Fish and Crops is an aquaponic unit that grows one meal. Directly where it is cooked. Aquaponic is a farming technique that combines the cultivation of fish in a symbiotic environment with crops: fish fertilize the water that nourish the plants. Plants clean the water from organic waste in return.

Conceptual Devices is pleased to announce that the results of the first Design Royale Workshop will be exhibited at Fuori Salone in Milano during the design week. A big thank you to all the students who participate to this workshop: Tommy Bett,  Katie Ogden, David Rose, Elizabeth Tschirhart, Joshua Wilson, Darren Yeo Jun Xian.

Design Royale is an on-line workshop, a party-in-progress, and the best mind-boggling night of the Milan Design week. It’s an ongoing project built through human relationships & lots of fun. 21 days of digital work using social media (facebook, twitter, flickr). 14 days of physical work in Milan hideaways 7 days of play and hard work and games on-the-spot …and 1 long night at the giardino segreto – a magical hidden space of tricks where everyone is invited. An extravaganza of elephants, a sauna, a hot-air balloon kitchen, tarot cards, inflatable sumo suits, friendly bento boxes, rope ladders, nets and hammocks, a household aquarium, and a coffin experience + much more… 15th april, via della Moscova 28, Milan (from 11.00 pm through the night).

Between the 10-12.12.2010 in SOHO FACTORY complex, Mińska Street 25, Warsaw, Just Undo It and Wired Unplugged will be presented within the Przetwory (recycle) festival. For this occasion a new project will be unveiled. More information soon. On Sunday the 12 at 13.00 I will talk about Triangular Design Manifesto.

Eco-friendly design bound with recycling methods is nowadays strong tendency in global product making. It is hard to avoid questions of shrinking natural resources, raising consumerism and programmed insolidity of contemporary products when being in a position of a designer or product manager today. We live in a circle of buying, using, collecting, disposing and sharing of consumer products. The XXI – century man is virtually sinking in the amount of produced, collected and used objects. We are rarely aware of a process that every product has to go through before getting into our hands. Terms „recycling“ and „sustainability“ made their way through global consciousness becoming a trend and a real motivation for reaching viable solutions in many fields of life. This process can be summed up with a question: how to survive? After four-year struggle related to organizing RECYLES event we can easily position ourselves on the radical other end of the rainbow towards mass production. We are promoting totally different approach to the product by supporting D.I.Y. idea and by endorsing unique design solutions.

Among the invited guests: Refunc (Netherlands), Basurama (Spain), El Ultimo GRITO/EUG Studio (UK), Mantas Lesauskas (Latvia), Tom Price (UK).

A workshop will be created by students of Royal College of Art in cooperation with students of Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts Faculty of Design.

EXFORMATION. This is a term coined by the Danish Physics Tor Nørretranders in his book the User Illusion, meaning explicitly discarded information. Originally spelt eksformation in Danish, the word first appeared in English in an article Nørretranders wrote in 1992.

From Wikipedia: “Effective communication depends on a shared body of knowledge between the persons communicating. In using words, sounds and gestures the speaker has deliberately thrown away a huge body of information, though it remains implied. This shared context is called exformation.” The concept of exformation will be used in the course as a design issue. The process of design is a process of in-formation, of form giving. Exformation is everything deliberately discarded by the “designer” in the form giving process. The course will be thus focused on the “discarded information”. Students will have to explore this concept and develop a project with it. More…

The course will be about the design of a souvenir for the city of Trieste which claims not to have one yet. Course blog: www.sovveniretrieste.blogspot.com

Catalogue of the Exhibition Geodesign, care of Stefano Boeri, Lucia Tozzi and Stefano Mirti. RIKEA is a project realized in collaboration with IKEA and the Balon free market merchant’s community.

Corpi Arredativi, the Catalogue from Alessandro Guerriero’s students work is out (A. Guerriero, M. Bobbioni, D. Crippa, B. Di Prete, Corpi Arredativi, Libreria Clup, 2005; pp. 32-33). Davide and Barbara wrote a nice “about” for me as I was a workshop guest in the course they have collaborated, thank you!

I have made a workshop in an Estonian Kolkhoz. I was invited to talk about it in Venice. This happened to be in a book: “Citying. Pratiche Creative del fare città“, edited by Riccardo Caldura, Venezia Supernova, Venezia, pp. 62-66.

In this workshop I have tried to involve the inhabitants. In order to do so I had to challenge the children, since they were the only one who were able to speak some sort of English with me. Together we draw good/bad mental maps of the place: what they loved and what they hated in their Kolholz. The paper is about looking upon urban design in a scenario of demographic and economic recession.