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London, design and elegance
By roberta
July 15, 2007 · 6 Comments
Steve came back from a trip to London a few days ago bearing gifts to appease the great stay-at-homes. Our guy is something of a design nerd. So, when we hear he’s got some things to show us from his trip we don’t expect diamonds and chocolates, although we do indeed get chocolates sometimes. We know to expect things that are surprising good design.
Steve loves an elegant and simple design. As someone who is an inventor and just got his first patent on a software design, we think he’s got good design sense.
So, Steve’s bounty from his London trip offered up two examples of great (or at least better) European design:
1 — a paper cup for hot beverages with a built-in insulator (negating the need for those annoying cardboard sleeves which don’t really protect you from the heat and which slip down the cup when you least expect or want it).
2 — a plastic bag snap closure that is England’s better answer to our twist tie.
Exhibit A. The better paper cup with insulation built in
Better paper cup
Exhibit B. The snap closure that’s better than our twist tie or the really low end plastic tab with the circle bitten into it that many grocery store breads use for closures.
The British snap clip.
Exhibit C. Twist tie. Usable but let’s face it not very elegant
Twist tie. EEEEUUUU.
The little plastic device from London reminded me of some plastic snap closures Stella found at Ikea. The Ikea snaps are more like hair barrettes than this little clip however, and their design — flat and unforgiving — leaves something to be desired…They could use a little fatness like the London clips to deal with the thick folds of a fat plastic bag.
Design is important. It can help make your life good or bad. Curb cuts are great no matter how much they cost. Sometimes as a bonus design can add a little beauty in to your life. These two British designs (are they British? Maybe they’re from anther country and are merely what’s in use in London) won’t enhance the beauty of your environment but they are elegant solutions (simple, workable, nifty) as well as utilitarian and for that they are better than what’s in the American marketplace right now.
More from the elegance department
Jean Bacon, watercolor paintings
I must mention here that one other thing Steve brought home was the news that his colleague Jean Bacon a professor at University of Cambridge Computer Lab is having a show of her watercolor paintings in Blythburgh Suffolk, August 14th – 24th 2007. Jean’s art in this show is based on photos taken by Ken Moody. The works are reed bed paintings and they are long and narrow like scrolls and lovely, contempletive — and elegant.
Tags: design, jean bacon, london
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The coffee shop in my ‘hood has paper cups with the built-in insulation but alas they don’t look that good. Really, they’re the ugliest cups I’ve seen but they do their job.
Nice post.
This everyday design issue is something I think about a lot and the poverty of it that we suffer in this country. It’s sad when the best design I’ve bought into in the past five years is the box my iPod came in.
It doesn’t matter though. Everything’s gonna look like IKEA in 10 years anyway.
Oh wow, the tyranny of Ikea. Much of their stuff is disposable so I guess it could be since we are the culture of disposables. I wish I knew more about product design and who’s doing it and how they make their decisions. Apple’s made some good decisions but they have relatively few products. Flip-top toothpaste caps are good. A slice of pizza that comes in a pizza wedge shaped box is bad. Disposable in general is gonna kill us.
The coffe cup I mentioned is here:
http://www.coffeeserviceplus.com/miva/graphics/00000002/dixie_hot_paper_cups.jpg
Terrible. It lets you know that even the worst design student you knew in college ended up getting work.
Totally agree about the death by disposable. When Tracy was on a business trip in Denmark and Sweden she said all the hotel furniture was IKEA so I guess they make some stuff durable enough to take a beating.
Whoops, I’m terrible at links. Here’s the Dixie cup link in parts. Cut-n-paste them together:
http://www.coffeeserviceplus.com/miva/
graphics/00000002/
dixie_hot_paper_cups.jpg
You’re all making me miserable with these comments about disposability–maybe because I just saw An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s documentary about global warming. I knew we were going to hell in a hand basket, but I didn’t know it was happening that quickly. The population chart alone was enough to send me into a wild funk. The rising waters obliterating half of New York City means that Philadelphia also will be losing ground. Am I high enough?
nobody’s high enough…we all will be waterlogged. thanks for the link rob, the pic was small but i get the idea. part of the reason it’s so ugly is that nobody values beauty anymore. or maybe our sense of beauty is so warped it’s not reliable (are the golden arches beautiful? is mickey mouse? cinderella? a hamburger????) it’s crazy.