The Dreaming Wall is published on Design Like You Give a Damn [2], edited by Architecture for Humanities. Design Like You Give a Damn [2] is the indispensable handbook for anyone committed to building a more sustainable future.

Following the success of their first book, Architecture for Humanity brings readers the next edition, with more than 100 projects from around the world. Packed with practical and ingenious design solutions, this book addresses the need for basic shelter, housing, education, health care, clean water, and renewable energy. One-on-one interviews and provocative case studies demonstrate how innovative design is reimagining community and uplifting lives. From building-material innovations such as smog-eating concrete to innovative public policy that is repainting Brazil’s urban slums, Design Like You Give a Damn [2] serves as a how-to guide for anyone seeking to build change from the ground up. Interested? You can order it here!

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Whether you are an Italian designer or not the year ends at Salone in Milano every spring. Times are busy and the world design community is ready to gather and share event invitations as they do between civilized and happy family members with greetings cards during Christmas. So do I.

To make it short I have got a poker this year. I will be indeed involved in four different event which I would like to share with you.

On Tuesday 17th of April at 18.00 in via Mellerio 1 & via GB. Vico 1, within the context of Kidsroomroom I will present TANTO. In this occasion it will be also presented TANTINO which is a smaller version of TANTO, the fairy tale bean bag I am producing.

On the same day but at 21.00 in via Savona 97 (in Francesco Jodice’s atelier) in an exhibition called Foster Care curated by Susanna Legrenzi, Stefano Mirti and Marco Petroni, I will present a new piece of the collection ReadyKea called Zoroaster: a device to grow lettuce hydroponically. The entire project is covered in the April issue of URBAN (a preview at this link) entirely dedicated to the Salone 212.

Friday 2oth I will participate at another exhibition curated by Susanna Legrenzi – cocktail party at 18.30- at Walter Voulaz space: “OBJECTS (IN THE NAME OF LOVE) is a collection of objects of affection that inhabit the private space 40 designers. A thin red line, the sentimental value of things that turns an object into the guardian of time, memory, affections“.

Here I will present a collection of nails that was given to me by a carpenter in New England, about ten years ago. According to him you can read the American urban revolution trough these nails: from the handmade ones (expensive and “rares” on the left) to the standardized ones that allow you to order a house by phone (towards the right).

The fourth event will be at the Fondazione Portaluppi, it is called “Little Italy” and it will be curated my Stefano Mirti and Alessandro Scandurra: “Little Italy is in the first place a magazine,  a magazine that comes in a unique number. If it were a traditional magazine we would have asked the various “contributors” to submit their articles, in this case we ask you to produce your content with others, the day April 21 at the Foundation Portaluppi.

Technically it is a “book sprint”. That is, the term derives from “code sprinting,” a method used by software developers who gather in a room and work on an open source project for a period of time.”

Exciting no?

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GLOBE / HEDRON is a bamboo greenhouse designed to organically grow fish and vegetables on top of generic flat roofs. The design is optimized for aquaponic farming techniques: the fish’s water nourishes the plants and plants clean the water for the fish.
Using this farming technique, GLOBE / HEDRON is optimized to feed four families of four all year round.

GLOBE / HEDRON is designed to be manufactured and retailed at a low cost. Easy-to-set-up units can be combined to scale up food production capacity.

Using a geodesic dome, the load of the fish tank rests on the frame of the greenhouse and is redistributed to a larger surface. Because of this design, the aquaponic farm can be housed on more roofs without any structural building adaptation. The dome structure is designed to be built with bamboo, so that it is biodegradable and organically farmed.

GLOBE / HEDRON is designed by Antonio Scarponi / Conceptual Devices in collaboration with UrbanFarmers. They are fundraising the first prototype with indiegogo: help them build it.

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TANTOOO is more than a bean bag chair. It is so much more: it is a place. No, not just because it is 120 cm wide. But because it is so comfortable and huggy, it’s the perfect place where to read (and write) fairy tales.

Its external lining is made of a soft fabric used for outdoor upholstery produced by Sunbrella which is easily washable, waterproof, oil proof and sunlight resistant. The internal lining is 100% cotton and contains the expanded polystyrene padding.

TANTOOO is manufactured in Italy. It is produced on demand and it can be shipped anywhere in the world. If you are interested please order it on tantooo.com.

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We live in an historical time where there is the need to re-found a new avangard. We have the cultural responsibility to build a new present: make a tabula rasa and start all over again. The old cultural categories in which we used to operate do not make sense anymore. The only way to proceed is to re-found DADA. The old Europe is again the centre of the economic and cultural game.

It is a mistake to think that there is just an economical crisis going on. This is first of all a cultural crisis that manifest itself thought the economy. Culturally the crisis has started a long time ago, we all saw it coming. Now it is evident to all, since our economic model is also in evident collapsing. We need to think a new world. We need to build new relations between people and things. To do this, we need a new avangard.

This will be the subject of a talk I will give the 3rd of February 2012 within the context of “Coffee Break of a Revolution”, a seminar at Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich, which is part of the exhibition “Revolution to Smash Global Capitalism” (for which I have designed Readykea). This will be a way to celebrate the DADA birthday. In this seminar will also speak: Adrian Notz, Co-Director Cabaret Voltaire – Mike Bonanno, The Yes Men – Mediagroup Bitnik – Yana Sarna, Voina – Almut Rembges, Emanuel Tschumi, Marcel Schwald, Bblackboxx – Christian Huebler, Knowbotiq Research – Billy Talen, Reverend Billy.

I had to give this thing a name, but I wanted to make a non “choice”, so I have simply mirrored the world DADA into ADAD. Later I have found out that ADAD is the Babylonian and Assyrian God of storms and fertile rains. I thought that this is the perfect meaning for what I want to talk about. I also found that ADAD stands for many acronyms that all make sense within a DADA logic:

ADAD_Alcohol and Drug Abuse Division (Colorado)
ADAD_Association of Dance of the African Diaspora
ADAD_Another Day Another Dollar
ADAD_Automatic Dialing Announcing Devices
ADAD_Alzheimer Disease and Associated Disorders (journal)
ADAD_Air Defense Alerting Device (US Army)
ADAD_Air Defense Artillery Director
ADAD_Airborne Division Advisory Detachment (US DoD)

It is the right time for the #ADAD manifesto. If you want to contribute just tweet your statement with the hash-tag #ADAD. If you do a project in this spirit include #ADAD within the press release and talk to people about it. Google will be the archive of this movement. It is time for a new present.

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Re-Use is a DIY diary and notebook that allows you to save 50% of the office A4 paper you would normally discard. It is free and released under Creative Commons (Attribution–NonCommercial–ShareAlike) license.

Preparing the 2012 edition, we decided to re-design it, in order to make it even more customizable and flexible. It is now a template, re-usable every year, to be completed and hacked as you wish. Download the PDF file and print it on the unused side of your boring papers. The Re-Use PDF file is available here.

Print it- fold it – punch it – bind it. The graphics are designed in a way that with one single layout you can have three different formats: A4-A5-A6. Use it as an agenda, an organizer, a journal, a sketch book or whatever comes to your mind. Happy new projects!

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Next Thursday, within the context of The Revolution to Smash Global Capitalism at Cabaret Voltaire Zurich I will engage in a discussion with Francesca Recchia around the topic of AZADI. In this workshop we will collects materials, images andwill also invite Twitter users to contribute under the hashtag of  #AZADI. We will collect tweets, images, live interviews via Skype with different people. This material will be organized, collected and distributed in a DIY zine that can be made with a PDF. The map of AZADI shown here below will also be  presented. This displays the amount of people who use AZADI in both languages that are officially recognized by the national authorities and  languages that are not. Hope to see you there.

Thursday Jan, 19th, 2012 2 – 6 am The Revolution to Smash Global Capitalism: Azadi – آزادی – आज़ादी With Francesca Rechia and Antonio Scarponi

Azadi is a Persian word that means freedom, liberty, liberation, independence. The word has a long history and a beautiful geography. Its roots can be traced back to more than three thousand years ago, to the ancient Avestan language. From Persia, Azadi started travelling: it went far and reached Afghanistan, Pakistan and India where it seeped into the local languages and it is now of common use in Farsi, Kurdish, Pashto, Urdu and Hindi. Azadi is about liberation as much as it is about liberty and hence signifies both the struggle for and the achievement of freedom; it does not simply describe a target, but embodies a process. Azadi helps therefore reflecting on the relation between freedom and liberation, on the necessary struggle that is implied in the idea of the achievement of freedom and on the sense of a collective responsibility that such a struggle requires.The word, however, has ever too often been appropriated in the political discourse as a symbol of Islamist ideology, separatist movements and extremist politics.But is it so? How many people do use the word Azadi in a non ideological way? What is the power of this word and what are the contradictions it carries? From the perspectives of design and geopolitics, Antonio Scarponi and Francesca Recchia will engage with these questions addressing the manipulation of innocence and the ways in which ideological interpretations “shape” meaning and reality. In a participatory manner, the conversation will take place on the 19th of January from 2 to 6 pm CET at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich as part of the exhibition The Revolution to Smash Global Capitalism. This will be accompanied by the realisation of a demographic map that shows the amount of people who use the word Azadi on a daily base. The physical event will also take the shape of an Internet happening through Skype and Twitter (hash-tag #Azadi) opening the debate to different people who have been engaged in the struggle for Azadi and for whom Azadi is a daily word with a political – rather that politicised – meaning.

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Being an architect I like to design things that anyone can manufacture. A good design can turn the world population into the bigger creative industry ever known: an aware industry where ideas becomes effectively tangible. In this sense I like to draw recipes and instructions manuals as ultimate design tools of our times, so to produce devices that anyone can make. Readykea is a modular system realized with two IKEA pieces (Trofast and Antonius) combined and reversibly assembled with the use of zip ties. The design consists essentially in the functional subversion of these two IKEA products.

Readykea is a behavioral furniture conceived as an exhibition device commissioned by the DADA House, also known as the Cabaret Voltaire Zurich for the show “DADA New York II: Revolution to Smash Global Capitalism“. The exhibition is curated by Adrian Notz and Philip Meier. The featured artists are: The Yes Men, Reverend Billy, Voina Group, Irwin, Königreiche von Elgaland-Vargaland, Mc Ghillie, !Mediengruppe Bitnik, UBERMORGEN, Roland Wagner.

The exhibition had to be cheap, easy to store, easy to replicate elsewhere, easy to ship, easy to carry around and easy to dismantle. It is conceived as a shop, as a compound and as a workshop in progress. The brief requested three exhibition units containing the sections of the show (documentation – vision – action), a reception desk, a workshop desk, a bed to host a ‘revolutionary in residence’, eight stools and a corner for media content productions such as blogs and social media actions.

It was supposed to be a “guerrilla exhibition” and so it is.

The idea is that you need “capitalism” to “smash capitalism”. So, why IKEA? Because it is cheap, because it is everywhere and because it is open on Sunday. This is an instruction manual: make it, share it, distribute it, but most of all have fun!

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Edge Park is an exhibition curated by Riccardo Caldura about a possible description of urban park models. A set of seven instruction drawings of Malthus manual will be exhibited.

Other artists and architects invited: Giancarlo Dell’Antonia, Bianco-Valente, Elisabetta Di Maggio, Vincenzo Casali, Tri.p Group + Giulia Filippi, Margherita Morgantin, Interno3, Manuela Sedmach, Antonio Scarponi, Marta Allegri, START UP, Antonio Guiotto, Nicola Genovese, Daniela Manzolli, Stefano Munarin + Maria Chiara Tosi, Emilio Fantin, Luigi Viola, Pavel Mrkus, Primoz Bizjak.

Forte Marghera 8-29 October 2001, pavilion n. 36, Venice. Opening October 8th at 17.00. Friend on Facebook here.

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One of our clients, the start-up UrbanFarmers, was invited to speak at TEDx Zurich to present their urban agricultural concept: good food from the roof. UrbanFarmers is indeed working on the mission to install aquaponic agricultural system on the top of otherwise unused building roofs. Aquaponics is a farming technique that allows to grow fish and plants simultaneously: the fish nourish the plants with their urine, plants clean the water for the fish. You eat both.

They have asked us to build a functioning concept model that can explain this system in an educational way to be brought on stage during the second TEDx Zurich Event.
So we have designed and built a mini aquaponic greenhouse. Yes you can crop and eat the salad when is ready if you wish. Which probably makes it the world smallest aquaponic greenhouse farm ever built.

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As designers we give ideas a form and we transform them into things. We can’t certainly solve the world’s challenges, but what we can do is to create a concrete storytelling about them. A narrative.

Malthus is one of these tales. It is an in-home aquaponics unit designed for the next generation kitchen or living room. It grows one meal a day: a portion of fish and a side salad. Aquaponics farming is a technique that combines the cultivation of fish with the growing of vegetables. The fish provides rich fertilizer for the plants and in return, the plants clean the water from the tank. The fish and the plants co-exist in a symbiotic relationship.

Malthus is an appliance for the kitchen of the future that grows food right next to where you cook it. Malthus consists of a fish tank that holds 400 litres which can support more then 2kg of fish like tilapia, salmon, grey fish or carp. The water is pumped through three cultivated grow beds which filter the water for the fish.

Malthus is designed to optimize space and costs with indoor food production. The weight of the fish tank is comparable to the one of a full bathtub, its width is about the size of two small refrigerators. Its parts are made of elements available in most DIY stores.

Malthus #01 was built thanks to the collaboration of Ola Nilsson and presented for the first time at the 10^th edition of NESS – Nordic Environmental Social Sciences Conference – Stockholm 14^th -16^th June 2011 within the context of the exhibition “Power Landscapes” curated by Po Hangström. The theme of the conference is also the theme of an art project where the invited artists (Katia Aglert, New Beauty Council, Cristine Ödlund) presented works on design as a tool for social and environmental engagement.

Malthus has a planned production limited to 100 numbered pieces. The first piece (Malthus #00) is the prototype currently running in our office in Zurich, thanks to Laura Vargalyte, our intern. The design and the production factors of Malthus have been made possible by the technical support of Andreas Graber from UrbanFarmers and Head of the Aquaponics project of the Zurich University of Applied Science who has introduced us to urban farming and to Aquaponics techniques.

A special acknowledgement goes to Stefano Massa for making things run smoothly throughout the project. This text has been kindly edited with the collaboration of Liz Henry Economou of Nuance Words.

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This “visual essay” was just published on Condition Architecture Magazine #8. There was an open call for submission about “preparing for the unknown“. I am thinking hard about how to make the complexity of a thought clear and simple. This is the result of my experiment, a diagrammatic index. This would be my keynote for a two hours talk. It feels like making sense.

[A special thanks to Liz Economou of Nuance Words, for chatting, commenting, suggesting and editing my text for proper English speakers. Thank you Liz, really. And by the way she is responsible only for the text in this image. All the rest is mine very crap written English]

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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).

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I will participate to a seminar in Milano during design week about sustainability and communication. My talk will be titled “Objects, Systems, Behaviours, of a Sustainable Design“. But I will have only forty minutes (instead of the three days the talk title would require) so I will basically present some projects we have done at Conceptual Devices that deal with paper (quite few indeed). The seminar is hosted and organized by Paper & People, the most beautiful showroom for paper in Italy.

Here is the program:
Economia sostenibile e “Greenwashing” – Paolo Ricotti, PLEF
Carta che crea o carta che distrugge: cosa è vero e cosa è falso – Massimo Ramunni, Assocarta
Sostenibilità: oltre le certificazioni – Davide Biancorosso, consulente e formatore
Oggetti, sistemi, comportamenti di un design sostenibile (I am the media,
You are the message) – Antonio Scarponi, Conceptual Devices (me).

If you are interested, just let me know there are some place still available and I am allowed to let someone in.

Images of this post are a courtesy of Design Royale, the Most important event at Fuori Salone 2011, that will take place the 15th of April, in via della Moscova 28, Milan (from 11.00 pm through the night).

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The Italian Constitution is one of the most beautiful juridical texts ever written. Its articles are stated clear and communicate the social universal values of the whole nation. Italy up in smoke is a project for the promotion of these values. People are the medium of distribution and dissemination of them.

If you have already a T-shirt that you want to use you can download a DIY t-shirt transfer here. Otherwise you can buy a new one in our store or you can simply use the design and have it printed where you prefer.

Italy up in smoke is a way to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Italian Republic. A project conceived with Peppe Clemente and produced for the first time in 2006 by Art for the World.

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