Category Archives: showtime…

our sustainable design manifesto poem

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Last week we were at the brilliant South Coast Design Forum’s Brighton Designers Showcase, where our work was being exhibited along with other members to a gathered audience of fellow designers and business people from the south.

We also were given one of the speaking slots, where I had one minute to speak about something compelling in our industry, with no hard self promotional sell.

One minute. Not long to be interesting and compelling, whilst remembering each point you wanted to cover.

So, we decided to write a poem about parts of our studio’s sustainable design manifesto. It will never win any awards, but it seemed to go down well, so here it is.

 

Hello, my name’s Claire Potter

I’m going to talk about sustainability

Due to time, I’m going to do this

In the form of poetry

 

Great spaces are engaging

Should make souls and hearts sing

Exciting and inspiring

Without excessive bling

 

Small actions can feel tiny

But they’re powerful when combined

So did you help or hinder

With the element you designed?

 

Design for disassembly

Should be factored at the start

So ending creates new beginnings

When something’s taken apart

 

Reduce reuse recyle? But

Responsibility

Respectful and Repair it

Should be added to the three

 

Minimise your waste stream

So lots of things are saved

Mileage, money, resources

And responsible paths are paved

 

Collaborate with others

Many brains better than one

For thinking WAY outside the box –

Essential. (and it’s fun)

 

Design should be disruptive

It should challenge then create

For how are we to progress

If we don’t innovate?

 

So this is our studio focus

To design spaces ethically

And we assure you we’re far better at it

Than we are at poetry!

 

(by Claire Potter, Jan 2012)

back to work with a bang – and our eco studio is moving home!

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Welcome one and all to 2012.

We do hope that you had a lovely seasonal break, whether you went away or stayed at home. We hope that you had a lovely relax, ate too much, drank too much and generally had a jolly old time.

We hope that you are raring to go for 2012.

We certainly are, and we have an exciting way to start off the year.

After three years in one location, we are due to be moving to bigger and more public premises this coming spring. Planning and negotiations are now complete, and we are pleased to announce that we are converting a former public toilet block in Hove, Brighton into our new eco hub office, eco studio and workshop.

As well as a full eco conversion, the space will be used as a working place and open eco studio, so you will be able to drop by and say hello as well as purchase our limited edition pieces made in the workshop or other items we have salvaged on our travels.

Plans are also afoot for events in May for the Brighton Fringe Festival or Brighton Artist’s Open Houses, and we are planning a series of workshops, talks, debate dinners, lectures and courses on a variety of interesting subjects which will be announced soon.

So, workshop, office, studio, mini salvage store, exhibition space, teaching space and eco studio hub. Not sure exactly what it will be called yet – we are torn between the LooLab or StudioLoo. Your suggestions are most welcome.

Amazing what you can fit into an old loo eh? Keep your eyes peeled for construction updates.

white night Brighton 2011…

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We love White Night here in the studio – the annual, free, night time arts festival in our lovely city. Brighton is creative and pretty eclectic at the best of times, but White Night is when you really see the boat pushed out, so to speak.

You can barely turn a corner in the city centre without coming across a video installation, performance art, pop up public piano, wandering band or random activity.

This year we had the pleasure of visiting, as we were taking a year off from producing an event, and we had a brilliant time.

We did not make it till dawn, and retired around 1am, but we packed in quite a few visits, and now you can see our mini video blog of our trip on our YouTube channel here White Night Brighton 2011

something for the weekend…part 1

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This marks the first in a few mini posts over the summer period dedicated to simple pleasures, traditional stuff and generally enjoying yourself, in the great outdoors. I will be covering a series of things from (free) events to go to, as well as things to do indoors (when it rains – which it will), my favourite recipes and how to make cool stuff. Things to fill the summer holidays.

The first is aimed at those of you living in and around, or visiting London this weekend, which, as usual, is rammed with interesting things to see and do.

Unfortunately, a trip to our capital can mean a good old spend of dosh, but there are also things you can do for free….here is our mini pick for this weekend.

Vintage by Wayne Hemmingway is a festival which originated along the road from us in Chichester at the beautiful Goodwood (which I adore) last year, and for it’s second outing it has travelled up the A23 to London to camp out in the South Bank Centre from Friday 29th – Sunday 31st July.

For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, the Vintage Festival will be as follows:The 21 acre Southbank site will be transformed into a Vintage wonderland. All the wonderful clubs, bands, fashions, art, and design, film, shops, vintage retailers, dance lessons, makeovers, workshops that made Vintage 2010 so memorable will be there along with some cool new Thames boat party surprises. So, expect a myriad of activities and stuff to see from the 1920′s to the 1980′s – music, design, fashion…

Only sticking point for us is that the tickets start at £60, or £75 if you want to visit the evening show. Quite a price. But, (which we think is a step better than last year, which was ticket only), this year there is a raft of free stuff. We approve of vintage and we approve of free fun.

So – what can you do and see for free this weekend at the South Bank Centre frontage? Well, you can visit the Vintage High Street and the Vintage Marketplace, open every day from 11am, with traders such as Benefit (who are offering free make-uppers), Oxfam (who are replicating their 1948 shop), Horrockses (who make beautiful dresses – I have one!) and Penguin Classics. There will also be entertainment, music, period style foods and the Marketplace, where vintage traders will be selling their wares. You can also visit the Vintage Cinema Bus and watch the chap Olympiad – billed as ‘Britain’s most eccentric sporting event’.

And when you have had your vintage fill, you can do the rest of the fantastic museums our capital has to offer, which are also free…

 (image by RavenFire)

a bright idea…

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We try and do our bit for our local community, sponsoring events and donating our time and expertise wherever we can, and at this time of year (the  very traditional Summer Fete, Open Days, Degree shows etc season) we tend to be doing a fair bit.

And so it has been for the last few weeks.

First off, I was invited to be the keynote speaker for the University of Sussex Product Design Degree Show, which was a great privilege but also a bit of  a responsibility as well. After umming and arrhing for a while about what to base the talk on, I decided to take it straight back to when I graduated and what I would have liked someone to say to me. I prepared it all with around 30 fantastic images, which were projected onto the wall behind me as I spoke about education, the credit crunch, the environment, brick walls, nanotechnology and graffiti. Oh, and fish. My favourite saying at present is ‘only a dead fish goes with the flow’, so I encouraged the graduates to get into the world and be rebellious and create change. It seemed to go well.

Next up was our yearly donation to a local school auction – the Dharma School in Brighton, which educates children based on Buddhist principles. Their motto of ‘warm hearts, clear heads and a love of learning’ is one I also prescribe to, so we are delighted to help to raise precious funds.

Each year we create something new, and this year was no exception.

This year we created a new light for the school, named the ‘bright idea’ – based on that ‘bing’ moment of the lightbulb above the head, this piece utilised a reclaimed marble light base and an old felt hat (found in our local Emmaus) and one of the beautiful, award winning designer energy saving Plumen lightbulbs. We loved it, and we are pleased to say, so did the school representative when it was picked up from the studio today! In fact, we loved it so much, we will probably be making more in a similar vein, so happy days.

 

butterflies in Glasgow…

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Another busy week,  and one that saw the studio heading up to Glasgow to the Ideal Home Show Scotland – quite a trip from the sunny climes of     good ol’ Brighton,  and in true Scots style we were drizzled on a good’un.

But never mind. We were completing an internal installation for the lovely Media Ten who were organising the show in the Diarmund Gavin Show   Garden area of the exhibition hall, so drizzle did not interrupt play.

The site was well organised and pretty tidy despite the last day push of hundreds of contractors all trying to complete their works and get out      before the traffic man shouted at them. Again.

We were calm and collected, and the beautiful butterfly pavilion went up without a hitch as the landscaping contractors paved and turfed around   our perimeters. This was another two tone lovely, with the exterior being a lush pale ‘Ideal Home Show’ blue and the inside a serene white – both     from our eco stain favourites Auro. A natural cedar beehive sat in one recess and a (filled) wormery went in the other.

The roof was planted with ferns (not our choice, but looked lush on the roof for the exhibition) and I suppose if you had a shaded roof, this would   work quite well. The acidy green did look great with the blue, especially with the solar panel nestled in the middle.

Inside the pavilion was a load of hooks made from recycled forks and a lovely aluminium clad potting bench and chalk board.

We left after our installation tired but contented, and after a brief stop over in Kirkcudbright, travelled back down south. Epic few days, but lovely. Thanks again to all the team for making our installation so smooth!

We are told that the Show went well – we will post any snippets we have over the next weeks here also!

white night or white horses….

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There are a few things that I find particularly exciting about the design process – the sketching, the thinking, but one of the best elements has to be the learning.

I find it such a wasted opportunity when designers (of any discipline) churn out ideas that have already been seen in another guise – surely we get our kicks from thinking up mad, weird and wonderful ways of doing new and exciting things? Maybe it is just me, but when I design I try and touch the moon – then figure out how I am going to build the damned ladder to do it.

Designing is challenging, and we should challenge ourselves (and our clients) every day.

But sometimes, no matter how much you plan, design, learn and invent, things can merrily gallop into your path, causing you to have a change of plan.

And so it is with our White Night proposal.

I planned for an ethereal, glowing and fluctuating installation, drifting and rocking next to the beautifully skeletal West Pier for White Night 2010 – this coming Saturday night. With the expertise and help of others I learnt about the rise and fall depths of the local tide, the natural drift, how to produce a double anchor system that would work with different wind directions, how to launch the boat, how to retrieve it, what a timed swell is and how it could cause our little boat a huge problem.

I learnt about the fishing boats of Brighton and why there aren’t many about, the underlying structure (or lack of it) of the West Pier, and how great a high pressure front is and how nasty a low pressure front can be.

But knowledge can sometimes feel like a bad thing, hence the phrase ‘ignorance is bliss’. And when I looked at the extremely complicated weather predictions for the West Pier area yesterday, the bits I had learnt showed me something I didn’t want to see. A phone call to the wonderfully helpful and patient experts at the Brighton Seafront Office confirmed my fears.

Saturday night would be great if I wanted to do a bit of surfing at 1.00 am, with a 5ft swell over 12 seconds, but not so favourable for a little 1960′s timber dinghy, full of wind generated LED’s, next to a large and imposing metal structure.

‘mini murmurations’ will not float for White Night Brighton 2010.

Instead, she will be located on the beach (well above the high tide mark!) with her rods and LED’s wafting in the breeze, albeit from a static base.

But Mother Nature is not to be messed with, and I would rather this than be swimming frantically out to the installation at the ungodly hours of the morning trying to stop it smash into the Pier. My risk assessment is complicated enough thank you.

So there we go – all have agreed that the low pressure looks ominous and even though I am a bit miffed, there is not much I can do. Instead, we will float her on another date when the gods of the sea are having a quiet snooze rather than the planned knees up this weekend.

Best laid plans…