An exclusive EcoSalon playlist to be played while wearing your hippest set of shades.

The seventh edition in our series of feel good music that keeps you moving and just might make you want to dance, Ray-Ban Exclusive Volume 7 is prepared with love and an extra dose of smooth summer funk. As always the playlist starts chill and ends strong, perfect for cranking through a morning of work or lounging with friends late into the summer evening.

If you’re new to the series, be sure to check out 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6.

Ray-Ban Exclusive Volume 7 from EcoSalon on 8tracks.

Tracklist:

1. Vanessa (Nico Pusch Bootleg Remix) – Grimes
2. These Dreams – Chris Malinchak
3. Hypnotized (Feat. Fran) -Oliver Koletzki
4. Chimie Physique (Gold Fields remix) – Yelle
5. Sail Away Digitalism Remix – The Rapture
6. Angels (Gin & Gin Remix) – The XX
7. Waiting For My Chance To Come (Bibio Remix) – Noah and the Whale
8. Real Talk – Anna Lunoe & Touch Sensitive
9. Wildfire – SBTRKT feat. Little Dragon
10. Pyramids – Frank Ocean
11. We Are Fine (Tourist Remix) – Sharon Van Etten
12. I Follow Rivers (The Magician Remix) – Lykke Li
13. Little Talks (The Knocks Remix) – Of Monsters & Men
14. Far Nearer – Jamie XX
15. Got 2 Find a Way 2 U – Origami
16. The Keepers (The Knocks Remix) – Santigold
17. Luminaire – Dream Lowe
18. It Ain’t Easy (JNL RMX) – Bit Funk
19. Glam feat. Chali 2na (Defunk Remix) – Dimie Cat
20. Catgroove – Parov Stelar
21. Geronimo – The Knocks & Fred Falke
22. Trembling Hands (Benny Benassi Remix) – The Temper Trap

 Want more? Check out all the Ray-Ban Exclusive playlists. 

The post Playlist: Ray-Ban Exclusive Volume 7 appeared first on EcoSalon.

Über-human folds in industrial and home design.

Foraying into the foldy discipline of origami design once more, let’s take a look at a few bends that have captured the design world – in both market and imagination.

The first comes care of bendables expert Pleat Farm, a perennial favorite of ours, for whom folds hold more than cornered materials. They just might hold the answer to everything, according to some. But in the case of design student Christophe Guberan of Ecole Cantonale d’art de Lausanne (ECAL), it’s not entirely clear why the crinkle conjoins. In other words, it folds therefore it is…what? Cool seems the most sensible adjective for it.

He created the Hydro-Fold inkjet printer, which prints paper that pleats into 3D foms. It works by printing a mixture of water and ink that causes the paper to bend along the wet lines and humid areas.

The forms are created via a computer program that generates patterns for different configurations.

Issey Miyake, meanwhile has been avidly folding and creasing technology-driven art and fashion since the 1980s (he did Jobs’ turtlenecks, too – entirely pleatless yet visionary). The designer’s latest collection is not that of clothing or even cloth, but an LED lighting series made from recycled PET plastic bottles.

He’s working in collaboration with Italian lighting brand Artemide on the project, a forward-thinking solution for our plastic water bottle problem.

Finally, from German designer Elisa Strozyk a wooden blanket made usable from giving chips of wood the multi-faceted geometric treatment.

The blankets are among a larger Accordion Collection, which also include wood pleated into lighting fixtures and origami cabinets.

The designer states, “[the wooden textiles are] between hard and soft, challenging what can be expected from a material or category. It looks and smells familiar but feels strange, as it is able to move and form in unexpected ways.”

Images: Elisa Strozyk; Pleat Farm; Fast Company; Elisa Strozyk

The post The Bendables: Origami Design Tackles 3D and Waste appeared first on EcoSalon.

Wherein we ask our favorite design bloggers, curators and forecasters what inspires them.  

Pleat Farm is about more than origami. It bills itself a design pasture for all things apparel, textiles, architecture, furniture, paper art and product design related. But with a twist and a fold.

The site is focused entirely on innovations in material applications involving some kind of bending, knotting. Origami, basically – elevated to high brow and high art standards.

Architect and curator Elizabeth Surya helms the blog from the San Francisco Bay Area and attributes folding to creating the foundation of her design education and influencing her work.

Elizabeth chose to answer question number two.

What object are you currently lusting after and what would you do with it?

Elizabeth’s current lustable object. 

Elizabeth: Eero Saarinen’s Womb Chair and Ottoman is my most coveted set of furniture.

One reason is my appreciation for the architect’s methodology in scale and structure using bold yet simple, sweeping, curvilinear forms. The Womb Chair takes on those elements yet on a much more human level – a simple, curving shell that cradles the user. My wish is to own this baby some day.

This Saarinen masterpiece not only looks handsome in space, but would also be well-utilized as my spot for rest on a bad day.

What she would do with it. 

I’d curl up, catch forty winks, or sprawl with a good book. As cliché as this may sound, the chair really lives up to its name: the Womb.

The 5 Questions Series is an ongoing project wherein we peek inside the workspaces and living spaces of our favorite design bloggers, curators and trendsetters.

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These aren’t your grandmother’s paper flowers.

The word stems from ori (folding) and kami (paper), which rather sounds like gami, hence we have the traditional Japanese art form of Origami. Its origins date back to the 17^th century, but it’s since been popularized and westernized, in large part by Akira Yoshizawa, considered to be the grandmaster of the art.

Yoshizawa once explained that he wished “to fold the laws of nature, the dignity of life, and the expression of affection into my work.” His canvas, of course, was paper, poor pulpy paper, which gets such a bad wrap among the eco-conscious these days. No matter how much we recycle it, as newfangled it may be, our reliance on it is still responsible for untold deforestation, greenhouse gas emissions, and landfill waste.

To fold “the dignity of life” and “the laws of nature” into a product that comes from industrially harvested wood seems counterintuitive, doesn’t it? Ironic, even. But from Brooklyn to Berlin and beyond, the art of paper folding continues to surge in popularity – among young and innovative designers especially – challenging the way we consider the medium.

Brooklyn-based Brazilian artist Vik Muniz used the traditional origami crane to create a mosaic. More than two million were folded out of math homework, hall passes, love letters, candy wrappers and restaurant menus.

In Berlin, set designer Sarah Illenberger did the holiday windows for Hermes at the famous Kadewe department store. The result is whimsical and fantastical.

Craig Sonnenfeld remains rather mysterious. What we do know: he lives in Phoenix and creates amazing origami art out of dollar bills. The dude’s got money to fold.

Melbourne artist Matthew Gardiner coined the term Oribotics (a combination of origami and robotics) and created an entire art/science research field around it at the Ars Electronica Futurelab. Orbotics studies the interconnection of the aesthetic, biomechanic, and morphologic properties of robots and paper.

Also notable, his full scale Origami House constructed in 2008 from 1 square km of paper.

Swedish designer Mia Cullin creates textiles out of hand folded construction and geometric assemblies.

In Naples, Italian paper artist Andrea Russo folds modern origamic objects and cylinders, though his Van Gogh portrait is especially remarkable.

Holland based designer Yuya Ushida breaks the trend by using chopsticks to create a movable chair/couch, but relies on the principles and mathematics of origami.

In Paris, brothers and collaborators Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec created Clouds, an interlocking tile concept for the home. Though not strictly origami, Clouds is an installation (meant to be hung from a wall or ceiling) that takes its cue from origami masters: texture, form, and the tactile expression of affection.

Makes us want to reach out and crinkle something. At the very least, neatly fold.

Image: Trendenser.se; Design Taxi; Sara Illenberger; Deviant Art; Mathew Gardiner; Pleat Farm; Kvadrat

The post Cultural Origami: Pleats and Folds From All Over the Globe appeared first on EcoSalon.

Japanese icon/designer Issey Miyake recently collaborated with engineers and pattern makers to launch his first clothing line in more than a decade called 132 5. The collection was created from a fusion of both theoretical math, attractive design inspired by origami and a hi-tech new polyester fabric made from recycled plastic bottles. In the name “132 5,” the numeral “1” refers to the single piece of cloth, “3” to its 3D shape, which can be folded back into “2,” or two dimensions. The “5” corresponds to the multiple ways each garment can be worn, reports Suzy Menkes of the New York Times.

“For me, it’s a very powerful idea to actually change the meaning of something,” he tells Susannah Frankel of The Independent. “Like the Walkman, for example. You know, it completely changed the idea of sound, and that’s great. My dream, and the reason I first decided to open my studio, was that I thought to myself, if I could one day make clothes like T-shirts and jeans, I would be very excited.”

A garment from Issey Miyake’s 132 5 collection

Reality Lab,  (a team of young designers and engineers with whom he works with to develop pioneering clothing) launched the line with Miyake and purposefully created the designs as easy to wear as a pair of jeans and a t-shirt. The idea for the wearer is to literally step in and let the garment unfold, fastening where needed. The pieces are also easy to pack away and store and equally beautiful just laying flat “as the proverbial pancake, only to be unfolded by a woman wishing to wear it.”

For Miyake, the launch of 132 5 follows his other forward thinking collections, “Pleats Please” a crinkle fabric collection and A-POC (a piece of cloth), where cloth is cut by a computer, creating continuous tubes of fabric which include both shape and pattern. The customer cuts sleeves and skirts exactly to the length he wants.

Designs cut from Issey Miyake’s A-POC line

Miyake’s ultimate goal with all this research? A focus on the future of Japan’s fashion industry talent and factories closing down.

He tells The National: “This is a critical stage where we must focus upon this grave situation and think seriously about the future of making things.”

The exhibition that showcases the new 132 5 collection and how it was made, runs at 21_21 Design Sight in Tokyo until December 26.

Top Image of Issey Miyake with a 132 5 garment courtesy of The National

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