Black and Blum’s inscribable Time Square clock and magnet board. Multi-tasking expands its reach to more and more products.
In the age of multi-tasking, it’s about time more of our domestic appliances caught up to our multivalent work methods. Sure, we’ve got fancy electronics that quadruple up as our mp3 players, telephones, internet browser and reading tablet, but a number of our long-standing devices at home have been slow in catching up to contemporary realities. Stuck and stoic with the progression of time, these laggards often serve the same function they’ve had nearly since their inception.
Speaking of time, wall clocks may well have placed been in this category except for a couple of recent additions to the genre. Black and Blum’s Time Square clock actually triples its purpose by serving as a timepiece, blackboard and magnet board all in one. Combining these particular functions in one device is not without reason, since the need to reinforce memory by quick notation is inextricably linked to keeping track of time. (Being New Yorkers and recreational punsters ourselves, we also appreciate the witty name, especially as it comes from a London-based design firm.)
Alessi’s Blank Wall Clock: no need to draw a blank anymore when there’s something you’re trying to remember to do.
Alessi’s Blank Wall Clock is the formal yin to Black and Blum’s yang, being white and circular as compared to black and square. It doesn’t have the magnet function of Time Square, but its whiteboard writing surface has a nice clean look and allows for the use of dry markers in place of chalk.
Looks like our appliances are finally catching up to our busy selves after all. It’s about time.
Magnetic force let these flowers flow freely. Designed by Brandon Perhacs.
Whether we’re buying them for our own decor, or receiving them as gifts, we are among that large population who believe that flowers were put on this earth to give us pleasure. They add refreshing breaths of life and color to our office and homes, letting us put some of the outside world in. We suppose for that, we have Mother Nature to thank, but also, it must be said, our florists, who manage to bring out the formal variety that underlies so much of our appreciation for these beautiful living things. Not only the variety among the flowers within a particular bouquet, but the extraordinary variety of the kinds of flowers that Nature creates around the world.
If bringing out variety is one of the key characteristics of managing Nature in a human environment, then it’s curious how most conventional vases are quite the opposite – static, immobile, unchanging. Obviously, that’s not the kind of product we’d be interested in at MODULE R. Oh, nosirree! What we’ve collected in this category are a group of transformable vases that all allow us to shape them, adapt them, vary them to either change the look of an arrangement or be altered to accommodate different types of flower groupings. It’s co-creation taken to the level of Nature itself.
Adaptation
Set in a wooden base, the Adaptation vase comes with four glass tubes that resemble science class beakers from our high school science days. Simply insert the magnetic steel spheres into the tubes, and the vases connect to the wooden base so that the tubes can tilt, sway, turn or move in any shape or figure, giving your flowers the liberty to move in any direction they please. A kind of human heliotropism, you could call it.
Flowers grow in full bloom with this unconventional take on the vase. Each holder rotates on a threaded bases to point the flowers in a multitude of directions.
Adjustable Twister Vase
Perfect for the playful-minded, the Adjustable Twister Vase looks like a small tree sprouting flowers as they grow. The vase is designed so that the branches twist and rotate, giving any floral arrangement the illusion of a colorful flower tree. The vase’s durable plastic construction and playful shape makes it welcome in kids rooms, family rooms, kitchens, bathrooms and just about any room that has a sense of fun and lightheartedness.
This simple yet versatile vase system features a base with three removable top pieces. Change them as needed to handle whatever type of floral arrangement is at hand – stem, broad or vertical groupings.
FlexVase
Designed by the Dutch team of Arjan van Raadshooven and Anieke Branderhorst, the white porcelain FlexVase consists of a base and three interchangeable top pieces. You switch out the top piece depending on what type of flower arrangement you want to display. Caps are held in place by a strong clip reminiscent of those used in canning jars. It’s three elegant vases for the price of one elegant vase.
Showcase buds with these exceptionally slender vases that dress up the dinner table and have your guests in awe because they won’t topple over even when the subway rattles by. Designed by Shahar P. Studio, Tel Aviv.
Magnetic Vases
Perfect for the dinner table, Magnetic Vases are a series of slender, brushed aluminum stem vases that showcase flowers individually. The vases come with small magnetic plates allowing each holder to connect to one in any arrangement you please. Your dinner guests will be wowed away by their dexterity and ballerina balance when you hide the plates under a placemat, table cloth or runner. Clever!
This collection of elegant vases is designed to be bound together with the elastic bands provided. They work equally well in smaller groupings or individually.
Opaline Glass Modular Vase
The Opaline Glass Vase is a 10-piece vase collection that can be tied together to make one large grouping of vases, or broken up into single or smaller groupings of different sized vases. We think it’s perfect for floral arrangements that come with a variety of stems, plants and flora of varying heights.
The entire collection of vases you see here are on view at the MODULE R store.
Breakfast in bed takes on new dimensions when they both come in a box. Actually, several boxes. Several red boxes.
Take the myriad of doo-dads and equipment and stuff you used to haul along when you went camping or on a road trip, and throw them out of the car: the Swiss Room Box wants to modularize the experience of the great outdoors. For aficionados of organized labors and any device that starts with Swiss, the great outdoors just got greater.
No more waking up in the morning covered with crab grass and red ants: hop into the mobile shower to get renewed.
The Swiss Room Box is a portable modular living system that enables families and campers to cook, eat, sleep and manage personal hygiene from an all-inclusive traveling device designed to fit into the trunk of a car.
A good night’s rest comes in the form of Swiss Room Box’s double bed.
By utilizing various boxed units in the system, campers will find a sink, cooking unit, dining table, picnic table, chairs, a double bed a shower and even a toilet at their disposal. All can be set up without tools or technical know-how in just fifteen minutes (longer if you first have to fight off a grizzly bear).
A portable picnic table makes dining outdoors a civilized pleasure.
The box units come interconnected and can be customized to fit into the back of just about any car. A simple pull from the rear of the vehicle is pretty much all it takes to get access to the equipment.
Now you can see it all on video.
To maximize on efficiency, the camping system can be recharged with batteries that charge while the car is running. More economics: the Box costs a tiny fraction of an RV (well, guess everything is relative).
What we appreciate are the evocations of mobility that something like the Swiss Room Box implies – not only the transformability of the design itself, but how its context is rooted in the car, the exemplar of latter-day nomadism. Mobile, modular, modern…where do we go from here?
The units that make up Stitch Interlocking Rug system come in vibrant color shades suitable for both young folk and color-inclined grownups.
Finding the perfect sized rug to work in a space can be a challenge, especially when you’re also trying to find just the right color scheme AND find a pattern you like. Sure, your basic white rug is a convenient away to steer around at least the last two problems, but where is the fun in that? White is so…vanilla. Not to mention a bear to keep clean unless you force people at gunpoint to walk around in their socks.
Answer? Make your own rug, of course. Okay, so you don’t know how to operate a loom. Or fleece sheep. Big deal! Modular design comes to the rescue, as it often does. In fact, we’ve got two solutions to offer: the Stitch Interlocking Rug from Lithuanian designer Nauris Kalinauskas, and the Buzzi Puzzle Rug from our friends at BuzziSpace.
The Stitch Rug also comes in grays, blacks and neutrals for a more subdued palette, which can nevertheless be intermixed with strong stronger accent colors for some visual pop.
Stitch works pretty much the way the name suggests: you purchase rug components in 10-piece packages that you then join together to create the finished rug. This allows you to build whatever size floor covering you want and mix colors in whatever proportion you desire. Is your space irregular, open or complex in plan, meaning not a pure rectangle or circle? Egads, this really is your lucky day, because the contours of the Stitch rug modules lend themselves particularly well to making a rug with a non-rectilinear outline.
The Stitch Rug palette embraces a wide range of hues, so you can make sure it goes with your dog. Or child.
Our other customizable floor covering, the Buzzi Puzzle Rug, goes in the opposite direction in terms of shape; in fact, the modules are based on a square, which goes pretty well with the straight walls and rectangular perimeter that characterizes the large majority of interior rooms or areas. The pieces measure about 39 inches across, not including the tabs, which gives them a fun, generous scale. The palette tends toward neutral grays and off-whites. Made from up-cycled PET waste, you’re not only doing your toes a favor when you go this route, you’re helping the environment. And the rug has sound-absorbing properties to boot (get it, to boot?).
The Buzzi Puzzle Rug comes in four colors and is a cinch to put together. Even a grownup could do it.
Don’t know about you, but we’re positively floored by the idea of making cost-effective rugs to suit.
A chair for children, or a side table for adults: the Child’s Chair by ArchitectMade can grow with you to adulthood and even into your dotage, at which point it’s time to hand it down to the next generation. Image courtesy of ArchitectMade.
Ah, childhood. Frivolous days of frolic and not a single concern in the world. Not even for the awkwardly exponential rate at which we outgrew every pair of shoes, pants and shirt Mom bought for us. Problem for Mom and her wallet, big problem with conventionally static design.
Enter Kristian Vedel (1923-2003), Danish industrial designer and problem solver for fast-growing children worldwide (left).
Vedel was an influential member of the Scandinavian Design movement at its mid-century height, crafting furniture from plastics and woods in a classically modern design vocabulary that embraced ergonomics and pragmatics simultaneously. He incorporated these objective requirements with a personal design vision that sacrificed neither imagination nor practicality.
This balance of perspective made him an ideal designer of children’s furniture, since he resolved the obvious problem of accelerated obsolescence by designing children’s furniture that grew with them instead of them outgrowing it. This made him of one of the first architects to design children’s furniture that wasn’t simply a miniature version of grownup pieces. His Child’s Chair of 1957, currently produced by ArchitectMade, is a superb example of his insightful design philosophy.
A few key aspects of the Child’s Chair explain its success as a piece of children’s design. First, Vedel made the chair reconfigurable by the use of two removable and re-positionable discs that fit into any of four slots in the barrel form. Friction-fit and requiring no hardware, the discs can be handled easily by child and adult alike. That makes the chair more than just a piece of practical furniture – it also makes it an object of interactive play for the child. And once the child’s imagination comes into play, so to speak, the chair becomes potentially infinite in form (in other words, a toy).
LEFT: A sampling of the many configurations of his Child’s Chair from vintage photographs. We especially appreciate the image in the lower right showing a big old guy handing a bottle of beer to an unsuspecting child. Please do not try this yourself at home. Image courtesy of ArchitectMade.
Reconfigurability also enables the chair to serve multiple functions. Simply by altering the discs and orienting the barrel form in any number of directions, the Child’s Chair can function as a table, rocker, highchair, nightstand, storage or display piece. Its versatility is further enhanced by the abstraction of its geometry, particularly the fact that it has no visible base, middle or top. By contrast, imagine taking a traditional child’s highchair and trying to turn it upside down to use it for something than its intended purpose. The only thing you’ll get by doing that is a mess of split peas on your rug.
The absence of details that give a chair its scale – the turnings on a leg, the size of a fixed back, the height of a defined seat – is precisely what enables Vedel to avoid the problem of miniaturization we mentioned at the start of this post.
Reconfigurable, multi-functional, beautifully designed and made: sounds like something they’d carry at our favorite online store for transformable art and design. Oh wait…that’s us!
Bec Brittain’s SHY Light made of LED tubes for Matter are reminiscent of our playful days with K’NEX. The tubes can be detached and re-configured for endless configuration options.
Let’s recall our years of youth, specifically our formative years when team sports was considered the to-do as the after-school norm. Our nine-year old selves gathered around soccer fields and basketball courts as our coaches taught us the basic principals of what makes an organization, of what essentially makes a team. Some of us listened passionately, mentally noting down what was needed to make a great pass, while some, let’s be honest, were prone to daydreaming and annoying our friends. Nevertheless, our coaches tried to imbue us as best they could with the golden rule: there is no “I” in team. To succeed we had to work together in whatever position we were placed or in whatever order we came up to play.
Jason Miller’s Endless Lighting system defies space with limitless arrangements for the wall or hanging configurations.
We now know that our coaches wouldn’t lead us astray. After all, pop culture has proven to us that the most popular musicians, artists and casts would not be successful without the integrity of each part of a successful team. Would the Beatles be the Beatles without their essential four, would Andy Warhol have reached stardom without his entourage at The Factory, and would the crew of Friends be the same if they were missing a friend? Of course, we know that some of these pop culture references have more cultural importance than others, but the point is, without the entire ensemble of these groups as a whole, they wouldn’t be the same. Because one without the other does not make them great, but together as a whole they shine brighter.
TOP: Camp in the great indoors with Paula Sevilla’s Home Camping, a collection of porcelain hanging flashlights. BOTTOM: A naked bulb never looked so good: Frame cluster chandeliers by Iacoli & McAllister come in a variety of colors, frame and light sizes, and configurations.
We were thinking about how this strength in cohesion philosophy relates to modular design when we happened to come across several customizable pendant light fixtures that have recently come on the market. Each of them seem to embody the lesson of team playing in subordinating the part to the whole, thus making the whole greater than the sum of the parts. And of course, as is generally the case with modular and customizable design, the fixtures can be more easily harmonized with the physical parameters of the surrounding space by adjusting their size, color or shape than the static design typical of most fixtures.
Thanks, Coach. You really were the brightest bulb in the bunch.
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Mission
Henry Ford, move over – the era of mass production has come to a close! Personalization is the name of the game now. People want a role in shaping the physical world around them to suit their individual needs, tastes and resources; to satisfy that goal they're looking for works of art and design that are reconfigurable, interactive and scalable. This blog explores how creatives are responding to the quest for customization, as well as the impact customization is having on the creative disciplines themselves.
