"Children's City" Creates Cheerful and Relaxed Atmosphere for Sick Children

Kinderstad (which means "children's city" in Dutch) is an addition to the old VU Medical Centre in Amsterdam, designed by Sponge Architects & Rupali Gupta in cooperation with IOU Architecture.

This was the winning entry of the Young Architects Competition of the Dutch National Board of Architects (BNA) and the penthouse now serves as a visiting area and offers a great space for the parents and their sick children to spend their visiting hours in. Roland Pouw of IOU Architecture says


"I hoped to create a space where young patients can forget for one moment their sickness and where they are in their own dreamland...".

New Standards for LEDs

Scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), in cooperation with national standards organizations, have developed the first two standards for solid-state lighting in the United States.
Also known as light-emitting diodes, (LEDs), the new generation of lighting uses light-emitting diodes (LEDs) instead of incandescent filaments or fluorescent tubes to produce illumination that cuts energy consumption significantly.
Solid-state lighting is expected to significantly reduce the amount of energy needed for general lighting, including residential, commercial and street lighting. “Lighting uses 22 percent of the electricity and 8 percent of the total energy spent in the country, so the energy savings in lighting will have a huge impact," says NIST scientist Yoshi Ohno.
Solid-state lighting is expected to be twice as energy efficient as fluorescent lamps and 10 times more efficient than incandescent lamps, although the current products are still at their early stages. Ohno chaired the task groups that developed these new standards.
In addition to saving energy, the new lighting, if designed appropriately, can produce better color rendering—how colors of objects look under the illumination—than fluorescent lamps or even incandescent lamps, Ohno says.
NIST is working with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to support its goal of developing and introducing solid-state lighting to reduce energy consumption for lighting by 50 percent by the year 2025. The department predicts that phasing in solid-state lighting over the next 20 years could save more than $280 billion in 2007 dollars.

Nearly Every Top 100 Interior Design Giant Specifies Green

Interior Design magazine surveyed the Top 100 Giants in 2003 and found that 95% specified green products. Virtually all Giants are involved in sustainable design or think it's important to specify environmentally minded products.

The below survey shows how the percentage of actual green products used also has been rising each year.

MOMA Exhibition

Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling

July 20–October 20, 2008

Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling is both a survey of the past, present and future of the prefabricated home and a building project on the Museum's vacant west lot. Not since the mid-century House in the Garden series has MoMA built occupiable model buildings to demonstrate contemporary issues to the public. The fives homes erected on the vacant west lot are designed by Kieran Timberlake Associates (Philadelphia); Jeremy Edmiston and Douglas Gauthier (New York); Horden Cherry Lee Architects / Haack + Höpfner Architects (London/Munich); Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Architecture and Planning / Associate Professor Lawrence Sass (Cambridge); and Oskar Leo Kaufmann (Dornbirn, Austria).

The exhibition, and its accompanying Web site (www.momahomedelivery.org), display the process of architectural design and production in equal measure with the actual end result. Within the gallery, eighty-four architectural projects spanning 180 years are presented by means of film, architectural models, original drawings and blueprints, fragments, photographs, patents, games, sales materials and propaganda, toys, and partial reconstructions. This diverse collection of material illustrates how the prefabricated house has been, and continues to be, not only a reflection on the house as a replicable object of design but also a critical agent in the discourse of sustainability, architectural invention, and new material and formal research.

SOLD for $86.3 Million!

New York City - A 1976 triptych by Francis Bacon brought $86.3 million at Sotheby’s, becoming the most expensive work of contemporary art ever sold at auction and a retort to doomsayers who had predicted that the art market would falter seriously this season because of broad economic anxieties. “Recession? What recession?” Barbara Gladstone, a Chelsea dealer, said jokingly.

NYC Waterfalls

NEW YORK CITY - The New York City Waterfalls, a major new work of public art by internationally acclaimed artist Olafur Eliasson, will be on view in New York's East River from late June through mid-October 2008. Commissioned by Public Art Fund, the project consists of four monumental, man-made waterfalls temporarily installed at sites along the waterfront in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Governors Island: one on the Brooklyn anchorage of the Brooklyn Bridge, one between Piers 4 and 5 below the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, one in Lower Manhattan at Pier 35 north of the Manhattan Bridge, and one on the north shore of Governors Island. The 90- to 120-foot-tall Waterfalls are erected on the shoreline and have been designed to protect water quality and aquatic life. They will operate from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., seven days a week, and will be lit after sunset.

Websites Trends of 2008!

Can a web site designer really learn anything from upcoming trends in the world of physical product packaging? Contrary to popular belief about the two different branches of design, packaging trends and web site design trends are actually derived from the same complex combination of fashion, evolving design philosophies, shifts in cultural value, and technology.So what’s going on in packaging that the web site designer should be aware of?

The most popular these days:

Go Green

The phrase is so overused that it has gone beyond cliché; but overuse of the term should not blind smart marketers to how much environmental concerns and the desire to slow the runaway pace of pollution has impacted our culture. So if you want to jump on this, when it comes to your site, capitalize on the growing concern for the environment by installing electronic bill pay systems, emphasizing the reduced environmental impact of a digital rather than brick-and-morter storefront, and using the copy-oriented culture of internet selling to explain all of the “green” initiatives your company has created.

Make it personal

By adding a blog or some other form of personal interaction will make more customers come to see what you or others have posted. Also adding mission statement and personal saying help customer feel more in turned to your product or services. Bold Bright colors may seem as old fashioned as Captain Crunch cereal packaging, but when incorporated into smart design in an abstract way, bright colors take on a trendy, artsy tenor.

Graphic Images

The generation of 18-34 year-olds has been casually labeled the ADD generation for its total inability to concentrate on anything for more than approximately 30 seconds. That might be a slight exaggeration, but the truth remains that imaging with a clear, concise illustration of product use beats out good copy on the shelf. People want to look at a product, know instantly if it is something they like, then take the time to peruse the copy for more information.

Minimalism: Less is More

The overarching trend in much of product design, packaging, and even digital graphics is that subtle touches and minimal composition are preferable to busy design. This is perfect for the web site designer because it reduces the need for distracting patterns in favor of a focus on the product or service being sold. Look at your pages as total work of art, with its own composition, and path for the eye. Guide the visitor’s eye the images of your product and use concise copy that treats each word as a strategic decision. Avoid as much as possible, distracting banner ads or excessive copy, especially on index pages. If customers are interested enough to click and read more, then you can provide more details about the product.

Artistic and Free

Break away from carefully stylized images and let loose the artistic creativity of counter-cultural design. Experiment with the shapes, style, and shading of everything on your site from the tabs to the windows. Remember, though, that just as artistic design should never detract from the utility of product packaging, so artistic design on your sight should never detract from ease of use, intuitive set-up, or well laid-out navigation. Artistic design should wrap around, not manipulate, the basic structure of your web site.

So here are some helpful hints on trends of website design for 2008.