Gestalten.tv

Founded in 2003 by Susanne Hofmann, Baupiloten is a Berlin-based architecture collective that has a unique approach to working with architecture students, giving them the opportunity to apply their creative energy to real life practical experiences. The award-winning studio specialises in realising innovative social design projects such as schools and kindergartens. Featured in one of our new book releases Play All Day: Design for Children, the Erika Mann Elementary School they designed in Berlin proves how innovative architecture can play a significant role in the creative and interactive interplay between students and their environment.

American artist Brian Dettmer’s passion for books is not of the standard kind. What once served as reading material on his bookshelves are cut up, glued and torn apart into pieces altering their original state. Epic novels transform into sculpture-like objects that hold a new and compressed meaning and significance – where there was once a story, is now a multitude of skillfully crafted tangible semantic levels. Dettmer also composes and dissects found newspapers, maps and magazines in the same way and also employs this practice to create sculptures with old cassette tapes. In Gestalten.tv’s interview with the artist, during one of his recent trips to Berlin, Dettmer rejoices about how books and printed matter continue to develop and redefine its form and function.

Working at the intersection of science, design and art, Stuart Wood, Flo Ortkrass and Hannes Koch are not just interested in designing unique design products, but inventing and creating interactive, experiential installations by marrying high-end digital and analog worlds. The trio founded their collective rAndom International in 2002, after receiving their Masters from the Royal College of Art. They have managed an impressive list of projects including PixelRoller, a paint roller that prints digital information in pixels to their recent AUDIENCE installation at the Royal Opera House in London, where they positioned digitally guided mirrors that engaged and followed the movements of the visitors. Experimentation and meticulous research are essential for rAndom International who has already won numerous awards and gained commissions by a diverse range clients and artists such as Philips Design, the BBC, MetaDesign, Studio von Klier, Olafur Eliasson, PearsonLloyd and Audi Design. Gestalten paid them a visit in their studio in London’s East End.

The striking creations of Canadian-born graphic designer Julien Vallée incorporate splendid handcraft and digital technology. For the cover art of Gestalten’s new book Tangible: High Tough Visuals, Vallée uses his multidisciplinary graphic-inspired approach and stages his design spatially by crafting three-dimensional objects and lettering. The result - a stunning almost palpable cover! Not limiting himself to print, he uses the stylistic means of graphic design to create art installations, motion graphics, animations and video designs. His playful graphics has gained him commissions and props from clients such as New York Times Magazine, MTV and Swatch to musicians like Kanye West. We met Julien, who’s recently moved to Berlin, while he was preparing his installation for his group exhibition here in the city. A Gestalten favourite, his work is also featured in a number of our books; Tactile, Fully Booked and Lemon Poppy Seed.

The New York industrial designer Stephen Burks is interested in the possibility of placing traditional craft techniques in a new context. While his studio Readymaderprojects plays host to a myriad of projects including contemporary home furnishings, luxury products and package designs, he takes an active role in working with non-profit organizations to develop sustainable products which bring economic and social benefit to local artisans in developing countries. He has a fresh approach to design; researching off beat tracks and experiments with low cost materials and traditional techniques but shifts the technique into a new dimension, relieving it of its usual context. In our interview Stephen discusses the meaning of conscious design and gives insight into his collaborations with artisans in Peru and South Africa.

We live in uncertain times but one thing about the future is certain: The business of trend analysts Chris Sanderson and Martin Raymond from the London firm The Future Laboratory is no fortune-telling business. They are all about the research of data, its correct interpretation and to some extent, about intuition. For ten years, The Future Laboratory has combined meticulous research and basic gut feeling which their clients have proffered from. TFL work for a broad range of international brands and companies as well as on special projects like Gestalten's recent book release crEATe.: Eating, Design and Future Food, which they helped conceive and co-edited. We met the accomplished speakers, whose lectures are as informative as they are entertaining, in Berlin to chat about the city as an indicator for trends, the importance of buzzwords and the fact that true optimism is best built upon profound pessimism.

Strike a Pose documents a new extroverted architectural language. Manifested in spectacular structures, eccentric forms and vivid colours, this expressive approach goes way beyond conventional stylistic and geographic boundaries. The book leads the reader around the globe to iconographically charged scenes and futuristic spaces, with examples of architectural playfulness and experimental wanderlust ranging from private residences to schools and operas, museums and interior design. In our latest podcast Strike a Pose Editor Lukas Feireiss comments on a publication which inspires beyond the traditional borders of genre, further indicating architecture’s pop appeal and its contagious and entertaining effect.

Calma is not only artist Stephan Doitschinoff‘s street alias, but also the abbreviation of “con alma” (c’alma) in Latin, meaning “with soul”. His emblematic metaphoric imagery feeds off Afro-Brazilian folklore, pagan and alchemistic symbolism and contemporary pop culture. Doitschinoff composes spectacular murals and applies his extraordinary talent to emblazon houses, churches and walls in rural cities in his South American homeland. Temporal provided courtesy of Carol Dantas, Paula Cavalcanti (Production Executives), and Bruno Mitih (Director) documents his artistic journey through the Brazilian countryside of Bahia and features an interview with the artist – introducing the complete visual pandemonium of a young urban artist who creates powerful and unique figurative worlds.

Marije Vogelzang is not a food designer. She is a Dutch product designer who graduated from Design Academy Eindhoven and chose to use food as her main material because of her love for it. Her work is featured in Gestalten's new book crEATe.: Eating, Design and Future Food and she has also just published her first monograph Eat Love which speaks volumes. She is the foundress of Proef, a food-design laboratory and "eating places that started out as food design studios" in Amsterdam and Rotterdam. Be it the re-design and re-thinking of a typical Dutch funeral ceremony, a Christmas dinner or playful ways of making children eat vegetables voluntarily(!), all of her ideas and creations are characterised by a lively and wholehearted approach that reexamines the way we eat and think about food. In Gestalten.tv’s latest podcast, she gives us a tasty morsel of her philosophy that will surely make you want seconds and thirds!

Nipa Doshi and Jonathan Levien form the London-based design partnership Doshi Levien. They combine a celebratory approach to design, interweaving narratives into distinctive products, exhibitions and furniture design as well as in installations and interactive design for clients such as Moroso, Nokia, Intel, Tefal and the Wellcome Trust. Since 2000, they have brilliantly managed to bring together the best of both worlds –Nipa’s Indian upbringing and Jonathan's British background complementary materialize into Eurocentric results. We met the couple for an interview in their new studio in London's East End shortly before the arrival of Rahul, "surely" their most fascinating and praised collaboration yet.

Nicola Carter and Luise Vormittag who founded the multidisciplinary art and design collective Container dreamed up so many playful concepts and creations across a multitude of 2D and 3D platforms while having lots of fun, that it was only a question of time when they'd back up their dream team with more like-minded artists to have even more fun. So that is what they did, and now as ContainerPLUS, we experience the full force of Luise Vormittag, Anna Fulmine, Victoria Sharokh, Patricia Niven and Nicola Carter, combining their skills as illustrators, designers, photographers, actors, typographers and then some. The creative quintet has designed the cover of Gestalten's recent release Playful Type: Ephemeral Lettering and Illustrative Fonts. If you want to find out where their laughter comes from and why even Zaha Hadid works with them, then watch the podcast feature we’ve produced on them in London during London Design Week 2008.

Many prophesied that the printed book would be doomed by developments in digital media. Far from it! The book has not only survived, but – as tactile qualities have gained significance in our increasingly digital world – there is also more unhindered experimentation with bound paper pages now than ever before. The newly released Gestalten publication Fully Booked: Cover Art and Design for Books is devoted to current cover and book design. It presents material from printed publications that succeed in striking a crucial balance – between the market’s demands for availability, legibility and durability on the one hand and sophisticated visual and content design on the other. To dig even further into the topic of book design and the future of THE book, we met qualified experts, designer David Pearson whose work is also featured in Fully Booked and Jim Stoddart, the Art Director at Penguin Books.

Visualising information may not be making headlines today, but it surely will tomorrow in graphic design and everywhere else since more and more information is being visualised. Diagrams, data and information graphics are utilised wherever increasingly complex elements are present, whether it is in magazines, non-fiction books or business reports, (food) packages or exhibition designs. Chart-like diagrams such as bar, plot, line diagrams and spider charts, graph-based diagrams including line, matrix, process flow, and molecular diagrams to extremely complex three-dimensional diagrams are employed beyond their classical fields of use. In Gestalten.tv's latest video podcast the co-editors Nicolas Bourquin and Thibaud Tissot reveal more about the concept, clues and various chapters of our newly released book Data Flow: Visualising Information in Graphic Design.

Despite or due to his Catholic upbringing in Bavaria, Augsburg-born artist, musician and photographer Martin Eder's dedication to his art is "fundamentalist" as he puts it himself. Some people misinterpret his obsessive paintings and photographs as provocative, but according to Eder, they are definitely not meant to be. He simply creates fragile and violent beauty by practicing his very own, very realistic artistic (self)concept of nakedness. We met the charismatic and performative, yet friendly, humble and self-critical artist in his Berlin studio, which could easily pass for a location in a David Lynch movie.

Jurgen Bey and wife Rianne Makkink of Rotterdam-based Studio Makkink & Bey weave whole narratives through their product, furniture and interior design. Bey has long been known for his investigations into everything from urban planning and dust to the ways that people wait in order to create objects faithful to the way we (wish we could) live. And through these objects and environments the stories he tells about people come through with great wisdom and clarity. It is this curiosity about the reciprocal relationship between people and things that drives the innovation and poetry of Makkink and Bey’s work. During their recent trip to Berlin, the couple visited our Berlin office. In this podcast interview, the two unassumingly tell us how they work as a creative duo – Bey the dreamer collects and dreams up ideas and Rianne with the architectural expertise materialises the visionary cloud of ideas into form.