Design (ABC RN)

Australian designer says wool for furniture is still the...

Australian interior design brands have teamed up with the promotional body, Australian Wool Innovation, to highlight the qualities of wool.

The Future of Australian Cities

The Australian Bureau of Statistics predicts that by 2101 our population will be around 62.2 million people. But where will they live, how will they work and will they be able to grow enough food to feed themselves?

Drawing Room: Jerry Hall

The Drawing Room was visited by probably it's most glamorous guest ever when Jerry Hall came to town recently.

Drawing Room: What's in a home?

In the Drawing Room tonight, we find out how to create those special touches that make for a stylish home and uncover a comedian with a fetish for mounted animal heads.

Historyonics: Melbourne 1950s fashion

Hall Ludlow was one of the Australia's most important couturiers, and his salon at the Paris end of Melbourne's Collins Street was at its peak in the 1950s and 1960s.

Body Architecture

Imagine wearing clothes that convey your mood by glowing and blushing? Or perspiring a fragrance through your skin? Lucy McRae has a background in dance and design and she's come up with a unique job title: Body Architect. Plus, a look at the extravagant architecture of the hair that was in vogue in the 18th century, when fashionable women wore towering edifices of decorated hair.

360documentaries 2 February 2013

Canberra is a city sculpted by trees. In this program we visit the new National Arboretum to learn more about Walter Burley Griffin's vision of trees for Canberra and meet some dedicated tree enthusiasts who are keeping his dream alive.

कुम्हार Potters Re-Caste

An enduring collaboration between Indian and Australian potters is featured on Creative Instinct this week.

Drawing Room: Hats, Fashion and Racing Culture

It's the race that stops the nation -- or so they say. Maybe it should be the hat that stops the nation!

Where there's smoke

A fatal fire in a Sydney high rise apartment building has exposed widespread failures in fire safety compliance. For residents of Australia’s tallest apartment building it is a burning issue. Stan Correy investigates.

Drawing Room: African Australians for social change

In the Drawing Room tonight, you're joined by two African Australians who are young, passionate, hardworking, creative, and dedicated to community.

360documentaries 14 October 2012

A program that makes heartwarming oberservations about life and people across the globe. In Part Two of The Radio Hour a story about two letters from Afghanistan that tell of falling in love with dust and the call to prayer and a tale about the way we read people's faces, all presented before a live audience as part of the Melbourne Writers Festival. Also amusing comments made from a balcony overlooking a cobblestoned street in Brussels, one of the City Nights stories.

The Himalayas to the Darling Downs: Cities of Peace and...

Lumbini, Nepal, the Buddha's birthplace is a small poor hamlet that is set to be reborn as a model city of peace and harmony. Toowoomba, Queensland has a vision to become a leading example of a multi-faith community that lives in peace and harmony.

'Deadly Dressed' shows off Indigenous fashion and design

The competition includes both professional fashion designers and "styled up" community members.

Dressing Sydney: The Jewish Fashion Story

The Perkal brothers, now in their 90s, are still working five days a week and since the 1940s they have been making shoes for some big names, including Kerry and James Packer and even the Queen. The story of these Sydney based cobblers is part of a new exhibition that features in the NSW History Week, a week exploring the history of threads. Dressing Sydney: The Jewish Fashion Story is at the Sydney Jewish Museum.

Urmadic University

A group of design experts are thinking through the possibility of creating an 'Urmadic University' - a new kind of university designed to address some of society's major challenges.

Vintage fashion: why are old clothes trendy?

Why has second-hand or vintage clothing become so trendy? From Portobello Road in London to Camberwell markets in Melbourne, vintage clothing is a marker of style. So why, in an age of cheap new clothes, do we seek out the old and worn?

Turning industrial decline around: Tom Murphy

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania was once the poster city for post-industrial decline. As manufacturing moved offshore in the decades after the second world war the city emptied out -- over 500,000 people left the city between 1970 and 1990. The city has now been voted 'America's most liveable city.' The man credited with that turnaround is Tom Murphy, who is in Australia to attend an international planning symposium at Sydney University.

The Panel: Living in the City

A whopping 64 percent of Australians live in our state capitals alone. For this week’s panel Janne Ryan takes us in-the-field to a kitchen bench in the city of Brisbane where a group of thoughtful people gathered together to discuss the problems and challenges of urbanisation.

The Conversation: Harry Sprintz on designing a home for...

Architect Harry Sprintz has spent four decades arguing that we should think about the possibility of disability or frailty in old age when designing a house. The trouble is, largely we don’t. Instead we wait for it to happen then either attempt to modify our homes or find ourselves forced to abandon them for aged-care facilities.

India: Future Traditions

The power of tradition in a modern India.

Colder weather creates perfect conditions for the...

Beards might go in and out if fashion, but in Ned Kelly country, around Beechworth in central Victoria, it seems they've never been so popular. A competition called Ned's Needles is now open to find the best and most creative knitted beards.

Bringing GPS indoors

Over 100 companies are working toward the new holy grail of navigation—building an indoor positioning system. If it can be developed, an IPS will do for the indoor world what the GPS has done externally.

Faith, fashion, fusion: Muslim women's style in Australia

It’s not often that fashion and faith meet on the same page … but that’s exactly what’s happening in an exhibition currently running in Sydney.

A fashion staple: the male suit

The suit is a sign of male aspiration and success. And while fashion for women can come and go, the suit is a real staple of menswear. So why has the suit endured?

Saturday 12 May 2012

Imagine the urban grid minus half its' buildings. What's left? The Aboriginal notion of country. The architect Kevin O'Brien tells us why the Finding Country exhibition he's taking to the 13th Venice Architecture Biennale is more than a design concept. And the choreographer Gary Lang talks about the new work he's developing, Mokoi. The new production will explore some tough themes: suicide and self-harm as they relate to Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory.

Mummy Secrets of the Tomb

Queensland Museum opens its doors to a new blockbuster exhibition, Mummy: Secrets of The Tomb.

The office

Journalist and author Gideon Haigh has written a comprehensive account of the evolution of the office: everything from the changing physical characteristics of the place where so much time is spent, to the politics and gossip that go on there.

कुम्हार Potters Re-Caste

A long collaboration between Indian and Australian potters is featured on Creative Instinct this week.

Venice Biennale

Australia will be the first country to redevelop their national pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

Labyrinths

Labyrinths (not to be confused with mazes) are geometric patterns laid out as a walking path designed to encourage contemplation and peace -- a walking meditation.

Cook Style Shoot: And the winner is...

More than 270 entries flowed into our inaugural online competition called Cook, Style, Shoot where professionally judged food photographs could win a range of prizes.

Building cardboard cities in the name of art

Home Sweet Home is a public art installation that begins as a blank canvas grid of Perth and grows into a cardboard city built not by artists, but by the public.

90s nostalgia and the cultural paralysis of now

The 90s are back so today it's 90s nostalgia day. Writer Kurt Andersen argues that the West and the United States is in a state of collective cultural paralysis and says that our cultural style hasn't changed since the 90s even as technology has changed our world.

3D Printers meet pirates, Gamify, Batteries reborn

Can the principals behind computer gaming solve world hunger and untangle the GFC? We examine the quirky world of Gamification. Plus, what happens when you combine a 3D printer with the world's largest illegal downloading network? Hilarity, that's what. And If you're sick of your mobile phone running out of juice (and aren't we all?) Download explains the future of the cell phone battery. Plus we investigate whether Google has found the lost city of Atlantis.

Wednesday 01 February 2012

By Design looks at the way we live our lives: from the way we think, to the way we build our houses and cities.

The Panel

Each week By Design introduces you to a range of ideas from people working in design disciplines to people who have a great interest in the way our lives are 'designed', from the way we think about ourselves, to the way we design our houses and shape our cities. This segment will be an open-ended conversation from week-to-week, canvassing ideas from the panellists.

Conversation with author and former architect Barry...

Barry Maitland is a prizewinning novelist. His crime novels have a popular following and he works full-time as a writer. But Barry started out as an architect, and is a former head of the architecture school at Australia's Newcastle University. He reflects on how this training and way of thinking help shape his life as a writer.

Late Night Live Summer (#7) Shanghai culture, history...

Dr Jonathan Hutt unravels the cultural, political and architectural history of Shanghai to explain the historical antagonism between Shanghai and Beijing which created the enigmatic city of Shanghai and also helped shape the China we know today. But where is it headed and how much of that unique Shanghai sophistication remains today?

Books: the popularity of graphic novels

For the regular book segment this week we're talking about graphic novels.

Late Night Live Summer (China #2) Sculpture Park, Guilin

About 45 minutes outside of Guilin is an extraordinary sculpture park called Yuzi Paradise - or Fool's Paradise - set on 1300 acres, with over hundreds of sculptures from artists all over the world, dedicated to the promotion of contemporary art and culture in China. After ten years and over US$100 million investment, the park opened in 2006. There is also an extraordinary hotel sited there and this is all the dream of Taiwanese billionaire Mr Rhy-Chang Tsao.

By Design on a tram

Join Alan Saunders and the By Design team for a highly unusual forum celebrating the architecture and urban design of one of our greatest cities. Unusual because the venue for our forum is that quintessential Melbourne mode of transport, a tram: The City Circle tram to be exact. The City Circle tram passes some of the city's major tourist attractions and some of its finest architecture and urban design. Today we'll talk about some of them and expand on the issues they raise for the broader...

Hat design

Richard Nylon designs extraordinary hats: feathered creations that seem to float in the air, blurring the line between fashion and art. Not only do they appear on some of the most fashionable heads each year at the Spring Racing Carnival in Melbourne but you'll find his one-off creations in the permanent collections of cultural institutions such as the National Gallery of Victoria.

What Can I Say?

From the roof of a minaret in Cairo Colette Kinsella describes the chaos, beauty and life of the city; thousands of satellite dishes, a boy feeding goats on a rooftop, the smell of meat cooking on open fires, flocks of pigeons circling, latticework on crumbling buildings and the secret language of car horns.

Jewellery reveals our cultural life

Often, we tend to work in this program on a large scale: the building or even the entire city.In this interview we turn to the comparatively small and looking at how it reflects and commemorates the large.The Melbourne jeweller Blanch Tilden has been working for more than a dozen years now, mostly in metal and glass.And her rather avant-garde work is inspired by architecture—particularly the monumental metal and glass buildings of the nineteenth century—and by machinery.Here we meet Blanche...

Ronchamp - a reflection

The world's greatest architecture delights not only the eye but many of our senses. There are some buildings, which although you might be lucky enough to enter their doors only once, the experience stays with you for a lifetime and their spaces continue to haunt our memory. For Colin Bisset a recent visit to the modernist masterpiece of Ronchamp cathedral in rural France sparked reflection on the essential spirit of place.

14/12/2011

Listeners' Letters

Here is an edited selection of your comments and emails. Enjoy!

Inside Mawson's Hut

It's one hundred years ago this month since explorer Douglas Mawson departed Australia on his Antarctic expedition. The site now commonly known as Mawson's Huts relates to that historic expedition (1911-14). The Mawson's Huts site is unique amongst those associated with early exploration on the Antarctic continent, because the majority of the portable artefacts outside the huts are still in essentially the same locations they were when Mawson left the site in 1914.

Boyd in Burnie

Boyd ceramics travel the country

The charm of retro

Retro may be cool but why are we in a love affair with objects and designs from the mid-twentieth century? What is it about the recently-old objects from earlier in our own lifetime -- whether furniture, fashion, tablewares, glass or ceramics -- that so captures our imagination?

Trends: Design thinking in business

In our Trends segment today we're learning increasingly governments and business are learning how good design, and use of what has come to be known as design thinking, can pay big dividends. Our teacher is Sir George Cox, past Chairman of the UK's Design Council and author of the Cox Review, on creativity in business. Sir George is here as a guest of the Australian Design Alliance to speak to politicians and business leaders how design can is critical to the economic growth of nations.

Adelaide Parklands

In her new book, The Adelaide Park Lands, Patricia Sumerling recounts tales from the time of earliest European settlement until present days. Where crowds once thronged for a public execution, or to see Blondin, the tightrope walker of Niagara Falls fame, now thousands gather for car races and cultural festivals. Adelaideans play sport in the Park Lands, get married, enjoy picnics, and meet for secret assignations.

Trends: A space to think

Where do you get your best ideas? When you're swimming, when you're walking, when you're on the loo? Can architects design spaces that encourage creative thought, or are those spaces more likely to be found in the natural landscape? Where we do our best thinking is one of the questions dealt with in a new book about the way the digital age is changing our minds.

In search of Charles Rennie Mackintosh

Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868-1928) Scottish architect, designer and artist, is celebrated as one of the most significant talents of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His birthplace, Glasgow, is central to an understanding of his achievements and it's there that the most important of his surviving work is to be found, the Glasgow School of Art. The Glasgow School of Art has produced many famous contemporary artists: alumni include Douglas Gordon and Simon Starling, who won the...

Let's knit a fox fur evening robe

The woman who pioneered a method of knitting fur into clothing wants to use fur from feral animals such as foxes and rabbits rather than waste what she sees as a valuable resource.

Architectural Competitions

If you want a big new public building, how do you find someone to build it? One way is to hold a competition: invite architects from all over the country, perhaps from all over the world, to submit designs and choose the best one, or at least the one you like most. This sort of thing has been going on for a long while now: the Acropolis in Athens was a result of an architectural competition, as were several cathedrals in the Middle Ages. In 1419 a competition was held to design the dome of...

Building the New Deal

First there was the Depression, then there was Franklin Roosevelt's answer to it: the New Deal. Many of those who worked for the New Deal believed that they were building a civilization. They left thousands of schools, colleges, bridges, dams, murals, parks and aqueducts. On a smaller scale, similar things happened in this country: in Melbourne, the Shrine of Remembrance was built largely by unemployed workers during the Depression. Happily, the Shrine of Remembrance is still in good nick,...

Darwin fashion

Tony Elfernik, a Northern Territory Country Liberal MP, responds to Chief Minister Paul Henderson's suggestion that wearing a necktie be optional in the NT legislative assembly.

Worn in

These days it's like products, and even humans have their own 'refresh' buttons. The latest model is always on offer. Happy, shiny people everywhere. But permanent 'nowness' can't last - the cracks start to show, eventually nature subsumes culture and everything falls to bits. This evening we look for the 'melancholic beauty in the impermanence of all things', what the Japanese might call 'wabi sabi'. It's the pleasure of the imperfect, impermanent, incomplete - when the new gets, if not...

Paul Bangay

Today, we meet Paul Bangay, one of Australia's most acclaimed landscape designers. He's a busy man: his life is divided between Australian and overseas commissions and his own garden in Daylesford in Victoria. He has a new book out, Paul Bangay's Guide to Plants. He talks about his love of geometric perfection, his use of ornaments, the inspiration of Andre Le Notre, who designed the garden of the Chateau de Vaux-le-Vicomte in 1657 and went on to work on the gardens at the Palace of...

Garden Cities

English Garden Cities is a new book about a phenomenon that extends far beyond the shores of England. Sunshine, which is now a suburb of Melbourne, was designed in the early years of the last century as a community developed according to the ideals of the Garden City movement. Canberra is something of a garden city and its architect Walter Burley Griffin produced a number of garden suburb estates, most notably at Eaglemont with the Glenard and Mount Eagle Estates and the Ranelagh and...

Animal architecture

Throughout the centuries there have been castles and monuments, great and small, for animals as diverse as goats and guinea pigs, deer and dogs, cows and bees, pigs and horses, as well as bears and salmon. Imagine a red sandstone elephant with a castle on its back was designed for bees built in the 1800s or a Grecian temple with tapering Egyptioan windows to house pigs. Beyond being just curiosities these buildings once occupied the imagination of some of England's finest architects and are...

High flying fashion

Stiletto heels, miniskirts, bobbed wigs, shiny new technology and exotic locations were part of the cosmopolitan lifestyle of the Qantas flight hostesses. As the trends changed, international designers such as Emilio Pucci and Yves Saint Laurent created a range of designs for flight crew, from khaki military style, to burnt-orange miniskirts and on to the Morrissey-designed Indigenous boomerang print.

Tall, taller, tallest: the history of skyscrapers

After the collapse of the World Trade Center ten years ago, it seemed that the era of skyscrapers had come to an end -- not only were they unlikely to turn a profit, they were dangerous as well. But skyscrapers have been symbols of hope and ingenuity for 100 years, and they are still being built -- taller than ever. The fascinating past, present and future of skyscrapers.

Remembering 9/11

This week the world will remember the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Those making the pilgrimage back to New York's Ground Zero will be able to find some solace in a National September 11 Memorial, which will be opened after a decade of debate, planning and construction. Architect Michael Arad's design for the memorial is called 'Reflecting Absence' and consists of two massive square voids in the footprint of the Twin Towers, into which water cascades from all sides. At the bottom...

Fictitious futures, virtual development and visual...

Hypothetical development, design fiction and The Noun Project. Three ideas that are about construction and design, but not in a bricks and mortar, or ink and paper kind of way.

Phillip Adams' Travels in China - tour of Peace Hotel,...

Historian Jenny Laing-Peach takes Phillip on a guided tour of Sir Victor Sassoon's 1929 art-deco masterpiece The Peace Hotel, located on what used to be called The Wall Street of the East - the Bund, Shanghai. It has recently been reopened after extensive refurbishment.

Architecture and Photography

While many of us are familiar with the look of many cities and their buildings around the world, for the most part this familiarity is the result of glossy imagery, rather than personal experience. And often, the photographic images that we recognise are hyper-real productions, created for the designers by architectural photographers. So have we become too dependent on these carefully managed photos? Is there a disconnection between the images we consume in magazines and books and what's...

CLASSIC LNL: The Devil's Rope: A History of Barbed Wire

A cultural history of barbed wire.

What do Industrial Designers do?

The Australian Industry's night of nights, the 2011 Australian International Design Awards Presentation Ceremony, was held in Melbourne on Friday 22 July 2011, Among the prize categories, the James Dyson Award is an international student design award running in 18 countries. It's operated by the James Dyson Foundation, a charitable trust established by James Dyson (best-known for his innovative vacuum cleaner) to encourage the next generation of design engineers to be creative, to challenge...

The future of natural textiles

Do natural textiles such as silk and cashmere and fine cotton still carry the same cache as luxury materials? Have their methods of production adhered to century-old traditions or felt the impact of technology? And can new understanding about the way materials behave help us improve on nature? In Trends today, following on from our discussion on wedding dress design, we're staying close to the subject of fashion and fabrics to discuss the state and future of natural textiles.

Carthage - and where is it now?

Carthage was one of the great cities of the ancient world. It's now a residential suburb of Tunis. but in its day it was a hugely important place, a great centre of trade comprehensively destroyed by the Romans in 146 BC. But what was it like to live in Carthage and how did urban life there compare with what was happening in its Italian rival city? Of course, what many of us know about Carthage is that it was destroyed, but, Richard, what was it like before it was destroyed? Was it a great...

Architectural installations: how they help us think...

Permanence is a quality that we associate with architecture; barring war or natural disaster architecture is built to last. But during the first decade of this century, in cities around the world, architects have combined their talents with artists and landscape designers to build temporary structures designed not for shelter but to stimulate thought and debate about public spaces ... especially neglected or under-utilised urban spaces. These temporary installations are intended to question...

Artworks Feature: Vienna 1900 - part 2

On this week's Artworks Feature, the second part of our visit to the Modernist outpouring of Vienna 1900, we follow one arm of the refugee diaspora, fleeing the Nazi pogrom. Some the Jewish families, who had helped to support great changes in the Viennese cultural landscape with their patronage of artists and designers like Klimt and Hoffmann and the others in the breakaway movement of the Vienna Secession, managed to escape with a surprising amount of work from this Modernist period. The...

Designing the Apollo space suit

When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped on to the lunar surface in July 1969, they wore spacesuits made by Playtex: 21 layers of fabric, each with a distinct yet interrelated function, custom-sewn for them by seamstresses whose usual work was fashioning bras and girdles. Playtex's spacesuit won out against hard armour-like spacesuits designed by military contractors and favoured by NASA's engineers. Today we explore the story of that spacesuit.

Artworks Feature: Vienna 1900 - part 1

This week in the Artworks Feature, a journey to the crucible of Modernism in Vienna. This is the first of two programs to mark the National Gallery of Victoria's major exhibition to celebrate their 150th anniversary. The show is simply called Vienna: Art and Design and it's a celebration of the remarkable creative flourish and counter-culture that took hold in Vienna around 1900. In this first program, Michael Shirrefs is taking us back to that period -- a time of a decaying Austro-Hungarian...

Sustainable kitchen design

And for our regular Trends segment we're looking at advances in a very particular aspect of kitchen design, the growing awareness of creating sustainable kitchens; kitchens that are environmentally friendly within our homes and to the planet at large. After hearing this you might want to ask more questions of your architect or builder next time you renovate.

Stamp Design Trends

In Trends today we're looking at the design of a product which some of you might think has a finite future: the postage stamp. In this age of email, how long is it since you stuck a stamp on to an envelope? I honestly can't remember. Yet since the profile bust of Queen Victoria appeared on the Penny Black in 1840 stamp design has continued to evolve, and Australia has set trends that the world has followed.

Architecture in Uniform

Against the odds, the Second World War was a key moment in the modernisation of architecture, both the theory and the practice. It happened in the United States and Britain, in Germany and Japan, the USSR and across the world. This is the subject of a new book, Architecture in Uniform: Designing and Building for the Second World War. Today, we meet the author, Jean-Louis Cohen, Professor in the History of Architecture at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.

Huts and the imagination

We begin today's program with a look at one of the most fundamental forms of architecture, the hut. The very word 'hut' casts a spell on anyone who has ever dreamed of having a little bolthole in the bush or by the sea to escape the complexities of the modern world. The hut is the most universal and ancient form of vernacular architecture. And although you might never have built your own hut, the appeal of these small spaces are easy to grasp for anyone who ever built a cubby as a child....

Panel - Sydney TEDx

Some of the world's more unique minds will gather in Sydney tomorrow for the second TEDx conference. On today's panel, Fran Kelly is joined by three speakers from the conference.

The Australian Garden at Chelsea

For five days this week, the grounds of the Royal Hospital in Chelsea, London, are transformed into a floral spectacle with the staging of the annual Royal Horticultural Society's Chelsea Flower Show. A major attraction of the show are the eight large show gardens along Main Avenue shaped by the world's top garden designers, who all vie for a coveted Chelsea medal. This year the Australian Garden has been honoured with being among the lucky eight on the Main Avenue.

Muses and Mentors: Philip Hunter

Visual artist Philip Hunter grew up in the Wimmera, that flat, low, farming country of western Victoria. And he's returned to it often over the years because in order to paint the landscape, he reckons you have to know it well. For Artworks, Philip Hunter has turned his attention away from the far horizon to consider the idea of inspiration; part of our Muses and Mentors series, where we ask artists, writers, performers and musicians to talk about a person or thing that has inspired them and...

Kinetic sculptor

Reuben Margolin is a California-based sculptor who creates beautiful kinetic sculptures that move in wave-like patterns in perfect formation. Recently Reuben entered into a collaboration with Melbourne-based dance company Chunky Move. The product of that collaboration is called 'Connected', where the dancers begin with simple movements and build their performance while they construct the sculpture in real time.

A conversation with Natan Linder

In our conversation spot today we meet a man for whom the description visionary doesn't seem hyperbole. His work fuses engineering and design to create novel human experiences. And the extraordinary world he envisages is shaped out of his research in the areas of robotics, augmented reality, and mobile technologies.

Hat design: a conversation with milliner Richard Nylon

Richard Nylon designs extraordinary hats: feathered creations that seem to float in the air, blurring the line between fashion and art. Not only do they appear on some of the most fashionable heads each year at the Spring Racing Carnival in Melbourne but you'll find his one-off creations in the permanent collections of cultural institutions such as the National Gallery of Victoria.

English castles

From coast to coast, the English landscape is still richly studded with castles both great and small. They're still objects of curiosity and fascination but for centuries they were more than this: they were at the heart of the country's social and political life.

Agritype's exhibition showcases farm entrance signage

The large metal nameplates that adorn the entrance to a farm are unique to the Australian rural landscape.

John Birmingham on home

As a special bonus to today's show we bring you the final speaker from our bydesign@ program in which six thoughtful Australians reflected on the meaning of home, house and shelter. John Birmingham made his name as a writer with stories of home, or rather homes, having lived in far too many of them with more flat-mates than is really necessary or probably safe. Having earned enough money from the sales of He Died With a Felafel in his Hand to get out of share housing for good, he went on to...

Tyler Brule: Monocle's modern man of action

Tyler Brule is a man of action. He started his working life as a reporter, and took on the big jobs: reporting wars, for example, and it was Afghanistan where he was shot and injured. With a lot of time on his hands while recuperating he found another call to action, turning his attention to taste-making and observing. Tyler founded Wallpaper magazine, now owned by Time Inc. Wallpaper chronicles the glossiest of design trends. But now he is at the helm of Monocle, a multimedia empire...

Floating Architecture

Following the Queensland floods, By Design discussed how we can better design our cities to hold back the waters. In response, a listener wrote suggesting that the time had come to think about whether we could make our buildings float rather than worrying about flooding. It's a question which captured our imagination and one that seems very pertinent as global warming sees water levels continue to rise in coastal residential areas. Waterstudio.NL is a Netherlands architectural firm that...

Glamour: more than furs and feathers

Glamour. What does it mean to you? Something or someone who has an alluring and illusory charm perhaps. The word conjures up notions or romance and excitement. And we associate glamour with compellingly attractive women, with furs, feathers and exotic fragrances. We look at the place of glamour in twentieth century social history and explore its relationship to femininity and fashion.

Trends: how retail outlets are buying for 21st century

The retail world is undergoing a revolution with the rise of online shopping websites. How does a shop -- with bricks and mortar -- transform its purpose for the 21st century shopper? How do the buyers -- people who buy the clothes for us to shop -- look ahead and anticipate this change; and the experience of shopping in a shop, rather than online.

Trends: directional gay ageing-in-place

BOOM architecture is a master-planned community in the desert of Southern California. BOOM aims to re-position options for retirement, and sees itself as pioneering communities that include everyone, that is multi- generational. Historically, the gay community has been at the forefront of helping each other in difficult times, and this a foundation principle of the BOOM community. Many leaders in the design and architectural world are part of this design and its development, including design...

The Dinner Party is Dead. Why?

Design commentator Alexandra Lange has written recently on her blog and in an article for [US] Gourmet On-line that the dinner party is dead. Why? Ms Lange chronicles the dinner parties of her mother and father in the 70s and 80s, and observes that the idea of reciprocity of effort has changed. In other words, no-one invites you back!

Conversation: the power of tinkering

Today in our Conversation Corner By Design introduces you to John Seely Brown, the co-author [with Douglas Thomas], of A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change. In this new book John Seely Brown is particularly interested in the idea of TINKERING. He suggests one of the best 'tinkering' models is the architectural studio - the place where students work together trying to solve each other's problems, and a mentor or master can also take part in...

Objects of desire

How do you live? Surrounded by stuff, or is your domestic life one of simplicity and spareness? Anyone who has ever had to sort through a relative's belongings after a death poignantly understands just how much we collect in a lifetime. The objects we surround ourselves with may or may not be worth money. More often it's "sentimental value" that makes us keep such a plethora of things. For journalist Helen Elliot beauty has always been the over-riding factor for acquiring something and never...

Fler and the Modernist Impulse

The story of innovative Melbourne furniture design firm Fler, and the influence of modernism upon the changing landscape of the Australian home,in the decades following the Second World War. The Fler company began making furniture in a two-horse stable in Richmond, Melbourne, in 1946. Its founders were two young European Jewish migrants, Fred Lowen and Ernest Rodeck. Both men had fled Nazi Europe, arriving in Australia in September 1940 via the Dunera. They met at Tatura Internment Camp in...