HobbyPrincess

Design barcodes from Japan

Barcode Revolution creates designed barcodes for major Japanese brands such as Suntory, Calbee, Wacoal and others.

New BonBonKakku is CafePress for Design Fabrics

Good news to all fabric lovers: Vallila Interior has just launched a CafePress of design fabrics, BonBonKakku (kakku = cake in Finnish). You can submit your own design or vote for ("score") designs by other people. The site is by the coolest agency in Helsinki Kokoro&Moi.

I just submitted my first design, and I'm looking forward to seeing the quality of their prints. The example fabrics suggest they have the capacity to make large colorful ones. But how will they compare with the everlasting quality of classics like Marimekko?

The minimum order is 3 x 1m (á 25e/m) plus tax, so printing all your great designs at once might get a bit dear. Nevertheless, beware friends and relatives: next christmas you'll get lots of soft presents!

A beautiful offer

The yearly Alvar Aalto symposium in Jyväskylä is a kind of a foo camp for design professionals. This August there was especially one presentation I didn’t want to miss: Dai Fujiwara, creative director of Issey Miyake and the creator of a-poc (a piece of cloth) manufacturing concept.

I had booked us hotels and all was set.  Then (oh no!) little Eliel got sick.

Six weeks later at the Valve & Jaiku & Thinglink housewarming party, I met Laura Sarvilinna and Tuuli Sotamaa, who tell me this story: at the same Alvar Aalto symposium that we had missed, Fujiwara had offered to design wedding dresses for a couple who would exchange wedding vows before the end of the year.

Quite extraordinary, I agreed. But even more extraordinary was the fact, Laura exclaimed, that nobody had yet signed up to take the offer! No kidding. But wait a minute, said Laura suddenly,  couldn’t you and Jyri get married?

I instantly thought it was a brilliant idea. Jyri’s birthday was a couple of days ahead and I had not yet thought about his present. Yes, that’s it: I’d propose him. Girls, I said, it’s a deal.

And yes: he said yes. Actually, he said “great idea, let’s do it”.

UPDATE: As a result of this project, my name has changed from Ulla-Maaria Mutanen to Ulla-Maaria Engeström. In the slow world of academic publishing, I'll still keep Ulla-Maaria Mutanen as my artist name.

The Movement for Fun

This column was published in CRAFT:05.

Professor Kevin Henry called me one day from Columbia College in Chicago, where he is Coordinator of the Art and Design Department’s Product Design Program. “Do you think we’re witnessing the rise of a new craft movement?” He asked me curiously. Kevin explained that he had been interviewing crafters on the East coast for a study he was conducting. “Almost none of the crafters I spoke with considered themselves part of a larger movement,” he complained. ”Most of them just craft for fun!”

Surely people who are just having fun do not a movement make? Let’s first turn around and look back at a historical precedent – the Arts and Crafts Movement at the end of the19th century. At a time when industrialization and minimum-quality mass production were booming, a group of artists and designers, William Morris among them, issued a call for the revival of the lost spirit of crafting in design: return to simplicity, to sincerity, to good materials and sound workmanship. Morris’ group never evolved into a social or political organization. Rather, it was a loose community of professional craftsmen who shared the same artistic ideals.

Today the story’s different. First, there is a whole universe of coexisting artistic styles and aesthetic ideals. Second, today’s crafters are more often hobbyists than professionals. They’re also driven by various personal motives.

Take my sister-in-law Kukka, who studies history at the university. She lives on a tight student budget, and perhaps because of that, she crafts a lot of cool stuff. She sews her own skirts and bags, builds clever Christmas presents out of recycled materials, and paints beautiful greeting cards. She saves her pennies and gets more delight by crafting unique creations instead of buying expensive merchandise from the store.   

My journalist friend Liisa is another example. She just loves making cool things and realizing her ideas. Once she made pillows with a wonderful cat design that grew so popular she had to make a whole bunch for her buddies. The other time she crafted necklaces and swapped them for lunch company. She also organizes crafting get-togethers. One Saturday she had us sew outfits for going out that night. For her, crafting is about having fun with friends.

Then there is Stefan who runs a yoga retreat. Following Mahatma Gandhi’s swadeshi philosophy of good life, he hates imported mass-produced products and always tries to find a way to support local makers and entrepreneurs. He thinks that by setting an example to others, he can help make the world a better place. For Stefan, crating is an alternative lifestyle.

The one thing that my sister-in-law, Liisa, and Stefan have in common is the celebration of individual creativity. And that’s the whole point. The emerging new craft movement is not about outspoken leaders or violent controversy. Instead, it’s about regular people following their passion and connecting with their friends.

Still, it’d be a mistake to shrug crafters off as clueless. Below the innocent appearance they are planting the seeds of change. Without making a big deal about boycotting big brands or saving the environment, crafting changes the way we consume. It exposes us to the original ideals of William Morris: the preference of creativity, sincerity, good materials and sound workmanship over wasteful mass-production. It’s just that this time the movement is not limited to a group of professional craftsmen. Instead, it’s spreading much further and broader than Morris could have imagined in his wildest dreams.

Green Touch at DOTT07

Jenna and I built an interactive installation called Green Touch together with the Touch Project of Oslo School of Architecture and Design. We're in Newcastle this week for Designs of the Time 2007 to display the installation at the festival.

The idea of Green Touch is to encourage the DOTT07 exhibition visitors to explore the design objects on display and learn about their production and environmental impact by touching them with NFC-enabled phones.

Green Touch brings the Thinglink interface to mobile devices. We used Nokia 6131 NFC Edition phones running a custom Java midlet. The software enables users to access images and sounds from thinglink.org when they touch an object containing a NFC tag, and provides tactile feedback on the phone.

For the installation, we selected a collection of Finnish design products that carry a unique story - such as the Artek stools designed by Alvar Aalto and Shigeru Ban.

So far the feedback here at DOTT has been enthusiastic. Especially kids seem to instantly grasp and love the idea of mobile phones as "magic wands".

Henrik Torstensson speaking at Helsinki Design Hub

Want to meet Henrik Torstensson from stardoll.com? Come to Helsinki Design Hub seminar tomorrow!

Social Objects project

Summary of the case examples

Social Objects project explores new forms of internet-mediated communication around design objects. Between October and July 2007 we explored three main themes:

-    micromarketing
-    mobile tourism
-    design-centered social networks

In collaboration with young designers, museums, and a school, we built seven practical examples that each relates to a theme. All examples work on the free thinglink.org platform.

1) Design Mobile – Bookmarking real-life objects with Nokia 6131 reader phone

Design Mobile consists of seven bookmarkable Finnish design objects. Each object is tagged with two NFC icons linked with two bookmarking functions: “I like” and “I want”. Touch, for instance, the ‘I like’ icon on Darknezzz sleeping mask, and the sleeping mask is automatically added to your personal collector’s portfolio on Thinglink.

Read more.
We thank: Top Tunniste Oy, SECCO, and ByroLights

2) Expanding museum exhibitions into virtual space: The Craft Museum of Finland

How to present the full story of a historically meaningful artifact in a limited exhibition space? The Craft Museum of Finland uploaded their Poron jäljillä exhibition on Thinglink, where each object got its own web page. This makes it possible for the Craft Museum to present rich descriptions of the exhibited objects, which museum visitors can access during or after the exhibition on the Internet. Visitors can also comment and bookmark objects.

3) Social networking with school portfolios: Jyväskylä Craft School

Kids love to use Internet during classes but are rarely allowed to. How can a social networking service serve as a tool in teaching? Pupils of the Jyväskylä Craft School published their school portfolios in the Thinglink database. Pupils aged between 8 and 16 tried out social networking by adding their school friends as contacts and commenting each other’s work. 

4) Trendsetter portfolio

Some people just seem to have better taste than others. Those who do, are often followed by other people, and their personal choices become recommendations. We asked Liisa Jokinen, a design journalist and the co-founder of HelLooks, to build a trendsetter portfolio on Thinglink by choosing a collection of objects that she would want for herself. You can subscribe to Liisa’s portfolio on http://thinglink.org/user/liisa.

5) Micro marketing with SMS

Art, design and craft is typically available in limited editions, and true design fans want to be among the first at the treasury. Huippu Design Management created a Thinglink portfolio for Naoto Niidome to announce his latest creations. We connected Naotos portfolio with his Jaiku account.  Jaiku allows Naoto’s fans to receive SMS updates of any new item added to Thinglink.

6) Aggregating virtual exhibitions with user-generated tags: Mekko exhibition

Daringly graphic Marimekko and Vuokko dresses are classic fashion icons in the history of Finnish fashion design. In praise of these beautiful classics we organized ‘mekko exhibition’ out of DIY fashion shoots and nostalgic photos from family albums. The exhibition is aggregated with a tag ‘mekko exhibition’ on Thinglink. This way anybody can build their own exhibition.

Read more.

7) Adding sounds to design objects

We think sounds make an essential part of a cultural object. Sounds can differentiate objects. Sounds invite play. We made it possible to add sound files to objects on Thinglink. Go and check it out! 

Pattern Recognition

This column was published in CRAFT:04.

Have you ever heard of cosplay? Combining the words "costume" and "play", cosplay is a subculture that originates from Japan. Cosplayers dress up as characters from comics and video games. I got the opportunity to attend my first cosplay party not too long ago. Feeling like Alice in Wonderland, I mingled among the hundreds of super dollfies, elegant gothic aristocrats and loli-goths, all wearing wonderful self-made or self-designed costumes. Trailing the global success of manga comics and anime cartoons, cosplay has has made costume-crafting a growing trend worldwide.

Because more people are making their own clothes and accessories, the demand for useful blueprints and recipes is on the rise. Crafters, if anyone, should know that good patterns are valuable because they require hours of careful planning and design. Not everyone can express a complicated model in a simple way. Those who exceed at it can become celebrities. When a Toronto-based crafter nicknamed TheJordy published an illustrated how-to for making a purse on craftster.org, the response was awe-inspiring. Hundreds of thousands of people viewed the instructions, and the post generated over 100 pages of comments on the Web site.

Virtual worlds, blogs, online communities, and discussion forums offer new channels for crowdsourcing patterns and recipes. They are changing the way patterns are sought out and distributed. For example, if you are a fan of the fantasy role-playing game Dark Age of Camelot looking for the sewing pattern of a Sepiroth jacket, you’ll be happy to know one can be found on forums.cosplay.com. Valuable is thus not only the pattern itself but also knowledge of where to find it.

The distribution of patterns in magazines has traditionally been a profitable business. But if that is the case, why are then people like Nicola Enrico Stäubli, a Swiss-based architect, giving away the design patterns of his foldschool cardboard furniture on the Web for free? One answer is that sharing free patterns generates goodwill. In a world where everybody wants to earn a nickel, giving out something for free makes you stand out from the crowd.

A freely editable pattern invites us to play and contribute. Patterns can be a puzzle. For example, showstudio.com has a neat downloads section where it publishes the patterns of legendary but extremely complicated fashion items, like the Alexander McQueen Kimono Jacket. In exchange for giving out the pattern for free, showstudio asks the ones who succeed in making the garment to send in photos of the result for publishing.

Good patterns are sometimes referred to as the “source code” of great crafting. BurdaStyle, a spin-off project of Hubert Burda Media, is applying the software vocabulary even further. Burda has launched the concept of open-source sewing, and offers a free pattern database for crafters around the world. A pattern can be freely downloaded and used as the base for other designs. During its first four months Burda reports the database had over 60 000 downloads in the US.

Not all software programmers want to share their code. Likewise, many crafters consider good patterns and recipes their business secrets. Still, there are a growing number of those who believe that sharing patterns for free will eventually benefit the distributor and, in one way or another, generate a return on the investment. This makes sense. Who wouldn’t like to have a community of passionate amateurs promoting one’s core business?

mekko exhibition on thinglink.org

Do you have a vintage Marimekko or Vuokko dress? Join our mekko exhibition on thinglink.org starting from July, 4th!

Daringly graphic Marimekko and Vuokko dresses are classic fashion icons in the history of Finnish fashion design. These dresses are like good wine; the more time passes, the better they get. Some of Marimekko’s dresses have been in production for over four decades. Vintage vuokkos and marimekkos are among the most wanted discoveries at flea markets and second hand stores. Some of the dresses pass straight on from mother to daughter.

In praise of these beautiful classics, we are organizing a mekko exhibition – an exhibition of vintage Marimekko and Vuokko dresses.  In addition to new DIY fashion shoots, we’re welcoming nostalgic photos of dresses from your family photo album. Take part in the exhibition and win yourself a new classic dress!

How to participate?

1. Take a cool fashion shoot of yourself with a marimekko dress on, or scan an old pose from the family album and save it in jpg format.
2. Create a free collector’s portfolio on thinglink.org (‘Sign up’)
3. Add your picture to your portfolio by clicking ‘Add’. Write down the story of the dress under ‘description’ and tag the dress with the words ‘mekko exhibition’. When you’re ready, click ‘submit’ at the bottom of the page. You’re in!
4. You can now browse through other people’s dresses by writing ‘mekko exhibition’ in the search box. Pick your favorite dress!

Create your own exhibition on thinglink.org!

If you have cool photos of other kinds of marimekko garments, tag your photo as “vintage marimekko” or start a new exhibition by choosing your own tag!

If you’re passionate about other classic vintage garments, you can be a curator and create your own exhibition on thinglink.org by announcing a certain Thinglink tag on your blog!

Mekko exhibition info in Finnish

Design Mobile

How to bookmark physical objects with mobile phones? We addressed this question in a presentation made for Cultuur 2.0  workshop by building a Design Mobile that consists of seven bookmarkable design objects. Each object is tagged with two NFC icons linked with bookmarking functions "I like this" and "I want this" on thinglink.org.  Let's say you touch the "I like" icon on the back of the "encoded url on the sticker, and automatically (well, after login) adds the book to your personal coolhunter portfolio on thinglink.org. 

The components of Design Mobile

1) Lehvä luminarire designed by Jukka Korpihete (Young designer of the year 2006) and manufactured by ByroLights, 2) a traditional deer bell from Lapland, 3) a design collector’s must have vintage Arabia cup Odile, 4) You Should Be Here – a book about Helsinki by Bulgaria design collective, 5)Darknezzz sleeping mask by a Finnish fashion designer Tiia Vanhatapio, 6) Marimekko socks with the classic stripe pattern designed by Annika Rimala and 7) a Secco handbag made of recycled materials.

Phone: Nokia 6131
Tags: 3D Stickers from Toptunniste
Photo: Jenna Sutela