McFilter

Apologies to anyone eagerly anticipating a blog post about phones, but the "Mobile" in the title is the Italian for furniture. Sunday before last was the last day of the International Furniture Festival, and the only day that the general public were allowed access; so we got up early and drove the hour-and-a-half-or-so over to the Fiera Milano.

There was far too much to get round in a day, so we only had chance to look round the kitchen, design and new designers halls, but they were the ones in which we were most interested - so it wasn't too much of problem.

Given that it won't be a full review of the event, and because the variety of pieces and themes and ideas would make it difficult to pull together a structured arc of narrative, I'm going to re-purpose the "blog all dog-eared pages" review format. I picked up a business card, or catalogue leaflet for any of the exhibits that interested me, and I'll run through them all here with a sentence or two about why I picked up their details. Hopefully there'll be some links to more info about the exhibits, or maybe just to the odd photo we took. All the photos from the trip are up on Rebecca's flickr set Salone Internazionale del Mobile 2008.

Eurocucina and FTK Technology For the Kitchen Halls

No photos taken, or cards collected in the Eurocucina hall. It was a bit like wandering round a huge version of Magnet. From my notes it seems that this year's themes are bling; glossy wood in dark tones - think 1970s piano black and walnut; big lights, preferably chandeliers; cake stands; drawers hidden in drawers (so the front is one big drawer facing to cover the hidden one and give a cleaner look when closed, but more hassle when opening); and overly-elaborate door closing mechanisms.

The FTK Technology For the Kitchen tent was a little more interesting. Electrolux had some concept appliances with an energy efficient and environmentally-friendly slant, including a kitchen composter and a fridge that looked too small to hold anything useful (maybe that's why it was so energy efficient...). Their standard appliances section also featured a pretty heavy-duty shredder so you could mince up any food waste - presumably before you fed it to the kitchen compost machine.

Salone Satellite

This was by far the most interesting part of the show for me. The Salone Satellite hall contained a wealth of interesting stands from new designers. As a result it felt more like a design graduate show than a furniture festival. Most of the leaflets collected came from this one hall:

• taro&Sarah - MyCloud - magnetomorphic light system. This was like a 3-d lighting puzzle kit - the light modules tessellate together so you can reconfigure the shape of your lamp to your heart's content. The join together with magnets, which also provide the power to the lamp, making changing the lamp's shape a cinch.
• d.sign21 - hide_and_seek cool double-sided cupboard - open it one way and choose your shoes... open it the other way and you've got a guitar and PA...
• Katrin Sonnleitner. Two pieces caught my eye here: PuzzlePerser is a jigsaw rug, and Knopfleiste is a coat-rack made from an assorment of big buttons
• Gareth Neal Furniture's George 3. I loved how this looks with an ornate traditionally-styled chest of drawers hidden within a more modern exterior.
• üaut;&böaut;ler had a few good items, but in particular the Kase coffee table (well done - a site where I can actually link to the specific page! No flash that looks pretty but gets in the way of people talking about the items)
• wis design "Not everything has to be brand new. Design can arise out of recycling the past." Rebecca loved their Decades chest of drawers
• Never ending office was an interesting fabric partition-cum-seating system. Unfortunately their website hasn't been updated since last year's Salone, so I can't point you to it.
• The Vanitysss was a piece by a designer from the Catholic University of America, but I haven't been able to track down her online presence.
• qed Design cosy*rocking chair - a nice half-moon chaise longue
• Hommin Design - the Clip Trashcan and the Outlet House. Neither were grand pieces, but both were well thought-out.
• Union Desk by i do design. Could be an interesting design for co-working or maybe even pair programming...

Design Halls

By the time we'd finished poking round the Salone Satellite there wasn't much time left to see anything else. We had a quick dash round some of the Design halls, and then had to head home. The highlights of what we saw in this part of the show are:

• Missoni Home - another half-moon-ish rocking chaise longue. Sadly their website is useless so I can't tell you what it's called.
• Rexite - their Taboo bin has a handy clip in compartment to make separating recycling easier.
• I don't have any details of who makes stool-cum-table, but I like the integrated table and the idea that it could be a side table for your drink, or if you sat astride it you could rest your laptop on the table.

This was a panel discussion between: Bruce Sterling (sci-fi writer, curator of the Share Festival 2008), Donald Norman (design and usability guru - wrote the excellent The Design of Everyday Things), Luca De Biase (director of Nova24-Sole24Ore, journalist and blogger) and Gino Bistagnino (professor from the Polytechnic of Torino)

Handily, and presumably because Bruce and Donald don't speak Italian, the discussion was almost entirely in English. I felt sorry for Gino Bistagnino because his English wasn't good enough to follow along, and with the added delay of the interpreter loop he ended up a little isolated from proceedings.

Apparently, before the event Donald Norman had suggested that they should try to argue as that would make a more interesting and enjoyable panel, and I think he was right. There was lots to ponder and a whole range of opinions - some of which I agreed with, others that I didn't.

The session started with Bruce reading the "Six principles of design" from Donald's latest book, and then asking if anyone was going to follow them. Donald thinks that people will, but that the big problem with such new thinking is that the people doing - those who are designing and building the devices that we'll use today and in the near future - don't read, and don't attend conferences. The new ideas only come into production when the next generation of students graduate and bring the ideas from the academics (who are the ones attending the conferences) into the workplace.

Luca tried to steer the discussion towards ethics in design, but Don was dismissive, claiming that although it was an important topic, the designers aren't the key decision makers in such matters - "Does anyone care about designers' ethics?". That was disappointing, as I think we need more discussion about ethics in designing and manufacturing (and I very much include computing in there too). As Donald said, do we need more than one type of salt cellar? How do we decide when there are enough, and move onto more useful problems.

I think that ties into the reason for the conflict in my own views on intelligent objects. One of Don Norman's favourite intelligent objects is his coffee machine - he presses a button, and gets nice coffee without having to do anything. Next to that in my notes I've scribbled "That's good apparently". I think there's a danger in the assumption that automation is progress and therefore unquestionably good. For some people, such a coffee machine is perfect, but automation loses some of the theatre and romance that I get from the ritual of making coffee with my Bialetti moka. It's not an onerous ritual, but a step-or-two above push button, get coffee. It seems I'm not alone.

A fair chunk of the discussion was taken up with Bruce Sterling in a full-on rant against word processors and Microsoft Word in particular. It's probably worth watching the video just for that. I thought Don Norman's counter-argument was excellent - basically that Bruce should stop whingeing about it and do something instead. "If you want to change the world, you must do it" He should either build or fund the creation of a word processor that works. Bruce claimed that a friend of his tried that once, and ended up going back to a fountain pen.

That spawned a sub-thread about criticism, and whether or not critics were of any use, with Bruce in the pro-critic corner and Donald arguing against. That pretty much used up the remaining time for the session (which in true Italian style had started something like twenty minutes late) and brought proceedings to a close.

A brief write-up of one of the two talks from the Share Festival that I made it to, more as a reminder to myself that I attended and to point to some of the related materials. I don't think I can do this session justice as it was all in Italian, and hence my understanding was sketchy.

It was a talk of two halves: the first given by Fabio Franchino and Giorgio Olivero from TODO Design; and then Massimo Banzi talking about Arduino.

Fabio Franchino and Giorgio Olivero

The guys from todo.to.it (nice URL!) were discussing some of the digital art that they've built, and showed some video of it in use.

For the launch of the new Fiat 500 they were commissioned to build a service that allowed the public to text words that they associate with the 500 to a special number. The words were then transformed into a swooping visualisation, popping up in real time as a backdrop to the launch event itself.

They've also been involved in some work for the Torino World Design Capital year (or World Domination Capital as they joked). This was a cool mixture of physical and digital where a microcosm of autonomous digital alien fish were projected onto Porta Palatino, a Roman gateway in central Turin. The windows and edges of the building formed the boundaries of the world that the fish inhabited, and looked cool swimming around on the surface of the ruin. A kind of animated, digital graffiti.

There's another video with more information about how it was created.

Massimo Banzi

This seemed to be mainly a discussion about the evolution of the Arduino prototyping board and the team who have developed it. As I've been following the Arduino's progress for a while now, there wasn't much more to glean than there had been last time I encountered Massimo.

I do like the label on their office doorbell though (that's a photo of it above).

And he pointed us at the Maker Bill of Rights and the Crafter Manifesto - two worthy ideals to which any hardware project should aspire.

The full session was filmed, and you can watch it here.