Metropolis Magazine's blog

March 27, 2008—March 29, 2008
The AIGA San Diego Y Design Conference is going green for Y13, “Seeds of Change,” bringing you the biggest players in sustainable design for what promises to be the most thought- provoking and awe-inspiring Y Conference yet. This year’s conference will examine how individuals, communities, nations and the world are developing new paradigms for a more healthy and sustainable culture. As designers, we are asking ourselves, “how can we become better stewards of the earth—to our clients, to our community, and to ourselves?” The conference has expanded this year to two full days plus an opening evening with Paul Hawken, one of the world’s most influential environmentalists and entrepreneurs. Speakers include Metropolis editor in chief Susan S. Szenasy, Alexander Rose, Brian Dougherty, Janet Kübler, Robin Chase, Marc Alt, and many others. The Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace & Justice @ University of San Diego
http://y-conference.com

Water, water everywhere ...

Attention all designers: Metropolis Magazine has a challenge for you!

The 2008 Next Generation® Design Competition sponsored by Herman Miller, Maharam and Sherwin-Williams, focuses on WATER.

In a world of killer floods and rising tides, potable water is a finite resource. Water is everywhere—in nature, industry, home, our bodies, products, interiors, buildings, landscapes, systems (just to name a few). With up to one third of the global population living without reliable access to clean water, we need better design solutions that account for potable water, gray water, black water—its uses, re-uses, controls, management, efficiency, and conservation.

We call on your innovative design solutions at all scales and sizes—products, interiors, buildings, landscapes, communication systems, or anything else you’ve dreamed up—for handling this most precious and most threatened natural resource. The time for new thinking on water is now. WHAT’S YOUR SOLUTION?

The German architect Axel Ritter has been collecting examples of innovative materials for more than a decade, and his book, Smart Materials in Architecture, Interior Architecture, and Design—published by Birkhäuser last December—is a colorful, example-packed, occasionally disorienting catalog of that effort. So what makes a material smart? For Ritter the key considerations are whether it has changeable properties, and whether the changes are repeatable and reversible. It can be as simple as a latex paint that shifts color based on room temperature, or as complex as Ritter’s own proposal for a “polyreactive mechanomembrane” that would alter the shape of a building’s skin based on weather conditions. “Materials are becoming more and more important because architects are now thinking about buildings that are dynamic and can adapt to their surroundings,” Ritter says. But they’re just as important for interior and industrial designers looking for new finishes, adaptive forms, and unusual effects. Here we present a few examples culled from Ritter’s book...

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