Most loved up girls will expect roses or chocolates or perhaps a big diamond ring? Me I’d rather treat myself (in my dreams of course) to some tasty finger bling.

Danish jewellery designer Emquies Holstein’s gold chocolate wrapper ring would certainly be my new best friend.

Cora Sheibani’s quaint dessert inspired finger candy are drool inducing. Coupled with delicious recipes, her intriguing book is definitely on the ‘treat myself’ list. Jewellery and baking, a match made in heaven. Check out her book at www.corasheibani.com

Perhaps Melbourne based designer Lucy Folk’s quirky collection of food inspired handiwork will encourage me to get creative with food. Take a look at Lucy’s website for more ‘wearable food pieces’.

Solid Sterling Silver Popcorn Ring

Caviar Ring

But if 18 carat gold tarts and sapphire cavier are stretching the budget here’s my pick of more affordable food inspired treats…

Faralla Ring

I should have done this a while ago, but today I finally went out of my way to create my blogroll and links page and I thought it would be worth while sharing it with you!

Before I begin, If you don’t already use a reader, I’m personally using google reader which is pretty solid.

Why would I want to use Google Reader?

The amount of information on the web is rapidly increasing. Google Reader helps you keep up with it all by organizing and managing all the content you’re interested in. Instead of continuously checking your favorite sites for updates, you can let Google Reader do it for you. From news sites to your friends’ blogs, Google Reader helps you keep up-to-date with all the online information that matters most to you.

All you need is a google account, and away you go…!

… I have developed my own little DesignTavern built Directory – It is comprised of a list of blogs and sites that I regularly visit! and certainly think are worth while checking!

Keeping up to date with the latest news is important and it’s amazing what you pick up even if you scan through a few articles every day – these are the blogs and sites that inspire my design thinking..

(image via DeclanTM on Flickr)

Design Blogs And Communities directory list #1 – 21/12/2008
(all screenshots were taken at this date)

2modern design Talk

“We provide a wide-range of views and commentary focused on contemporary design. Contributors to the blog are designers, manufacturers, editors, retailers, architects and consumers. Some contributors enjoy a large spectrum of the modern lifestyle, others are focused on specific niches or topics like: modern lighting, contemporary art, innovative architecture, etc. Some of us spend most of their time at tradeshows, viewing the latest designs, others spend their time in a studio in overalls and paint. The common denominator is that this carefully selected group of individuals weave a special fabric we call the 2Modern Design Talk blog.”

A great starting point, 2modern Design Talk has a wide range of design products in their store and also on their blog – It has everything you might think of from storage units to fashion, books to outdoor music. 2modern has a bit of everything.

Apartment Therapy

“Saving the world, one room at a time”
A home and interior design site – Dedicated to decking out your home with the latest furnishings and products – A great place for inspiration if you’re thinking of re-decorating or just looking to jazz up your nest.

Better Living Through Design

“Better Living Through Design is an online resource for people interested in great design.”
Better Living Through Design is a great place to check out if you’re looking for gifts for friends, family (and YOURSELF!) All that is featured on the site is for sale – a bit of a one stop shop for the design orientated!

Cool Hunting

“Cool Hunting is a daily update on ideas and products in the intersection of art, design, culture and technology, and features weekly videos that get an inside look at the people who create them..” a collection of “stuff we like” from writers and users – great for finding the fun and quirky stuff that lurks the internet.

Core 77

“Since 1995 Core77.com has served a devoted global audience of industrial designers ranging from students through seasoned professionals. Core77 publishes articles, discussion forums, an extensive event calendar, hosts portfolios, job listings, a database of design firms, schools, vendors and services. Core77 provides a gathering point for designers and enthusiasts alike by producing design competitions, lecture series, parties, and exhibits.”

Core 77 has it all going on, on top of being a blog they also have their own little community – They are involved in everything you might think of revolving around design – It was my first port of call when looking for blogging inspiration. They have their own in house competitions, a job seeker page and all you could think of!

Daily Serving

“DailyServing was conceived as a central site for art lovers to visit daily to find resources and updates on happenings within the Contemporary Arts. Designed to be a dynamic source of information sharing, directly leading to countless sources of exciting information about our daily features, DS is revolutionizing how art lovers interact with and receive arts information.”

Daily Serving Is my source for keeping up to date with contemporary art (and design) they have all the goings on in the art world along with interviews, articles and reviews.

Design Addict

“..your resource for modern, post-modern and contemporary design of the 20th-21st centuries where you’ll find information on designers and producers, on furniture, lighting, dinnerware and accessories.

Design Addict is the leading design portal online, targeting the international community of design professionals and private consumers. Founded in 1998, Design Addict has witnessed brilliant rise during the past years. Thanks to its permanent wish to respond in the best possible way to users’ expectations, Design Addict has succeeded in imposing itself as the undeniable international leader of information websites in the field of product design.”

Another well established, big fish, design blog – The team over at design addict can boast forums, blog, shop and not to mention a huge readership.

Design Milk

“Design Milk is not a retail shop, nor do we sell anything from this website. We try to direct you to a website with every post, so that you can inquire directly.”

On top of the blog-front (which brings readers great art and design products from around the world) Design Milk also have an extensive Design Directory which is chockers with links for artists, designers and everything you can think of in the creative field.

Design Mind

“..Design Mind; Our mission is to share the best in form and function that the design world has to offer. We believe that in this mass production society, providing alternative ways to express oneself contributes to an aesthetically oriented culture. We encourage you to always look closely and critically with an eye toward the uncommon.”

The gang over at Design Mind has a lot of great content on display; but one would particularly hit Design Mind when looking for unique gifts, specifically jewelry! (A jewelry designer is behind the scenes) check it out!

Design Verb

“Designverb covers elements in design that excite, inspire, captivate, and rattle our goofy creative minds through curious and refreshing finds in art, design, technology, food, culture, experiences, lifestyles, entertainment, and all the other mind-provoking ideas that come with it!”

Aaron from Design Verb always has a bit of fun on display – Usually some interesting videos he’s found via youtube.

Dezeen

Time says of Dezeen: “This online magazine provides an in-depth look at the latest news from top designers and architects around the world.” Not only “top” designers and architects, we’d like to add.

A real mover and shaker, Dezeen is one of the leading sites when it comes to design, it’s rapid growth is a good indication of the quality of products shown – dezeen.com is now pushing 1.75 million viewers since late 2006!

Inhabitat

Inhabitat.com is a weblog devoted to the future of design, tracking the innovations in technology, practices and materials that are pushing architecture and home design towards a smarter and more sustainable future.

The hippies of the design world; the Inhabitat team are big on eco design; they’re a great source for green thinking and ideas. They also have a shop worth visiting for all your tree hugging needs!

Mochatini

“Mochatini is an eco-friendly design blog about interior and exterior spaces. Spaces that are contemporary, creative, handmade, budget conscious and personalized. Mochatini supports green, eco-friendly, sustainable design and living practices.”

Mochatini is compiled by the lovely Manvi, “a creative entrepreneur and blogger dedicated to improving the human quality of life through good design.” Manvi’s site has a great collection of home knick knacks – and some great interior design news, opinion and she also runs some fun competitions!

The Design Files

“The Design Files is a collection of creative people, places and products from Melbourne and beyond. I update daily, and interview some of Australia’s most talented designers, artists and creative professionals every week.”

I love to check in at the Design Files often, although Melbourne specific it also has some great interviews and articles worth checking out. It’s also got a nice personal touch as Lucy the author will often go out and take her own photos rather than recycling what is already on the net.

I think that’s enough to keep you going a little while and hopefully widen your design reading – over the next few weeks I hope to expand the list and am I looking to put together my own little Design Directory – Where artists, designers, architects, bloggers and all creative professionals can submit their site and services. This is just a portion of the blogs I have in my google reader (I read a lot of articles..!)

If you would like your blog to get a mention or you know a site worth sharing, please flick me an email ! and ill look to including it in the next directory post! remember, I’m at admin@designtavern.com!

I have recently got my hands on a copy of Dave Evan’s “Cool Hunting Green” a collaboration of “recycled, repurposed and renewable objects that inspire a greener world.” You can pick up a copy here if you’re keen.

From it I have deduced this list.. (in no particular order)

The top 10 recycled and recyclable chairs and benches    

#1. Exbox bench – Giles Miller

Designer Giles Miller’s ingenious and resourceful answer to helping the needy.

The ex-box bench was born whilst designing a bed for the homeless. The recycled cardboard is simply slotted together and can be made to any desired size.

www.farmdesigns.co.uk

#2. N+ew – Rodrigo Alonso Schramm

The N+ew stool-sculpture-installation cleverly uses (in a very obvious way) recycled electronic trash. This is made possible through the use of epoxic resin whilst the feet of the stool are made from melted aluminium. The stool is produced in limited editions and each is very unique. http://rodrigoalonso.cl/rodrigo_alonso.html

#3. Cow Benches – Julia Lohmann

These eerily realistic cow like benches are made from rawhide and stretched over a foam frame, and sculpted to mimic a cow’s torso.

“A leather bench or bovine memento mori..

..We don’t want our food to remind us of the animal it is made of and, at the same time are able to create living materials through advances in bio-technology. The ‘cow-bench’ explores the threshold between animal and material.

Thanks to everyone at Alma Home, London”

http://julialohmann.co.uk/

#4. Annie the shopping trolley – Reestore

The converted shopping trolley chair is by the contemporary eco design crew over at Reestore.

“Annie the shopping trolley chair is perhaps the most iconic of ditch

fillers. trolleys are generally scrapped due to unaligned wheels or exposed wire. Once transformed by reestore they become beautiful yet functional

upright chairs.”

http://www.reestore.com/

#5. Bath & Beyond – Reddish Studio

The “surprisingly comfortable result” of simply cutting an old bath in two.

“cut, bent and legs added” It’s that easy..

http://www.reddishstudio.com/

#6. Kid’s Spring Chair – Cambium Studio

I wish I had one of these growing up! A kids bouncing chair made from sunflower board and an old truck spring.

Looks like hours of entertainment!

www.cambiumstudio.com

#7. Human nest – Emily Pilloton

So named for obvious reasons, the human nest by Emily Pilloton. The nest uses layers and layers of off cuts of scrap fabric.

It looks very cosy, a great to place to curl (or nestle!) up with a good book.

http://www.projecthdesign.com/

#8. Vertibral – Joseph Keenan from ESO

The very changeable and customizable Vertibral comes from Joseph Keenan via Environmentally Sustainable Objects (eso)

“Vertibral is a versatile and flexible seating/table/storage range.”

 So named because of it’s human spine like movement, the Vertibral is completely Australian designed and manufactured. The timber used is completely renewable from managed forests.

To be fair, the Vertibral doesn’t stop at just a “chair or bench” but can also be used for shelving and storage. Check out direct link here for a great video with it’s designer Joseph Keenan to see how customizable it really is!

http://esogroup.com.au

#9. Hanging Chair – Raw Studio

This is one from a collection of Hanging chairs that have been developed by Raw Studio; this particular model is known as ‘hive’

Originally designed by Nick Rawcliffe, the Hive Hanging chair is completely eco friendly. It is made from sustainably sourced FSC grade ply and marine rope!

www.rawstudio.co.uk

#10. The Raw Bench – Jason Iftakhar

And finally, the raw bench by Jason Iftakhar. Jason has taken the saved hundreds of supermarkets cardboard boxes and packaging. He has created a system where the packing systems in fact produce usable, ready products.

Products such as the Raw Bench. The product could be easily created through the use of on site machinery that already exists in supermarkets! “the main idea is to use infrastructure and resources that already exist in a clever way to produce products and objects that prolong the life span cycle of cardboard.”

http://www.jasoniftakhar.com/

Can you imagine a window..? A window that you could carry with you in your pocket and could give you the power to search for anything and everything you see, when you see it?

Well so did Mac Funamizu Born and bred Tokyo Japan, in-house web/graphic and industrial designer.
“This is what I wish the internet search will be able to do with a mobile device in the NEAR future. Touch screen, built in camera, scanner, WiFi, google map (hopefully google earth), google search, image search… all in one device. Like this way, when you can see a building through it, it gives you the image search result right on the spot.”

“You can even see flowers that are not actually blooming.”

I was so excited when I saw this, it’s an amazing concept and I cant believe that It hadn’t been though of earlier..!
…and Mac has presented it amazingly well. Though if you read his blog, Mac is quite modest when it comes to his own designs, considering himself to be mediocre compared to the other designers out there.
It’s just not true!

 Although just a prototype, Mac hopes for the mobile search device to one day become a reality, but accepts that “it’ will take some years… I just draw the things I’d like to one day see in the future”
The possibilities for this device are endless, and Mac has only began to uncover its potential.

“Getting data of a weather forecast.”

Mac’s inspiration comes from all around him, and freely admits that he’s “easily inspired,” it is when he feels an inconvenience in his everyday life that he works to find a solution. Not to mention the likes of other designers such as Naoto Fukasawa, Jonathan I’ve and Josef-Muller Brockmann

“When you wonder what the scene you’re looking at was like in the past, you can see it.”

(an interesting read is this! Mac’s approach to problem solving and design!)

“Choose a building and touch a floor and it tells you more details of the building.
Well, it doesn’t have to be a building, but it can be any object you see. You can use it when you want to know a car model, an insect name, what kind of food is served at a restaurant and how much, who built a bridge, etc. etc. But as a designer myself, I hope it’s able to tell me a name of a font of the type I see, the size, color (in RGB), and so on.”

“It’s got a scanner built in, so you can use it this way when you want to check the meaning of a word in the newspaper, book, magazine, etc. It would be much easier to read a real book. You can use the dictionary, wikipedia, thesaurus and anything else available on the web.”

Mainly because I don’t usually care about nutrition when I eat, this kind of function would be helpful for people like me.

What Mac loves most about his job is when his clients are “blown away” by his ideas.. and his ideas are big! At the moment he is “designing something fun again.” One is a desktop gadget and the other is a browser extension.
If his previous designs are anything to go off we won’t be disappointed! and stay tuned for “the most popular items, re-rendered” in a “best of 2008″

Indoor guide: Works in a building, airport, station, hospital, etch.

Mac also has his own full throttle approach, to up and coming designers he offers this -
If you have an ace up your sleeve, just don’t keep it long. If you keep it for too long, it’ll go rotten. Just show everything you have to people, listen to what they say. You’ll be able to create something much better, to learn how to show your ideas to people, and to make your community.

“This might be off-topic, but it would be nice if it could work in sync with Google Maps like this.”

Mac Funamizu
http://petitinvention.wordpress.com/
http://www.behance.net/mac_fun

A personal thanks to Mac for supplying us with this interview and allowing me to share your amazing ideas.
From the whole Design Tavern, Cheers!

From Milano, Italy comes the talented talent of the Space Invaders Design Group.

Fresh from University, these talented young designers have now completed their degrees but are still meeting to enter design competitions.

The team have kindly given Design Tavern a taste of their work –  A few past University projects.

"Monolite was our final university effort.. "

Tell us a little about yourselves, where are you from and where are you living now?

Four people make up Space Invaders and we are each from a different part of Italy. We met in Milano at university and discovered that working together could have been some potential so we gave it a go and we created the group.

The Space Invaders group is composed by Giovanni Mendini, Stefano Pertegato, Francesco Schiraldi and Eloisa tolu.

The project was for a lighting system which can become something more than a simple lamp, and is actually an “interactive architetural element” to fit in with the SOHO housings (office houses in which dwellers live their entire day).

How did you come up with the name “space invaders design” the 80s icon i hope!

The name actually has two meanings. It came during a workshop when we made acollaboration with some Australian students. It was called “Octopus, porosity of the city” and we immediately thought of something that could really invade the city space, like a giant octopus.

The second reason is that we needed some graphic mark to identify our style and our approach

We already liked the name so we just picked one small alien from the 80′s arcade videogame with it’s amazing pop and pixelated graphics- it really symbolize our light and ironic approach to design.

This lack of external impulses brings a psycho-physical stress and our challenge was to “design a lamp to make people feel elsewhere”

What does each of you bring to the table? Do you each have particular strengths?

Eloisa is very good in doing research, while Stefano is skilled in drawing. Francesco is the one with the best ideas for concepts and Giovanni is the one who makes everything fit together.

In the end we realized that the most important figure is the one who can make a good coffee which brings peace back in the group in the most “busy” moments.

The most important thing in a creative group is to be all different but to share a common design view.

We did a lot of research into attention, interaction, and the multisensorial aspect of living. After this we came up with a lighting object which could involve the user,supported by visual and hearing experiences.

What people inspires you as a group?

All of us share a common tuition coming from the same university, but whilst we were working together we had the chance to discover artists, designers, architects and people who all influenced us.. Our biggest references are to Naoto Fukasawa because his works keep a unique lightness joined with a deeper meaning. Other’s such as Jonathan Ive, Muji, B&O and of course a little dose of “Rock n’ Roll” to make things less boring…

The ALGASTER project has had a lot of development: its aim was to have a concept for a future tractor which could imagine an evolutive scenery of agriculture, linked more to intelligence than to crude power.

What are your other interests beside design?

Well, this question got an immediate and common answer: Rock and Roll. But also photography, graphics, cinema and travels.

The beginning step was to understand modern agricultural tendencies, and it let us discover the “no food” agriculture, aimed to the production of clean energy and not polluting fuels

What’s the best and worst parts of being a full time, working designers?

The best part is when you know you are working on a good concept. And the end results is up to you!

The knowledge of being able to live, thanks to your ideas is something without comparison.

Also the nights spent working as a group: they are a really unifying experience, jokes, laughs, fights and problems become something to remember together.

Algae can be used for energy production due to its of high oil content. Furthermore, the Algaster can provide water cleaning in polluted areas where algae growth may exceed normal conditions (eutrophic waters) i.e generating energy from pollution.

Any advice to up and coming designers?

“Do something else…”

I’m sure the Space Invaders Group are only mucking around  when they suggest those wishing to become designers should “do some else.”
Their Passion for design after all is really amazing, and they are lucky to find such close-knit, like minded group members!

Stefano Pertegato has put up some of his and the group’s work at http://www.behance.net/steste
A huge thanks from the design tavern and best of luck withthe AlcantaraLab competition.

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