Perfect design… comets in the southern sky

Posted on March 1, 2013 by pamelasuttonlegaud

If you want to be inspired and transported to a whole other (actually our) universe, check out this timelapse video of comets in the Southern Sky as filmed from Victoria, Australia. It’s beautiful and awe-inspiring and will perhaps get your creativity going too.

Fantastic time-lapse of the comets can be found at: The World At Night Enjoy! And if you’re inspired, let me know. Thanks to Melbourne Museum for the wonderful info.

“What you can see in Melbourne’s skies: Two gas giants are the stand-out planets this month. Jupiter is bright in the evening sky, while Saturn lights up the morning. Low to the east in the morning twilight Venus disappears as Mercury returns to the sky.

Comet Lemmon is low in the south-west at sunset or low in the south-east at sunrise. From a dark location, it may be faintly visible to the naked eye. It is certainly interesting through binoculars or small telescopes. The comet has a greenish glow, as the Sun is making the comet’s carbon gas (or C2 gas) fluoresce. The comet may brighten even a little more as it moves towards perihelion (closest to the Sun) on the 24th.

Comet PANSTARRS can also be found towards the south at sunset during the first week of the month. Although Comet PANSTARRS is a little brighter than Comet Lemmon, the twilight sky makes it also hard to see. Comet PANSTARRS reaches perihelion on the 10th, when it will move into the northern hemisphere and could display the classic comet double tail; one of dust and gas, and the other made of charged particles that glow blue. ” Skynotes, Melbourne Planetarium

Interiors get a new look at a great location in Melbourne

Posted on January 26, 2013 by pamelasuttonlegaud

There’s a fantastic new interiors showroom opening in Melbourne this January. Beautiful furniture and decorator items from around the world, personally created or chosen by the business owner. Boyd Blue is coming to Melbourne to assist decorators and interior designers with an amazing new showroom in High Street Malvern. Visit http://www.boydblue.com for more info. I’m very happy to promote this successful Australian business – we need more like them! http://www.boydblue.com

Seasonal favourites…

Posted on January 4, 2012 by pamelasuttonlegaud

I was out doing my final, final ultra last-minute Christmas shopping, I stopped, almost by accident, to buy…shoes. As soon as I put them on I knew these would be my favourite shoes of the summer. For a start, they are red. And strappy. With a heel that is not too high. They were instantly comfortable even though I’d been walking around all day and had been shopping for a couple of hours. They made my feet look smaller. They gave me a sense of relief and comfort when I put them on. And i knew I would love them for ever. Or for the summer, which ever came first.
It made me think about the other favourites I’ve had over time. The multi coloured, cotton pants I refused to take off for almost two years and only stopped wearing when the folds in the fabric started to fray and my mother told me i looked like a French backpacker (why French? I don’t know, but that sounded rather chic to me). Or the gold strappy high heels I wore everywhere for a summer and when they needed heeling because i’d totally worn them out, i bought another pair in a sale so i could start all over again.
My favourite winter jeans fell apart at the seams before I was willing to give up on them. Is it a girl thing? No! I’ve known a man who refused to take off his 3″ cuban heeled boots even to go to the beach (and we were on a beach holiday at the time!)
Sometimes the object of your obsession gives up before the passion does. I bought a beautiful antique brass pendant, a kind of seal that might have been used with wax to close a love letter. After wearing it for over year on a slowly tarnishing gold-plated Belcher chain, I put it on one day and found it had lost is power over me. I didn’t put it on again for another 10 years. It was never quite the same.
As I write, my Christmas sandals beckon to me. I’ll be wearing them tomorrow when I go to the National Gallery. They’ll make the exhibition seem so much more exciting. I’m sure of it.

Design Challenge… Save our birds

Posted on December 19, 2011 by pamelasuttonlegaud

I was driving to work last week when in front of me I saw a small brown bundle of feathers, in the middle of the road, being buffeted by the wind from the wheels of the semi trailers blasting in front of me. I watched him roll around like a miniature tumble weed and my heart went out to it. I pulled my car over to the side of the road and waited for a gap in the traffic so i could attempt to rescue what was left of a bedraggled sparrow.

I waited til the last car passed before a gap of a few minutes appeared in the stream of traffic and walked out to pick up the broken bird. He was alive but just. Not bloody but definitely at least one broken wing. His little heart beat so rapidly against the palm of my hand that i thought he would expire just from that exertion. I knew I couldn’t save him but i could at least stop him being squashed flat by the tyres of the next articulated truck to become another feathery grease spot on the tarmac.

I held him in my hand and cooed a little to him before placing him on the grass inside the gated fence of Scienceworks Museum in Spotswood. He lay there, exhausted, breathing hard. His wing extended unnaturally. His mate frantically circling above me. I couldn’t breathe any more life into him but I could at least give him a peaceful place to quieten his heart.

As I walked back to my car and drove off towards the zoo, I noticed again how many small brown and brightly coloured bodies were all over our roads. I saw too how birds flew from trees on either side of the street, flying just a few inches above the road and so right in line with oncoming traffic.
We lose so many birds to habitat loss and poaching; now another mundane activity of modern life threatens our most constant wild companions. How do we stop losing so many birds to cars?

So I thought about all the ways that could be implemented at least to reduce the impact:
Fences – would the councils build fences around our roads?
Cut off low branches – perhaps if birds went from high branch to high branch that could help
Ultrasound – could cars give off a high-pitched frequency that birds dislike or would avoid?
Stickers on car windows – i have a sticker on my office window shaped roughly like a bird of prey to try to stop birds flying in to the glass. It seems to work.

I’m a beginner designer – what would a professional designer come up with? So I thought perhaps a design competition to reduce the impact of traffic on bird life. Has anything like that been done before? Would councils and governments support it? How about conservation organisation? What would entice designers to work on such a project?
I will try to investigate further. If you, dear reader, (if anyone is reading this but me) have any thoughts, I’d love to hear from you.
More on this later. In the meantime, slow down on the roads… and watch out for low flying sparrows.

PS: for more info on bird conservation visit http://www.birdsaustralia.org.au
PPS: The Eurasian Tree Sparrow’s extensive range and large population ensure that it is not endangered globally, but there have been large declines in western European populations, in part due to changes in farming practices involving increased use of herbicides and loss of winter stubble fields. In eastern Asia and western Australia, this species is sometimes viewed as a pest, although it is also widely celebrated in oriental art (Source: Wikipedia)

Design inspirations…a year in review

Posted on November 27, 2011 by pamelasuttonlegaud

I used to get my design ideas from magazines like House & Garden and Belle. I still like reading them but there was a sameness that meant i could pick up a magazine from 3 or 4 years ago and not always get a sense of movement in design.

It led me to look for other sources of inspiration that didnt have quite the single focus on interior design. What about furniture design, architectural impossibilities, 3D manufacturing….?

So where have I been inspired over the past year?

ABC Radio National’s ‘By Design‘ has been great. I love that show! Great interviews (even if the presenter, Alan Saunders, occasionally tends to sigh deeply in the background when women are the guests! Funny he doesn’t edit that out on his podcasts!).

Podcasts have changed my world! It’s truly amazing that I can listen to anything and everything from around the world whenever and wherever I want. My car has become my comms suite, flicking between podcasts from the BBC, ABC anywhere around the world… subjects like project management, Entrepreneurs from the UK.

Indesign, online magazine, is very interesting and looks forward and backward with stimulating articles, stories on design, talks about current projects, global designers, parties! Fun.

Audible gives me talking books… more for my comms suite I can download the latest novels, non-fiction, classics (I listened to Wuthering Heights recently and had never remembered it being so bleak! GAD! I wanted to exile Heathcliffe AND Cathy!) and to do this i have to thank….Apple.

Apple’s beautiful, clever smart phones have given me accessibility to information on design and everything else the digital world can provide. What did we do before we had the world in our hand?! I love it and I hate it! It takes up my time while filling my hours with wonderful information and ideas i would never have been able to access just three years ago. I read a stat recently that 90% of the data existing in the world today was created in the last 2 years. A wild world we’re living in.

As if all that wasnt enough, I travelled for a month this year. And that is the greatest creative inspiration one can experience in my opinion. France, Germany, Holland, Norway, England…. I visited them all this year. I saw the rebuilding of Berlin, the decay of Amsterdam and the noise and aliveness of London… all so stimulating.

So the year was full of ideas, full of change, full of depressing people trying to convince us the world will end because it’s too hot, too cold, too full, to mean, too selfish……..yes, it probably is but it’s also full of ideas and creativity and novelty and mad crazy designers and creators turning the impossible into the possible. Roll on 2012….. whatever will happen next!?

Designer Sailing…Norwegian Style

Posted on July 11, 2011 by pamelasuttonlegaud

I’ve never sailed on a cruise before so a short 3 day-2 night cruise between Oslo in Norway and Kiel in Germany is ideal to get a taste of a cruise without a 2 week commitment. The layout of the ship and the way space is utilised encouraged me to consider how it was designed. To suit the company or the passenger?

This cruise takes you through Norwegian fjords – small islands and outcrops of land that break up the seascape. Some dotted with houses, some covered in forest. Always boats of all kinds share the water with you.

This is a ship purpose built for entertainment cruising. The Color Fantasy. It’s 224 metres long and 35 metres wide with 15 decks. It’s so large that on this calm sea, there is virtually no movement, just a gentle thrum from the engines. You can go to the bow and watch where we’re headed or the stern to watch the trail of where we’ve been. There is a spa and fitness centre, a la carte restaurants, a ‘fantasy’ show lounge (last night we were treated to a Parisian spectacle) as well as dozens of shops, small cafes and duty free stores. There is also a nightclub, a golf simulator and an alcohol-free disco for teenagers with internet stations!

While all of this would give the impression of being customer driven in fact most of these are very good ways to encourage the passengers to part with their money. There are few places to enjoy the view that don’t offer enticement to buy a coffee or meal. You can walk around on the deck – some of it is closed so you cant do a complete circuit of the ship without cutting through the main decks past the retail sections.

Surprisingly, smoking is allowed on parts of the ship. In fact, at night all the entertainment venues – bars etc – allow smoking. Public smoking is frowned upon or even illegal in most places now but not it seems at sea! The smell of tobacco smoke late at night drove us out of most of the encouraging places for a drink and a lounge while listening to a piano player.

The best place to enjoy the cruise though (apart from the bow and stern observation decks which, it has to be said, offer spectacular views even if they are in a restaurant) is your own cabin. Ours is 5* standard cabin is better than most hotels I’ve stayed in. The moving view offers a constantly changing vista of colour, sea, sky and sail boats. The sun moving in and out from behind large blowsy clouds constantly alters the hue of the ocean from graphite grey, to ultra green, to sparkling blue and back again to a muted charcoal. A place for inspiration and idea-generation. And all in the comfort of your own space, with a glass of cold wine or hot tea to enhance the mood.

So perhaps, at the end of the day, the Colorline cruise does provide that something special just for the passenger… after you’ve bought your duty free and eaten your shrimp sandwich in a glitzy cafe, you can return to your cabin and enjoy what brought you here, the sea and all its moods. Designed to please after all.

What’s a designer?

Posted on June 28, 2011 by pamelasuttonlegaud

Can you decide to call yourself a designer? Is there a requirement that you’ve firstly designed something that someone else wants to buy? Or that you’ve created something that others have in some way recognised as being worthwhile?
If you call yourself a writer, it’s not a requirement that you’ve been published, is it? (although its what we all aim for). And if you say ‘I’m a painter’ is it not sufficient that you do in fact paint?
So. To be a designer must mean: “I design”.
If I create new ideas and turn them into something. I’m a designer. If I just come up with ideas and do nothing with them… I’m a dreamer. A designer designs. As in earlier posts, designing is not just brainstorming the next big thing, you have to be able to produce at least one working version of it. That to me is a designer. If anyone wants to buy it, produce more of it, sell it or own it, you’re on your way to being – potentially – a successful designer. Oui?

OzDeZine

Design in Australia