Monday, September 10, 2007

Function And Beauty

Mission: Bringing together the Producer who wants to be the creative brand and the Designer who wants to be unique-innovative.

Address: Istanbul, the connection point for creative ideas from disciplines of design.

Catchword: The space does not limit your creativity, only your creativity limits the space!

Organisation: Istanbul Design Week


The City is hosting IDW '07 at the Old Galata Bridge -as photographed below the Event area- between Sept 4th and 10th -today last day. It seems like a perfect platform to realize its Mission in order to reach consumers and make an extensive international connections.

Being a material scientist from my educational background, so I did not want to miss out and dropped in this event:) Now I'd like to break down what makes this event special from my perspective:

Lets face firstly with this simple question: Have you ever thought your mug when drinking coffee?

From inexpensive coffee cups and chairs to very expensive sports cars and hi-tech cellular phones, all everything we use is the creation of designers. We may not spend much time thinking about them how to produce, but the designers spend plenty of time thinking of ''us'' before designing any product.

Design is something to do with three-core interests:

Human. Technology. Esthetic.

As a conclusion, the design includes the disciplines of advanced mechanical, user interface, industrial design, research, materials sciences, and more. This diagram below presents the correlation of the fields:


We easily know how to make any product. We know how to use it. But what about emotions? What about the designs that delight? Are we sure how about to produce an emotional impact on the product? So, basically a combination of two-things usefullness (=utility) and emotion plays an important role for designing. When I do look around of me, I see that people started noticing what the design makes a difference in their lifes. Take an example; even a small item can make a big difference in your kitchen looking. In other words, people are realizing that they can make their kitchen look better and how it gives them a joy.

Another example: iPod. Today we see that this item is carried by millions of people. Besides joy, design has made ''an art'' as a part of our daily life.

Bruce Nussbaum from Business Week defines Design as follows:

''Design is so popular today mostly because business sees design as connecting it to the consumer populace in a deep, fundamental and honest way. An honest way. If you are in the myth-making business, you don't need design. You need a great Ad Agency. But if you are in the authenticity and integrity business then you have to think design. If you are in the co-creation business today -and you'd better be in this age of social networking- then you have to think of design.''
I advice you to read this interesting article from Nussbaum on design and innovation, critizing about CEOs must be designers or not;)

Paola Antonelli, curator of the Architecture and Design Dept in New York's Museum of Modern Art highlights that:

''Designers try the little bits to change the world. But in truth what I think that they're really good at is taking major developments, major revolutions, technological, historical, social or otherwise and what they do is they make them understandable, usable, manageable by normal people.'' How true approach, isn't it?

IDW '07 hosts Conferences, Panels, Exhibitions, Workshops. Namely on everything related to Design breezes on the historical Galata Bridge. The world famous designers are sharing their experiences all past and future trends as well.


Fortunately I found a chance to attend for the Conference given by Anna Efverlund from Sweden, designer working for IKEA. She is so nice personality. She was talking about how to make prettier and easier our life among many stuff existing at home, that can cause a big mess for most of us;) I like shopping very much in IKEA Istanbul as it's the correct address for asthetic good and offers a wide range of well-designed functional simple but extraordinary products at affordable prices.

Some of other participants for Conferences are:


Anna Efverlund
-Sweden,
Patricia Urquiola-Spain, Huseyin Caglayan (Turkish)-UK, Konstantin Grcic-Germany, Bilgi Karan-Turkey, Li Edelkoort-Holland, Defne Koz (Turkish)-Italy, Marco Susani-USA, Tucker Viemeister-USA.

As for the Exhibitions, they are listed by the country:

Futuro Textiles-France, Marimekko-Finland, Etoiles Du Design-France, Best of DesignMai-Germany, Electrolux Design Lab-Sweden, Good 50X70-Italy and Turkish Designers' Area.

Browse here for
Turkish touch in design. As for Turkish design inspiration, go to see Aziz Sariyer's design, works as a part of most important manufacturers' collections such as Derin, Cappellini, Moros, Zeriatalia, Sica, Alparda, Hamam, Step, VitrA and Park. Visit Nurus Designs for both furniture & motivation. If you, too, believe like me that every product has its own story then Habitat Design here. So the community of Turkish designers referred here have exhibited their recent award winning products in this event to the audiences.

The Organisation is divided into five sections. Here are my picks for the most noteworthy designs of IDW '07:

1) Industrial Product Design:


2) Communication Design:


3) Fashion Designs:



4) Environmental Designs:


5) Design and Engineering:



I spent an incredible full day, and was feeling myself ''drunk'' because of those dazzling delightful designs:)

Let your imagination go wild!

1 comment:

  1. "The artist's world is limitless. It can be found ANYWHERE"
    Photographer Paul Strand

    ReplyDelete