The Royal College of Physicians, has commissioned Affinity, which is a new collaboration between Daniel Charny and Martino Gamper to design of a new reception desk at the Denys Lasdun building in Regent’s Park.

A new type of exhibition curated for a long-lasting continuously changing commercial programme at The Aram Gallery. In response to the limitations of the limited edition trend, The Aram Gallery will be showing unique pieces selected while on visits to designers studios. For more about the concept and the first selection please visit the exhibition NOW on at the gallery website.

Platform 10 takes to the hotel stage once more, this third year of collaboration with Simon Warrington of ANDAZ.

Private View is an insight into the workings of the designers thinking process. A series of short films made as sketches for new designs that are concerned with personal space. Each one is an intimate creative experience that stirs, provokes and kicks off ideas. It is a raw part of the process of young designers thinking about the future of domestic spaces. The projects are presented in speacial locations around the hotel, including staircases and elevator entrances. The show is on and open to public till 14 May.

Why design more chairs? was one of the key questions raised while chairing a talk at the Barbican about the relationship designers have to chairs. This talk was part of the education programme around the Hans Schabus exhibition, in which he wall-mounted on to the impressive curve gallery hundreds of chairs into a seating layout of a commercial plane. The talk offered the chance to meet art historian Margit Emesz who wrote the text accompanying the exhibition; Tim Oldman designer that has made his way to management and is currently the Design Director of Vitra UK and Martino Gamper designer of the 100 Chairs in 100 days and winner of the Design Museums Brit Insurance Designs of the Year Furniture award last month.

Recently visited the studio of Xavier Mariscal to meet him and get an insight into his fantastic prolific way of working and got to see the inspiring Palo Alto studios. This happened thanks to the The Design Museum in London which have asked me to start thinking together with Mariscal about a monographic show of his work. From the very first comix to the latest foam prototypes for furniture and scale model for a massive civic sculpture. The studio is full of projects, prototypes , drawings, models and now also all the magical story-boarding for a full feature animated film they are working on with great energy. Also got to see the super impressive archive with hundreds of designs, for a long list of very different clients and in many materials, technologies and formats.

Total Trattoria, was a unique site specific commissioned project from London-based designer Martino Gamper to design all the elements of an ad-hoc restaurant. It’s an extension of the Trattoria al Cappello concept he developed together with Maki Suzuki, Kajsa Stahl and Alex Rich.

Every element of the dining set up was designed or adapted - ranging from the massive 13 part dinner table itself to a kitchen unit, from the cutlery, place-mats, glasses to the chairs and lampshades. Each of the projects has an element of bringing things together, reflect the social nature of a dinner event. The 25 chairs around the table are all different yet are constructed from the same components in different configurations, its a kind of way of seeing putting materials together as cooking with ingredients.

The exhibition graphics and communication, also designed by Suzuki, Rich and Stahl, are intertwined with a specially commissioned catalogue (we even made it to the amazon).

Signs of Change in Singapore was a five day workshop with the LASALLE University product and interior design students in their amazing new building. The students explored ideas about the future of their city by story-boarding a day in their life when they will be over 50 years old. Each one chose a cultural, technical or social change to follow and imagined the type of institutes that will be part of Singapore in 30 years or more. They then designed a public sign naming the institute and giving it a heritage sign type icon. Some of them looked at the future of housing, other transport and food culture. One of the interesting aspects that came through was the fear of an overload of virtual life which was evident in proposals such as the Meet-for-Real place.

The signs were placed in the vicinity of the campus with prospects of being embedded into the actual city at a later stage. The workshop was commissioned by the British Council Curator Catherine Ince and Dan Prichard, Director, Creativity and Innovation in Singapore. The students were all very much engaged and the workshop enjoyed the great support of Xinwei, an energetic tutor, that helped us get the signs made to a very nice standard. This is the second Signs of Change workshop, the first was conceived and co-directed with Artist Gabriel Klasmer in 2005 with the design students at Lund LTH.

Working with Daniel Charny in 2007, Urban Salon reached the fourth round of the RIBA competition to design the Royal College of Art Battersea North site.

The brief was for a £19 million building that contained studio and retail space, start up atelier units, and a lecture theatre to be built over three phases.

The team researched into the history of the existing South Kensington building, and then incorporated successful characteristics from here into the new proposal.

To find out more, visit the Urban Salon website.

In 2006, Daniel Charny contributed to Phaidon’s Design Classics – a comprehensive collection of three books examining some of the best products ever made.

ACCIDENTAL COLLECTORS curated for the Aram Gallery presented the personal collections of seven designers and artists, not of their work but the things they collect and mostly keep to themselves. This included the 48 puncture repair kits of Nigel Shafran, the 84 tin oil lamps of Tony Hayward, the 312 clothes pegs of Yoav Ziv and Gad Charny, a selection of 40 pinnies from Jesssica Ogden’s 400+ aprons, the Aladdin colour-separated glass vessels collection of Stuart Haygarth and file boxes full of the typographically-nuanced shapes and parts of objects from the studio of Paul Elliman.

The unexpected collected items, that serve to inspire their guardians, were presented during March 2007 and reflect The Aram Gallery’s ongoing curiosity about design thinking.

The exhibition design by Peter Marigold was complemented by a pamphlet edited by Daniel Charny, supported by The Arts Council of England, which included short essays by Yaacov Kaufman, Libby Sellers, Michael Marriot, Tony Hayward and a conversation between Paul Elliman and Anna Colins

if you’d like to get in touch here are some background and contact details

Daniel Charny works with academic, cultural and commercial design organisations interested in thinking through design.

Senior Tutor
Royal College of Art
daniel.charny@rca.ac.uk
www.rca.ac.uk
www.platform10.co.uk

Curator
The Aram gallery
daniel@thearamgallery.org
www.thearamgallery.org

Strategic consultant
Design Museum London
daniel@designmusem.org
www.designmuseum.org

daniel@danielcharny.com
www.danielcharny.com
Combining applied design with strategic thinking Charny’s work includes a wide breadth of activities ranging from furniture and product design to strategic consultancy for architectural projects and curating contemporary design.

Trained in industrial designer, Charny worked for a design consultancy giving services in the contract furniture sector and independently developed a private home offices design studio.

In the early 1990’s he was also a member of a public art group and started teaching design in higher education. Since then Charny has collected 15 years of international experience in design education, and is currently Senior Tutor at the Royal College of Art where he has been a leading member of the Design Products department since 1998.

In 2002 Charny started The Aram Gallery dedicated to experimental and new design where he has curated 14 exhibitions focusing on the way designers approach ideas, offering insights into the design process and debating the cultural role of the gallery in relation to design.

“Design is a global story told by a local story teller” was the key concept Charny developed for a new type of design museum presented in 2003 in an architectural master plan for an Israeli municipality client, the city of Holon Israel. The museum designed by Ron Arad associates is under construction due to open in 2009.

In 2007 Charny started working with the Design Museum London as a strategic consultant contributing to the thinking about the future of their collections.

daniel@danielcharny.com

Slow Water was a responsible design brief set by Feo and Charny for the Royal College of Art student group platform 10 and resulted in 14 new design concepts. The research and the prototypes were presented in a unique exhibition, supported by Innovation RCA, that rippled to wide acclaim during the London Design Festival of September 2007.

The students were offered a brief to ’slow water down between the sky and the sea’, and to consider changes to the way people use and think about water in their day to day life. This included ideas about the future of showering with less water and efficient rain water management for private gardening alongside communication projects for raising awareness to the impacts of indulgent domestic water consumption.

Two of the students projects from Slow Water have since been picked up by progressive industry, and the project is still generating attention from press and publishers… for more details check out the report on treehugger or visit the platform 10.

On the occasion of the opening The Royal Institution of Great Britain hosted a talk with Karen Blincoe and Daniel Charny on Designing for Sustainability with a focus on questioning the roles of designers and design education.

New Moves was an exhibition at The Aram Gallery from 20 September to 3 November 2007 featuring 70 new task light prototypes designed by students from the Royal College of Art’s acclaimed Design Products department. The exhibition had as its starting point an exploration of the iconic task light - the Anglepoise and also offers the opportunity to compare new work with a selection of classics and best sellers from this uniquely independent form of lighting.

Research into solid freeform fabrication NEW PROTOTYPES of the Morning Glory tower lamp, and two products from the “A head of its time” project. The first to be produced was the double portrait sandclock, the sand pours from the top head to the lower and back when turned up side down. The second project is a salt and pepper portrait shakers. The embedded portraits are of the two designers involved in this project. The three pieces are part of the joint design collaboration with Professor Gad Charny of HIT, for ‘Dream Makers’ - an exhibition on the future of rapid prototyping, curated by Alex Ward, produced by Objet Geometries and shown at the Israel Museum Architecture and Design department, opened 5th January 2007.

do you suffer from LITTER GUILT?

GET A PIGDOG and you will be released from any further recycling anxieties!

PIGDOGS - made from two pint UK plastic milk bottles metallized in gold have become votive objects providing relief from recycling guilt, last seen at the Wellcome Collection’s Travelling Apothecary fair at the British Library on 16th September 2006, for further info see LITTER GUILT

Conversational Spanish

Conversational Spanish was a strong group show of experimental and new designs by currently active new generation designers from Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia that are working with local Spanish industry. The exhibition was designed by Serrano, and used speaker cones that played short conversations about the key exhibits. We got exciting reviews in local and international press.

STAGE

STAGE at The Aram Gallery was a monographic exhibition of selected work by Jaime Hayon, curated by Daniel Charny. Check out BACKSTAGE - the catalogue, and see the poster designed by Jeremy Mac Lynn. The exhibition won best of show in the 2006 London Design Festival Icon Design Trail award and has gone on to other galleries in Holland and Spain.

Walking Chair

Click here to see other previous exhibitions, such as the posters of DONT PANIC, the domestication of rotation moulded design in ROTATIONS, lighting design in DARKNESS or the tribute to A.Castiglioni. While you check out the exhibition of Trico Design Love! have a look at the latest colour available of the classic all pocket Pocketshirt designed for their inspirational design against trend collection.

Trico Design Love!

Royal College of Art Platform 10 is jointly directed by Daniel Charny and Roberto Feo, and is now in its 4th year.

The 2006 graduates work can be seen in our latest BOOK OF TEN (2006-2007). The Book of Ten includes some of the briefs given from that year (such as to design a Superstition and design a Mythical object from the 21st century, or Culture Shop aimed at initiating museum shop products that reflect the culture of the specific museum). For the first time there was also a reflective collaboration with V&A/RCA History of Design students that noted their take on the Platform 10 work. Five of the 2006 Platform 10 graduates have set up a studio group together - check out OKAYstudio

In 2006 we collaborated with rapid prototyping technology industry leaders 3D systems on a project MADEBYMACHINE , supported especially by Colin Blain, it was exhibited at the 2006 Milan furniture fair in collaborations with Zeus in their wonderful showroom - see here for some of the results.

In 2007, with the whole of Design Products we ran a project with the inimitable Ernesto Gismondi of Artemide in search of a new type of task light to continue the legacy (and diversify the market) started by the iconic anglepoise lamp. The culmination of this project was the New Moves exhibition at the Aram Gallery.

Sharewear - CHarny’s response to an industrial design project for the RNID future of hearing equipment exhibition, Hearwear launched at the V&A Museum contemporary galleries in March 2005.

Read more about the project in design4design article, and here are some media/client images of the project.

Talk at the Design Revolution in Industry conference for plastic industry leaders and project managers on the potentials of improving briefs for designers. Hosted by D-vision, Ketter Plastics group, Herzeliya July 2006.

Talk to History of Design post-graduate students at the V&A about writing the conceptual programme for a new type of design museum. The research for this included creating a tool to describe museum subject affinity and profiling the physical environment in relation to the mission statement, activity programme and collection. The building is being designed by Ron Arad Associates for the Holon Municipality in Israel.

Badisgood - a second outdoor design workshop looking at positive three dimensional graffiti in the built environment. Some exciting concepts - picts to follow soon.

Signs of Change - an outdoor public space design workshop with Gabriel Klasmer for the Swedish Industrial design LTH University in LUND.