Laura Houseley on Ready Made Go at the London Design Festival

Last week's London Design Festival included plenty of beautiful objects thoughtfully displayed on pedestals or on gallery walls. But possibly even more compelling was the setup at the Ace Hotel's Ready Made Go exhibition, curated by Laura Houseley of Modern Design Review magazine, where visitors could experience a handful of new designs by local up-and-comers actually put to work in their intended habitat.
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Norwegian Product Designers Stokke Austad

It's a bit strange to call Stokke Austad Up and Coming, especially since their current project list includes the interior design for a major new wing of Oslo's airport. But this week we're spotlighting three of our favorite studios presenting new work at this year's edition of 100% Norway at the London Design Festival, and we'd be remiss if we didn't include them in that list.
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Norwegian Furniture Designer Silje Nesdal

This week we're showcasing three Norwegian studios showing new work as part of this year's 100% Norway at the London Design Festival. First up is Silje Nesdal, who began her career with a short stint in fashion and textiles, then incorporated those skills into a furniture practice, creating objects that are functional and honest in their construction.
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Atlanta Artist Christopher Derek Bruno

The art of Atlanta's Christopher Derek Bruno — which hews mostly toward rainbow lenticular wall sculptures that change color and form depending on the vantage point of the viewer, like the piece above he recently installed in Dolby's San Francisco headquarters — has almost as much movement and dimension and physicality as his furniture.
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Atlanta Artist Kevin Byrd

Dazzle camouflage was a frenetic patterning applied to ships during World War I to scramble the depth perception of enemies — not exactly a motif you'd expect to see applied to the walls of a major corporate office. Yet inside the new San Francisco headquarters for Dolby, Atlanta painter and dazzle enthusiast Kevin Byrd was given carte blanche to do just that.
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Tunisia Furniture Studio Marlo & Isaure

When we discovered the design duo Marlo & Isaure — founded by former ECAL classmates Marlo Kara (Swiss-Greek, born in Geneva) and Isaure Bouyssonie (French, born in Tunisia) — we assumed they were simply a furniture studio, creating products like the Fabrique lights, pictured above, for galleries and manufacturers. But it turns out that assumption was only half correct.
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Views by Designer Tom Hancocks

In his new Views series created exclusively for Sight Unseen, New York designer Tom Hancocks used the 3-D graphics software Blender to conjure six different rooms inhabited by various types of chairs, whose forms and relationships to their immediate surroundings were intended to convey certain moods and emotions.
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Baskets and Jewelry by Philadelphia’s Karen Gayle Tinney

For us, Karen Gayle Tinney was one of those surprises that you're shocked to find lurking in your own backyard — the artist and designer lives in Philadelphia, where for the past year she's been making elaborate woven baskets, planters, and necklaces for stores like Vagabond and Brooklyn's People of 2morrow.
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Node Lights by Amsterdam’s Odd Matter

The young Amsterdam-based duo Odd Matter, who we mentioned today in a separate post dedicated to their new work at Aram Gallery, have been busy bees lately. In addition to that project, the Dutch and Bulgarian designers recently launched a series called Node, which includes four highly expressive, sculptural lamps in copper and Jesmonite with forms designed to underscore their functions.
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3D Objects Made of Everything From Cement to Jell-O

Plenty of designers who work primarily in two dimensions translate their patterns and images to textiles, but up-and-coming London designer Lucy Hardcastle's oeuvre is particularly diverse — a former textiles student, she creates three-dimensional objects, sets, and artworks made of everything from cement to Jell-O, then draws on those creations to make prints for clients like Nike and Alexander Wang.
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Week of July 13, 2015

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: very on-trend iridescent flatware and terrazzo coasters, gorgeous oil-slick vases from a recent RISD grad, and the debut of the booksleeve (pictured above), an innovation we never realized we needed until now.
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