Gallery of iconic chair designs

One for your Design and Technology teachers and students.  This gallery on the homelife.com.au site has images of twenty iconic chair designs, with the bonus of links to more information about each designer and a separate/additional image gallery focusing on that designer's work.

Cheers

Ruth

Top design sites and blogs

A recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald's glossy mag about the design store, Top3 included a useful list of their top design sites and blogs.  Top3 has only three types of any one item -those they consider the best (so the Top3 site itself also has design education potential).

The Top3 top ten sites for design inspiration:

• ThisNext
• MoCo Loco
• Core 77 design magazine and resource
• indesignlive
• The Design Files
• 2modern design talk
• Designspotter
• designboom
• Stylepark
• Dezeen design magazine

Lots of material there for your students and teachers doing design and technology subjects.

Cheers

Ruth

PS We've just finished and installed a spiffing bit of art in the library - a second cousin of the word walls.  More (including pictures, please goodness Blogger will cooperate on the picture front) next week...

Have you discovered Instructables?

Recently, I needed origami instructions for a dead simple box (a Year 7 class assignment had the class members voting on each other's work, and so each kid needed a box for the raffle ticket 'voting slips').  Googlegooglegoogle and this box from Instructables is perfect - simple, fast, works with any rectangle of paper/cardboard.

Instructables (Make, How-To and DIY), if you haven't come across it, is an almost inexhaustible supply of how-to, from the sublime to the Unusual, and every byway in between.  Here, for example, are some of the links from the home page when I looked at it recently:

• Vertical Garden
• How to make your first real robot
• Iron Man - how to make various kinds of gear from the recent film/s
• Easy origami
• How to make a dog bone shaped cookie cutter
• Mobile veggie garden
• Turn signal biking jacket (with light-up left/right arrows)

And so it goes.  Usually step by step pictures with instructions on the tools and materials you need, sometimes video tutorials as well.  A cornucopia of ideas.

One to share with a whole lot of faculties - Science, Industrial Arts, Design and Technology, Agriculture....

Once again, no pics because Blogger won't play nice.  Sigh, again.

Cheers

Ruth

PS The science teacher who points out the absence of science-y entries on this blog can note that's two science-relevant entries in two days...!!

Culture Now: a social magazine about art, design and media

What is this?  It's a Playpump.  The Playpump is a great way to make clean water available to people in third world countries. The pump is essentially a merry go round which is powered by kids or adults and serves to retrieve water from deep below the earth. With most schools in deprived regions not being able to afford playgrounds for children, the Playpump addresses more than one problem simultaneously.

I found this, and a cornucopia of other items on modern culture, art, design, media, at Culture Now.

The Playpump is an example of its offerings in the Objects section (read more, and see a diagram of how it works here).  The Objects section has a bunch of fascinating subsections:

• 
  
  Art
• 
  
  Exterior
• 
  
  Extraordinary
• 
  
  Gadgets
• 
  
  Graphics
• 
  
  Interior
• 
  
  Personal
• 
  
  Utilitarian
• 
  
  Vehicles

The Interior one, for example, has great examples of current modern design featuring designers such as Kareem Rashid.  Useful for Design and Technology and other subjects too.  Explore.  Tell your colleagues and let them explore too.

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Fontstruct - building fonts online

Fontstruct is an online place to build fonts. It's set up very simply, so you can set a grid size and choose from a wide variety of blocks and elements.

I'd highly recommend viewing the introductory video (runs under 10 minutes, and the narrator has a lovely Scottish accent), and if you're going to use this with students, show it to them too.

Requires registration (free) and an email address, and offers possibilities for storing/sharing/sharing under Creative Commons licences.

Offers possibilities for a number of subjects, and not necessarily a whole alphabet - maybe just students doing a single letter (eg. their initial). Or, from a teacher librarian point of view, it's another way to devise a distinctive library logo.

TED Tuesday: Our cellphones, ourselves

From the TED resource of online talks, Jan Chipchase on the many possibilities of cellphones (mobile phones):





To quote from the TED website:

Nokia researcher Jan Chipchase's investigation into the ways we interact with technology has led him from the villages of Uganda to the insides of our pockets. He's made some unexpected discoveries along the way.

Can the cellphone help end global poverty?

One of the things I've always appreciated about the internet, for my students as well as myself, is the opportunity to sit in our school and read newspapers we may never have seen in paper form, or which may have been just impossible to access in any easy way. The chance thereby to read other points of view, other perspectives on the world.

For myself, it's years since I read a paper New York Times, but online, well...

A recent longer NYT article on mobile phones (cellphones) and the third world is a great example of something worth reading - with relevance in Business Studies, Commerce, Design and Technology, to name just three. And just interesting anyway (oh, I do like the NYT film reviews and articles, too).

The teacher librarian's challenge becomes connecting students with such resources; alerting them to possibilities in the internet jungle.

Design link: Australian International Furniture Fair

Today's Sydney Morning Herald features an article on young designers at the Australian International Furniture Fair, and a photo gallery of their work.

Useful for Design and Technology inspiration.