Design your life with Ellen Lupton

Ellen Lupton has been Cooper-Hewitt's curator of contemporary design since 1992. Her new book, Design your life, the pleasures and perils of everyday things is co-authored with her twin sister Julia. Design your life takes an irreverent and realistic look at everything from toasters, bras and pillows to housekeeping. Speaking to readers who are both design-conscious and consumer wary. Design your life taps into the popular interest in design as well as peoples desire to make their own way through a mass-produced world.

Ellen Lupton has held public programmes and exhibitions at Cooper-Hewitt's for the last 16 years. The first exhibition that she did was called the mechanical brides it was all about woman, machines and technology. In 1993 Ellen was 29 years old and didn't think she was a mechanical bride she had no kids, hardly cooked, but 16 years on its a different story. The book started from a website that her twin sister Julia and herself had created. the website was used to comment on trends and anything that would interest them both.

Ellen brings out the point that the toaster is made for cooking toast, not made to cook anything else, simple is better. It doesn't have to be elaborate it just has to cook toast. Designers always want to make a great product better but it doesn't always work out that way it can make the product worse and consumers wont catch on because its to elaborate and hard to use, also cost is a big factor.
Ellen talks about how computers involved in the kitchen to help house-wives and people over the age of 50 in the kitchen. Consumers never caught on. The media refrigerator has a screen that delivers ,t.v, the stock market, and the weather but it wasn't a big hit. There was numerous web-only computers designed for kitchen use and appeared during the Internet boom.

The visibility principle: "Piles" of paper on your desk is good thing. The piles that you have is a visual stimulation of what you have been working on and what you have done. Ellen gos on to say that having an open office is better you can see whats going on around you which is more stimulating for the brain therefore a more productive person. There are 3 main places you can work from, home, work or a coffee shop. Ellen says that the coffee shop is the best place to work, it is busy, lots of people around giving it a productive working atmoshpere.

This was an interesting video which showed the modifications of everyday products. In my opinion, I think that keeping a design simple and straight to the point is the best way to go about a design situation. I enjoyed watching this video and seeing Ellens point of view on product design in the everyday world.

RMIT Gallery Excursion Liu Xiau Xian

The Couple 2004 Edition 2

The artist's work deals with issues of cultural identity in large scale digital photography. It is playful, soulful, striking and witty.

The core of Liu Xiao Xian’s practice engages in a comparative study of Eastern and Western cultures. Born in China and raised during the Cultural Revolution, Liu Xiao Xian left Beijing for Sydney after the Tiananmen Square massacre. On this 20th anniversary of Tiananmen, RMIT Gallery is focusing on the artist’s photographs and sculptures, which explore the nuances between the East and the West.

When you walk into this exhibition the first thing you see are 3 large faces,(reincarnation - Mao, Buddha and I, Version 2, 2003 these three large prints are made up of 300 panels, each panal is a smaller photograph of the final print.) On the walls are photographs of families, on the floor are chess tables and utensils. This exhibition show art pieces from the east and west and how it influences our lives.

The couple, 2004 Bronze and Camphor wood was my favourite sculpture of the sxhibition, I didn't get it at first all i saw was 1 wooden sculpture and 1 bronze sculpture i could'nt see what was behind the artwork until David explained it clearly to me, the wooden sculpture showed underneath the skin which was lungs, brain, heart etc, the bronze sculpture had little pin holes all over its body which showed two complety different types of medicene that is used, the wooden sculpture showed the western medicene and the bronze statue showed the eastern medicene.

Another piece of work i liked was Home - 2002 - 03, Edition of 10, Lamboa print. Large format photograph of the Chinese family situated in London. This print shows you can be somewhere else in the world but you still have your home to go back too, in which this case China. The main strenghs that are shown in this print are the use of colour and the composition of the photograph with the guards on each side (protecting).

I enjoyed this exhibition there was some exhibits i didnt understand but i guess you get that sometimes but it was very interesting to see the differences between the eastern and western world.