Eye Delight

Check out Eye Delight-2011 for more interesting images.

Pick Up a Video Camera and Answer, “What Makes Your Campus Green?”

Have an urge to get behind the camera? James Cameron, director of Avatar, may have been speaking to you when he said, “Pick up a camera and shoot something. No matter how small, or cheesy, or whether your friends and your sister star in it. Put your name on it and now you’re a director.” Herman Miller invites you do just that: pick up a camera, gather some friends, and make a video that answers the question “what makes your campus green?”

Commuting to school by bike, campus-wide recycling initiatives, perhaps a zero-waste sporting event. Large or small, it doesn’t matter; show us what your school is doing for the Earth.

A winning entry could earn you up to $2,500 cash in Herman Miller’s third annual Student Video Contest.

Checkout last year’s winner, Fiona Green of the University of Ottawa, and get inspired.

Konstantin Grcic: A Love for Building Things

“Why did you become a designer?” “Because I love building things,” says Konstantin Grcic. Interior Design recently picked the brain of the Chair_One creator with its 10 Questions…. Here are four that we found interesting:

Interior Design: Why did you become a designer?
Because I love building things. When I was 19 years old, I did an apprenticeship for a cabinetmaker and I became intrigued. I discovered that I could create or rethink the things I built. I enrolled at the RCA (Royal Academy of Arts) in London.

What does design mean to you?
That’s an impossible question. You could write a book or say something really stupid.

What do you most like to design?
The physical scale of furniture attracts me. It’s what I’m good at. And it’s what I really like.

Where do you get inspiration?
KG: It comes from everywhere—from daily life.

Visit Interior Design for the rest of Grcic’s answers.

Gem: A New Fabric With a Better World in Mind

Whether it’s an affordable work chair or a textile, we always approach design with a better world in mind.

Enter Gem, a new polyester upholstery fabric that is antimony-free, making it a good choice for the earth. Polyester is one of the world’s most popular polymers; unfortunately making it is harmful to the environment. Designing a better polyester meant replacing antimony, a heavy metal used as a catalyst, with titanium, a much more earth-friendly choice.

Gem is durable, inexpensive, and easy to take care of—and it’s part of Herman Miller’s quest for a Better World.

Teaching Design to Healthcare Professionals

Physicians and nurses work through a space planning exercise. Photo: Joint Commission Resources

The design process can be overwhelming if you’re unfamiliar with its various phases, tools, and lingo. A new workshop aims to give healthcare professionals the skills to positively influence patient safety and quality during the design and construction of future healthcare environments.

Learning to read blueprints, articulate a future vision, and design for flexibility, these and other skills are covered in the Safe Health Design Learning Academy. This three-day session is organized by Joint Commission Resources (JCR)—a not-for-profit healthcare accreditation organization—and sponsored by Herman Miller.

Giving physicians, nurses, and healthcare leadership an active voice in the design of healthcare will result in safer spaces, better patient care, and satisfied caregivers—all noble goals.

The next JCR Safe Health Design Learning Academy will be held in April 23-25, 2012; sign up now.

Plywood: Material, Process, Form

An early prototype of the Eames lounge developed in 1946.

In 1945, Charles and Ray Eames introduced the world to molded plywood as a material for furniture. Using a process perfected in the living room of their Westwood apartment, the Eames created numerous prototypes. With each, they learned the characteristics and limitations of molded plywood, eventually landing on the forms of their iconic molded plywood chairs.

This February, see the Eameses’ hard work on display along with plywood designs by Aalto, Jacobsen, Yanagi, and others at Plywood: Material, Process, Form at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Hurry, the exhibition closes February 27, 2012.

Frank Gehry’s House Proves Its Merit

The American Institute of Architects each year recognizes one American building that is at least a quarter of a century old. “The idea,” says Robert Campbell of the Boston Globe, “is to recognize architecture that has proved its merit over time.”

This year, the AIA chose the residence in Santa Monica that Frank Gehry designed for his family. As much statement as structure, the house features materials familiar in an urban landscape: raw plywood, chain-link fencing, asphalt, corrugated metal—not the stuff of a quiet residential neighborhood.

But, Gehry has seldom been concerned with the expected. We have our own stories to tell about working with him on a factory-office facility we built in Rocklin, California. It has proved its longevity, too. Now owned by the William Jessup University, it’s become an award-winning student apartment building that preserves, as the award citation reads, “the original conversion of the Herman Miller furniture factory, designed by renowned architect Frank Gehry.”

Design That Leaves No Child Behind

One Laptop Per Child is a nonprofit that aims to “provide each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop.” The focus is on children in developing countries, and so far almost two-and-a-half million of them have one.

Yves Béhar and his team at fuseproject designed the laptop, and now they’ve done a tablet version. Just like the laptop, the tablet is simple and functional, with tactile rubber grips, flexible cover, and solar charging battery.

Pro bono design work isn’t new to Béhar and fuseproject. Another of their efforts is “See Better to Learn Better,” a free eyeglasses program in partnership with the Mexican government and Augen Optics.

Good works and good work are both part of Béhar’s vision. On the latter score, 2011 brought recognition for the UP wristband, which uses tiny motion sensors to monitor the wearer’s sleep, diet, and exercise. It made Alice Rawsthorn’s design honors list for 2011. But then, we’re partial to Béhar’s work, especially the award-winning SAYL chair he did with us.

MCL Leather: Natural Beauty for Classic Designs

If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, there’s now more of it for every beholder of our classic Eames designs. MCL is a new premium leather that preserves the luxurious feel and texture of a material that has long been the epitome of upholstery choices.

Most upholstery leathers are sanded and pressed to make the grain—the natural pebbled texture of leather—look more uniform. By contrast, MCL celebrates the inherent characteristics of high quality leather. Soft and thick, MCL closely resembles the aniline leather used on the original Eames lounge chair and ottoman. Over a lifetime of use MCL will wrinkle and patina naturally, meaning it will wear in, not wear out.

Education on the Move

“We are at a watershed moment in education design,” says Susan Whitmer in a conversation with Nicholas Jackson of The Atlantic. “The convergence of knowledge and circumstances provide us with the opportunity to revolutionize the built environment for all of education.”

How will the built environment, the physical places on campus, be revolutionized? One way, according to Whitmer, an education consultant and researcher at Herman Miller, is they’ll become movable. In a paper she co-authored on fostering innovation, she notes that education needs “highly malleable spaces that users can interact with almost like a living thing.”

Change is sure to come. According to Whitmer, it can’t happen too soon: “Our world is changing at a rapid pace, yet education is mired in hundreds of years of tradition.” Boola, Boola!