Brit Insurance Designs of the Year

An exhibition of the 100 best projects of design of the year in the Design Museum in London.

I liked very much some of the projects, especially in the Interactive session. Although, I was a bit disappointed with the Graphic Design session. I was expecting a bit more in terms of experimentation, new materials, print process...

The projects that interested me most were:

- Sketch Furniture, by Front
The group Front have developed a process to turn "air" sketches into real furniture.
Watch the video
Read more in the Front website

- Your house, by Olafur Eliasson.

This book was designed by Olafur Eliasson who relates the experimental narrative of reading a book to walking through a house.


- Sharkrunners, by area/code
Sharkrunners is an online game created for the 20th anniversary of the Discovery Channel's Shark Week.
In the game, players become virtual sharks researchers, but the sharks in the game are the real white sharks with GPS, which provides the position and movement of the real sharks.
Play the game

- Private View Exhibition for Trussardi, Palazzo Trussardi Alla Scala, Milan, by Paul Cocksedge
An exhibition at the Salone del Mobile in Milan. The walls are covered with a filter that for human eyes it appears black. People discover the hidden objects using their mobile cameras or digital cameras.

- The Replenishing Body Kiosk, by Ross Phillips

An interactive video installation where visitors were invited to make a one-second video recording which become part of the video portrait.

Showstudio website

Animated Exeter

We went for this event especially for the Quay Brother's talk, which was very quick and superficial.

Besides the talk, there was an exhibition with their work (the puppets and models) which was really interesting see the scales and the quality of the models and scenario. We could see the effort they put in details and the choice of materials.

We also watched the session of their short films ("Quay Brothers: a short Collection"). Some of them, I've seen in DVD before, but of course the experience is different in big screen. The movies were: "The Comb", "Street of Crocodiles", "This Unnameable Little Broom", "The Mascot" and "Are we still married?". What I most liked was "The Mascot", a story of a puppy that try to steal an orange but everyone wants that orange and try to get from him.

Other talks we attended:
- Pitch Perfect (with Marion Edwards, Matthew Sagar, Tim Searle, David Freedman and Lucy Murphy)
- Animate & Educate Conference, with Curtis Jobling (Bob the Builder, Frankstein's Cat)

The seagull, by Chekhov

The Seagull, a play by Chekhov, a Royal Shakespeare Company production.

It was the first time I watched a play by Chekhov. I liked so much that I bought the book and read other plays by him.

The production was great, basically just the essential actors on stage. This is the kind of play that I most like, more than huge and expensive productions.

The cast was amazing! It was staring Ian Mckellen. The whole cast was so amazing that Ian Mckellen, even being a great actor wasn't the focus.

About the story, what I most like is the parts that the writer in the play is speaking about creativity, its anxiety, isolation and sufferings:

"I am held day and night by one obsessive thought: I must write, I must write, I must... I've no sooner finished a story than I'm already driven by something to write another, then a third, after that a forth... (...) What, I ask you, is there here that is splendid or bright? Oh, what an absurd life! (...) I have no rest from myself, and I feel that I'm devouring my own life." (Trigorin's dialog, p. 108)

That makes me think how creative professionals have to give up their own life in order to be able to create. Makes me think the relationship between creativity and isolation.