The Top Stitch
Your weekly digest of news in the world of Design, Upholstery, Furniture and Interior Design, brought to you by Global Upholstery Solutions.
As we contemplate the other side of this COVID-19-induced shelter-in place protocols of the last several months, we at BADG expect to emerge into a new future with new terms. Some areas will remain recognizable, while others will be necessarily re-defined. A future that has been conceived by none. In this future, our homes are reinforced as the center of our lives: family life, work life. At the center will be the core principles of our general well-being and the protection of our bodies from potential harmful agents in the outside world. We embrace the possibilities of this future home sanctuary in the BADG Virtual Concept House (“Concept House”) and seek to demonstrate what this new future may hold in the context of dwelling for peoples of the Black diaspora.
On Saturday February 22nd had the the honor of being a guest on the Jennifer Hammond Show, SiriusXM UrbanView, Ch 126.
I spoke about advocacy and how I am fighting to make our profession and our world more equitable and just. I spoke at length, about National Organization of Minority Architects and the organization I founded Beyond the Built Environment.
Blacks Who Design highlights all of the inspiring Black designers in the industry. The goal is to inspire new designers, encourage people to diversify their feeds, and discover amazing individuals to join your team.
If you’re a Black designer, this site’s for you
There are great designers all across the industry. Hopefully this project inspires you to see yourself among the ranks.
If you’re not a Black designer, this site’s for you too 🙂
- Reply to a recruiter: Tired of recruiting emails? Instead of hitting archive, reply with a link to this site.
- Target your mentoring: Dedicate your lunch breaks towards mentoring people that might not normally get access to you.
- Volunteer: Consider blocking off some time to teach design to younger students.
This week, we tackled one of the main challenges facing all line managers right now: remote working inclusively. We – along with our panel of industry experts – had a frank discussion about the ways we can manage the complex switch to remote working.
Even the most astute amongst us hardly anticipated such a dramatic change in mandatory home working to happen so quickly. Offices that weren’t online-based were forced to scramble to assemble the appropriate equipment virtually overnight. Managers who had spent their careers resisting flexible working had to adapt to a new challenge. Teams were cut down with little warning.
But: the reality is that normal ‘work from home’ and ‘flexible working’ practices can never apply to our current situation. We can’t cut-and-paste our usual guidelines for working out of the office to a global pandemic. With this in mind, we called out to our industry experts to offer their guidance and support for businesses leaders feeling challenged right now.
I’m a design journalist and for the past decade I’ve been writing primarily about industrial design. As an editor for the industrial design website Core77, I attended design festivals around the world. In 2011, I started seeing really interesting projects, usually by students, that addressed or confronted different facets of our experiences around food including growing, packaging, transporting, storing, selling, and eating food.
Architect, open-source designer and Design Indaba Speaker, Nicolás Kisic Aguirre, has created an instrument dubbed the Momoprot or Módulo Móvil de Protesta (mobile protest module). The Momoprot is a way to generate collective noise, unify protestors against the same objective.
This unlikely sounding creation has been described as an Anti-fascist Drum Machine or Antifa Drum Machine, a name coined by Marcel Zaes, and has been used to raise the voice of far-left dissent in public protests.
We are a business and don’t want to get into a “look what we can do” campaign of something that had no commercially viable application. Our new product offering, Möbius, is a major commitment for us.
We have developed a product offering that will allow hospitality businesses to refresh their furniture with very high-end products without a high investment cost and meet their increasingly important environmental and sustainability objectives. That being said, it was far from easy!
Stirred by collective anxieties, designers organize beyond corporate confines to draw the industry’s attention to the climate crisis
Last August, Greta Thunberg crossed the Atlantic from Europe to the US by solar-powered boat, with the Fridays for the Future movement in tow. Halfway around the world, the Amazon and much of Australia was set ablaze. The same year, the global Climate Strike galvanized movements like the Sunrise Movement and the Extinction Rebellion and created palpable political momentum for a Green New Deal. At the same time, in the design world, there were not one but two design triennials championing international designers who are confronting the climate crisis, and the American Institute of Architecture declared the climate crisis “a top priority.”
Graffiti artist Banksy has created a sketch for a slavery memorial in Bristol that would incorporate slave-trader Edward Colston and the protesters who tore his statue down.
Banksy, whose identity is unknown but who is believed to come from the city of Bristol in south west England, posted his proposal on Instagram.
His sketch shows the statue of slave-trader Colston, which was torn down from its prominent position near Bristol’s harbour as part of a Black Lives Matter protest on Sunday, returned to its pedestal.
For most people, the sofa is the focal point of their living room. It is a welcoming element that will capture the eye of most of your visitors when they come into your home.
Because the sofa is such an essential part of your interior design, you want to go with one that looks great and complements your other furnishings perfectly. With that in mind, here are some current sofa trends you will want to look out for.
Architecture and poetry may not seem likely bedfellows. In normal times we tend to navigate the built environment with our heads down, performing functional tasks rather than finding inspiration in dancing golden daffodils or floating lonely clouds.
But London-based poet LionHeart sees things differently, and organisations including Grimshaw Architects and the Saatchi Gallery are some of the first to get on board with his unique approach, each making him their first ever Poet in Residence.
Visionary and prolific, Karim is one of the most unique voices in design today. With more than 4000 designs in production, over 300 awards to his name, and client work in over 40 countries, Karim’s ability to transcend typology continues to make him a force among designers of his generation. His award-winning designs include democratic objects such as the ubiquitous Garbo waste can and Oh! Chair for Umbra, interiors for Morimoto restaurant, Philadelphia and Semiramis hotel, Athens, and exhibitions for Corian and Pepsi. Karim has collaborated with clients to create democratic design for Method and Dirt Devil, furniture for Artemide and Magis, brand identity for Citibank and Hyundai, high-tech products for LaCie and Samsung, and luxury goods for Veuve Clicquot and Swarovski, to name a few. Karim’s work is featured in 20 permanent collections and he exhibits art in galleries worldwide. Karim is a perennial winner of the Red Dot award, Chicago Athenaeum Good Design award, Interior Design Best of Year Award, and IDSA Industrial Design Excellence Award. Karim is a frequent guest lecturer at universities and conferences, globally disseminating the importance of design in everyday life.
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