribute in part to the high rate of back pain, which, according to the National Institutes of Health, affects eight out of 10 Americans. “Our notion of a machine for sitting may not make sense in a globalized world,” says Herman Miller designer Cameron Campbell. Galen Cranz of the University of California at Berkeley points out in her book The Chair that the Indian practice of squatting and the Muslim practice of stretching five times a day to pray have great ergonomic benefits. Ten years from now, one worker may settle into a low recliner, another will kneel on a soft carpet, and they’ll talk across a pile of office cushions.—

This article is reprinted from THE FUTURE OF WORK-Pimp Your Cube 2017
The ultimate self-adjusting office chair plus seven more concepts that will make your daily grind a little smoother By Peter Hall and Lauren Aaronson | February 2007 Peter Hall

“Comic Abstraction: Image-Breaking, Image-Making”

Art Review | 'Comic Abstraction'
Visions That Flaunt Cartoon Pedigrees By Roberta Smith
(reprinted from the NY Times with some additional images)

The trouble with too many museum theme shows is that they begin with a viable idea and, through lack of institutional commitment, curatorial imagination or old-fashioned connoisseurship, fail to fulfill their promise.

This untitled 1990 painting below by Michel Majerus is among the works in MoMA's new exhibition:


So it is with “Comic Abstraction: Image-Breaking, Image-Making,” a sometimes perky but inoffensive and ultimately dispiriting exhibition of recent artistic endeavor at the Museum of Modern Art. Organized by Roxana Marcoci, curator of the department of photography, it brings together nearly 30 works in drawing, painting, sculpture, video and installation made over the last 16 years by 13 artists who borrow one way or another from comic strips, cartoons and animation.

The motor behind this show is a big idea: the lively and essential contamination of abstract art by popular culture that began with the Surrealists but has greatly expanded during the last 30 years. It could be argued that most new abstract art since the late 1970s has had comic aspects. After all, ironic self-awareness is one way that abstraction has dealt with the resurgence of representation and the splintering of the modernist trajectory.

A wall text outside the show’s first gallery lies in wait. It announces that the works on hand use the conventions of comics “not to withdraw from reality but to address perplexing questions about war and global conflicts, the loss of innocence and racial stereotyping.”


But in the end the works here are mostly cute, neat and perfectly pleasant, implying a view of contemporary art as mildly titillating but basically toothless entertainment. Thankfully there are some exceptions. For example, “Crazy Conductor,” a 1993 drawing on chalkboard by Gary Simmons, conveys the nasty racial caricature implicit in many animated cartoons. (Mr. Simmons’s 1996 “boom,” however, is simply a big, beautiful explosion — too close to its source, merely lifted without comment.)



Four paintings by Ellen Gallagher skewer Minimalism in general and Agnes Martin in particular with expanses of bug eyes and blubbery lips. At once gorgeous and barbed, these works are the most sustained and substantial efforts here, but their motifs are most potent in the smallest and earliest canvas; the others are elegant dilutions.



Sue Williams’s all-over paintings look similarly benign from a distance. Draw near, and you discover that her attenuated Pollock-like patterns roil with suggestions of body parts, bodily fluids and sexual couplings. Whether this payoff compensates for the emaciated effect of the work as a whole is debatable; it certainly lacks the punch of Ms. Williams’s nonabstract, savagely comical early feminist paintings, one of which appears in the catalog.

But otherwise too much here operates in some kind of vacuum, far from the madding crowd of ambition, recent art history, life or a deep engagement with the primary vehicle of visual experience, which is form. In little of it can you sense the force of a first-rate, profoundly engaged, here-for-the-duration artistic sensibility. This is because too many of the selections are early, sometimes promising work that never amounted to much, or are transitional, anomalous, derivative or tangential to the show’s theme.

In the case of Inka Essenhigh, Arturo Herrera and Julie Mehretu you have early works of limited promise that has so far not been fulfilled. In the case of Franz West and Polly Apfelbaum you have works that are charmingly whimsical but irrelevant to the show’s focus. Mr. West’s four small plaster and iron sculptures, called adaptives, are available for handling. Fun. “Blossom,” Ms. Apfelbaum’s stained-velvet Process Art floor piece, is named for one of the superheroic cartoon Powerpuff Girls and can therefore be construed as feminist. So what?



Like Ms. Gallagher, Philippe Parreno excerpts and repeats, but uncompellingly. His helium-filled Mylar “Speech Bubbles” from 1997 hover overhead, a dour, derivative meld of Claes Oldenburg and Yayoi Kusama plus Andy Warhol’s silver pillows. The caption rationalizes: They were once used as signs by protesters who wrote slogans on them.



Speech balloons also figure in Rivane Neuenschwander’s altered comic book pages, where they are blanked out with white (or occasionally blue) and the rest of the panels are bright monochrome colors. They provide some welcome if relatively pure visual intensity, regardless of what the label says about the cultural significance of the comics used. They might be better bigger, but then that would invite comparisons with Roy Lichtenstein, early Warhol and John Wesley.



Which is the problem with the efforts of Michel Majerus, a German artist who died in a plane crash at the age of 35 in 2002, especially if you factor in early Peter Saul and Albert Oehlen. A series of small canvases from 1996 have their comic moments, the best being a strange cross between an eye and an explosion. But the painterly fragments of images, words and letters of “Eggsplosion,” from 2006, could have been made in the 1950s or early ’60s. Best known for large, scrappy painted installations, Mr. Majerus clearly had talent, but not the time to find himself.



The megastar Takashi Murakami is represented by two paintings that feel like excerpts of his own work. “Cream” and “Milk” (seen below) are sparse, mural-size cartoon renderings of flung liquids that function best as backdrops to anime-inspired male and female figures that are present only in the catalog. Their markedly unabstract bodies are shown expelling the liquids implied by the paintings’ titles.


More comic installation than comic abstraction, Juan Muñoz’s “Waiting for Jerry” consists of the soundtrack of a “Tom and Jerry” animated cartoon: a cacophony of inferred chases, sneaks, skids, crashes, plops and general hysteria. Emanating from a lighted mouse hole cut in the old-fashioned molding of a small, dark room, it echoes throughout the show. The work is a refreshing anomaly, given the usual heavy-handed humanism of Mr. Muñoz’s figurative sculpture, but notice what engages you. I’ll bet it’s the appropriated soundtrack. Wonderfully complex, it bounces back and forth between descriptive and abstract, and represents the kind of concentrated thought and work that is missing from too much of this show.



“Comic Abstraction” would have benefited from more space, nerve and historical awareness. The catalog establishes no context for the origins of the comic in art, which gained speed with Pop Art. Also worth mentioning if not including in the show itself are artists like Mr. Oehlen and Carroll Dunham, both of whom are younger than Mr. West.

Especially pertinent is Mr. Dunham, whose automatist, Disneyesque excursions into the hormonal sublime, made in the 1980s and early ’90s, may be our moment’s richest, most disturbing, most perplexingly real works of comic abstraction. The efforts of several artists in this exhibition are nearly unimaginable without Mr. Dunham’s precedent.

Below is an example of Carroll Dunham's work:


Other artists whose work would have vitalized this show include Lucy McKenzie, Pipilotti Rist, Amy Sillman, Gary Hume, Josh Smith, Thomas Nozkowski, Chris Ofili, Monique Prieto, Joanne Greenbaum and, finally, Udomsak Krisanamis, whose work from the mid-’90s has a stand-alone power, even if it has yet to develop.

Beyond the big solo retrospectives that MoMA handles with expert aplomb, too many of the museum’s recent exhibitions have a veneer of political piousness that limits and shortchanges everything: art, artists, the public and the institution itself. In MoMA’s efforts to go beyond a formalist, linear view of modernism, the museum often seems to confuse sincere political intent with genuine, groundbreaking artistic quality.

No wonder it ends up showing shallow, label-dependent art rather than work that offers deeper, more contradictory encounters. Art becomes a kind of one-liner. The viewer looks a little, reads a label, says “I get it” and shuffles on. If you are new to art, you don’t know what you are missing. If you aren’t, you feel had.

“Comic Abstraction: Image-Breaking, Image-Making” continues through June 11 at the Museum of Modern Art, (212) 708-9400.

Meet The Nouveau Niche: Your New Demographic

"NOUVEAU NICHE"

BusinessWeek called it 'The Vanishing Mass Market', Wired Magazine spoke of the Lost Boys and the Long Tail. Others talk about Niche Mania, Stuck in the Middle, or Commoditization Chaos.

Those at Trendwatching dubbed it NOUVEAU NICHE: the new riches will come from servicing the new niches! And while all of this may smack of wordplay, the drivers behind this trend stretch widely and profusely, and have been building for years. So even though you may be more or less familiar with the below, it's definitely time to incorporate NOUVEAU NICHE into your corporate vocabulary AND your business strategy. The move towards everything niche should definitely rank right up there with other mega trends like GENERATION C, MASSCLUSIVITY, MASTERS OF THE YOUNIVERSE and so on.

What's fueling NOUVEAU NICHE?

1. Consumers are more individualized than ever, expecting every good, service and experience to be addressing their unique and oh so important selves. Gone are the traditional demographic segments, the distinct consumer classes: this is all about being MASTERS OF THE YOUNIVERSE. Gone too are the days when, as BusinessWeek so eloquently put it; "the ideal was not merely to keep up with the Joneses, but to be the Joneses." In a NOUVEAU NICHE world, where the demise of institutions and their stifling conventions has unlocked latent hyper individualization, where it is all about 'me' (for better or worse), where being special will lend consumers status, to be mass is now every consumer's nightmare. Witness GRAVANITY, witness MASSCLUSIVITY. Even the few mass objects of desire that still manage to unite large groups of consumers -- iPods, Nokia handsets, or the Mini Cooper -- are likely to be customized and personalized the moment they leave the warehouse, website or store.

Consumers are also more experienced than ever. They expertly cut through the crap, ignore advertising, and know which quality and price levels are fair. They actively hunt for the best of the best, and the best of the best is often NOT mass. (The only mass they're willing to put up with is the stuff they don't really care about and can get on the cheap at Aldi or WalMart).

As Chris Anderson, author of the excellent Long Tail article points out, the only reason mass used to equal 'hit', had to do with the now outdated perception that if something sells well, it must certainly be good.

Now, with consumers not only being comfortable wandering further from the beaten path, but the beaten path also being much easier to leave (thank you WWW), they discover their taste is not as mainstream as they thought. Mass popularity was based more on what was available (think mass marketing budgets, limited physical shelf space, limited broadcasting channels, and a nearly complete lack of transparency), than on absolute laws of nature that dictated 'good' or 'bad'.



No wonder that retail and hospitality players, which currently find themselves at the forefront of the NOUVEAU NICHE slash best of the best revolution, are opening up specialized stores and venues as fast as you can say 'NOUVEAU NICHE'.

From British The White Company (above), which only sells white home accessories, to NY's Rice to Riches (twenty flavors of rice pudding, including endangered maple with sun dried blueberries) to fast-expanding Oil and Vinegar (twenty five kinds of olive oil) and so on.

On the US West Coast, the next big NOUVEAU NICHE thing is regional Italian restaurants, from San Francisco based A16 serving food solely from the Campania region and its capital city Naples, to LA's Locanda Veneta in Los Angeles and Genoa restaurant in Portland, Oregon (source: Debra Mustain, Springspotters).

Hospitality? Lake Tahoe's THE BLOCK hotel welcomes snowboarders (see our BRANDED BRANDS update below), while countless B&Bs (all with their own websites) around the world now cater to every alternative lifestyle, preference or inclination known to man.

However, all of this pales compared to NOUVEAU NICHE in the virtual world:

2. The combination of online transparency of supply, prices, recommendations and opinions AND near one billion online users enables a match-making game connecting insanely segmented supply with equally fragmented NOUVEAU NICHE demand. Choose from eBay's millions of sellers offering everything from the expected to the unbelievable.

Dive into iTunes' hundreds of thousands of songs, Amazon.com's hundreds of thousands of books, Netflix's tens of thousands of movies and documentaries. Or go to Nicheflix for even more off the beaten path choice. Or visit Mandy May, the world's first DVD rental service to focus entirely on chick flicks (source: Aisha Jordan, Springspotters).



Consumers looking for other people, not things, end up on niche dating sites like cyclingsingles.com, winesingles.com, datemypet.com, singlerepublican.com, democraticsingles.com (source: ABC News). Choice within these niche segments is growing, too: Jewish singles check out jdate.com, jewishcafe.com, jewishmingle.com, gefiltefishing.com, frumster.com.

Add to that the revolution in location-based search (see our READY-TO-KNOW trend), making transparency truly personal and local, and the ongoing proliferation of collaborative filtering ("customers who bought this title also bought..." -- an essential ingredient for consumers to find their way deeper and deeper into unbridled catalogues and databases), and NOUVEAU NICHE no longer 'just' enables consumers to stray from what or who they know, but actively encourages them to do so. (P.S. More on this in next month's TWINSUMER trend description.)

3. New production processes, mass (!) distribution, technologies and communication channels, all enabling global economies of scale and scope, allow for virtually everything to be made and broadcast, at whatever specification, and whatever batch size. China. India. Eastern Europe. USD 29 DVD players. Hudong-Zhonghua Shipbuilding Group's 8,530 TEU container ships. Airbus 380. New H&M and Zara collections every week. Podcasting. Virtual worlds. 254 TV channels. Google AdWords.

Ironically, the only mass worth studying may be the mass/abundance of virtual shelf space (inventory no longer equals costs) and communication channels. One marketing message and one product for every individual: it will truly be upon us soon.



But is it all about traditional producers becoming more nimble? Not at all:

4. New producers, including the millions of members of GENERATION C, are adding niche content in text, audio, video by the tera bytes, to be purchased by micro audiences. For all the talk of new opportunities for established niche producers and marketers, the most interesting next development for NOUVEAU NICHE may be driven by ordinary consumers, doubling as producers. Equipped with professional hardware, software, skills and their own showrooms/shops at amateur prices, they're already producing an avalanche of new content: books, articles, songs, photographs, videos; thereby adding billions of new products and items to pickings that are already immense. Just consider how hundreds of thousands of bloggers have already exposed many mass media outlets for the boring, predictable and bland one-for-all content factories that they are.

Next next? Crafts! Not only the world of technology is throwing professional goodies at amateurs, so are the more traditional DIY manufacturers: NOUVEAU NICHE will increasingly be a redpaper.com meets cafepress.com meets lulu.com meets boundlessgallery.com meets GENERATION C. We ain't seen nothing yet.

OPPORTUNITIES
The above is NOT spanking new, and neither is it complete (part 2 to follow soon). However, what IS new, is how rapid NOUVEAU NICHE is approaching its (dare we say it?) tipping point. Everything has been put into place to unlock consumers' need for NOUVEAU NICHE on a global and local scale.

Yes, NOUVEAU NICHE is work in progress, for you and for us. But above all, it's a mindset. To continue thinking of niche as unprofitable or even worse, unpopular, may equal commercial suicide. Expect every significant field in business to succumb to the power of NOUVEAU NICHE. Advertising. Publishing. Television. Food and Beverage. Hospitality. Dating. Entertainment. Electronics. Search. Financial services. And so on. We'll still need mass, whether it's for low cost goods or to satisfy sudden cravings to belong to a larger group. And something that is really, really good or desirable will still be able to reach mass status. But it will be mass by choice, not mass by scarcity.

Where to start? Study the Long Tail phenomenon, hang out in niche venues, experiment with Google AdWords, actively look for NOUVEAU NICHE manifestations while roaming the streets, waiting at airports, and surfing the web. Re-read our MASTERS OF THE YOUNIVERSE trend and keep an eye out for NOUVEAU NICHE, PART 2.

Should be enough to get you going, and hopefully the above will help you to introduce relevant niche goods, services and experiences before your competition does!
--

source:Trendwatching

The New 2008 Olympic Logo: Eeeuuuwww!

My apologies to the designer, but.. yuck.

Lowbrow Art Lunchboxes By Baseman, Coop, Shag, Vissell and More

In the fall of 2005 La-La Land Gallery in Los Angeles held a custom lunch box exhibit featuring over 30 artists including those shown below created by Gary Baseman, Shag, Joe Ledbetter, Greg Simkins, Coop, Amanda Vissell and more.

Visitors to the gallery's website, lalalandgallery.com, voted on their favorite design from the exhibit. Dark Horse is proud to offer the top designs from the Hot Lunch exhibit as the newest additions to their current lunch box line.

And they are only $14.99. So, despite my mentioning in an earlier post that lowbrow art may not be the smartest investment, surely $15 bucks is!

Just look at some below :

Service for 6 only $111,600.00: Diamond Studded Flatware

Talk about a formal place setting!
At Christofle, sterling silver takes on a whole new allure. Knives, forks and spoons, with handles trimmed with diamonds of exceptional quality. Front and back, they embellish silver in a way as never before.


The diamonds are hand set, and the creative process requires six months of hand work. Malmaison Castle near Paris, was a favorite place of Napoleon Bonaparte and Empress Josephine.

Sterling silver and diamonds. Knife has a stainless steel blade.

Diamonds are set by hand in France.
Set includes one of each: dinner fork, dinner knife, soup spoon, salad fork, and teaspoon.
Price? A measly $18,600.00 per place setting

You can order yours here.

The Bouroullec Bros' Floating House

The Floating House designed by Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec.
Conceived together with Jean-Marie Finot and Denis Daversin, architects

Achieved mid october 2006, the Floating House is a studio for resident artists in the CNEAI (Centre National de l'estampe et de l'art imprimé) located in Chatou, France.

floating house : by night ­ 2006



Floating House interiors:



Length : 23m
Total surface: 110m2
CNEAI - Centre National de l'estampe et de l'art imprimé

all images courtesy of the Bouroullec brothers

More underwater and floating residences for you!:

•The Underwater Poseidon Resort & H2Ome

•Floating Hotels and Offices

•The Silverfish Floating Home

•Houseboats of The Future

My New Favorite Photographer: Eugenio Recuenco

As an advertising art director for many years (how many would give away my age), I've had the good fortune to personally view some of the finest photographer's books. But I recently came upon one photographer in particular whose range of talent simply awed me.

CA Boom 4: West Coast Independent Design Show

Exhibitor Reservations for CA Boom 4 Now Being Reviewed

CA Boom 4: March 30 to April 1, 2007 at a new and larger location, Barker Hangar, Santa Monica Airport. One hundred plus participating exhibitors will showcase what's next in how we live and how we work. Specific areas in the show include: prefab, fine furnishings, indoor/outdoor living, surfaces and finishes, and modern parenting.

2/8/07 CA Boom 4: THE WEST COAST INDEPENDENT DESIGN SHOW registration and tickets now on sale.


What else is new this year?
Dozens of national and international manufacturers are joining CA Boom’s core lineup of boutique design exhibitors. CA Boom 4 majors and mini-majors include Herman Miller, ducduc, Fleetwood Windows & Doors, Neo Metro and Nana Wall Systems, Inc.

This year, our show floor is divided into distinct zones including Prefab, Fine Furnishings, Materials, Surfaces & Finishes, Modern Parenting, Giftware & Accessories, Indoor/Outdoor Living and First-Timers.


Special Prices on Santa Monica Hotels, Airfare & Airport Shuttles. Travel & Housing

For the first time, Friday will be a “trade day” from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., open to qualified design & building trade members.

The famous CA Boom Opening Night party moves to Friday Night, 7:30 - 10:30 p.m., with an open bar, DJ's and full access to the show floor ($45).

Don't miss the debut of the “Modern Parenting” zone, spotlighting sophisticated furniture and accessories for children of design-conscious parents. Participants include Scandinavian Child, Inc., ducduc, Elevate Home and Nurseryworks.


Returning this year is the overwhelmingly successful PREFAB ZONE, the only place on the planet where prospective buyers of Modernist Prefab can actually comparison shop prefab manufacturers who are ready and able to deliver product. Participants include Living Homes, Clever Homes, Marmol Radziner Prefab, Sander Architects, kitHAUS, and Alchemy's weeHouse.

Don't miss our Design + Architecture Tours, where architects actually give tours of 15 cutting edge projects, 5 per day ($75 per day, includes Expo Hall admission).

Santa Monica: Friday March 30th • Venice: Saturday March 31st • Mar Vista/West LA: Sunday April 1st.

CA Boom exhibitors are invited to participate because of their innovation, design sensibility and category leadership. Each year, we also invite a select group of noteworthy up-and-comers. Many of our exhibitors are showcasing World and North American debuts at the show.

CA Boom 4 still has space to accommodate a few additional exhibitors who are a good fit. Interested? Go here.

79th Annual Academy Awards Promo Shot & Directed by Spike Lee

Directed by Academy Award®-nominated writer-director Spike Lee and shot throughout New York City, the 79th Academy Awards trailer features passers-by reciting famous movie lines from the past 70 years.