As we spend a lot of time keeping ourselves up to date with the design industry, through mediums such as magazines, blogs and the news, we tend to come across a lot of projects that catch our eye and really draw us in. The Creative Roundup is a new series where we share projects we've discovered and feel are worth shouting about, focusing on all areas of the design industry from architecture to graphic design, fashion to fine art.
The Oil Spill
The Oil Spill is the name of an artistic experiment conducted by Fabian Oefner during an ‘exploration of Iridescence.’ He poured water into a black reservoir before adding drops of oil to the surface, where the reaction caused the oil to expand and form beautiful structures. The colours formed are caused by the reflection and refraction of light as it passes through the oil film and back into the camera lens, with the colours changing depending on how thick the oil film is. We love the resemblance of an iris within the artwork, with various patterns and colours merging together similar to those in the eye. It’s interesting to see how much each outcome can vary so much, each just as mesmerising as the next.
“What I like about the series is that it is quite a simple phenomenon, yet strikingly magic and beautiful” says Oefner “It came to my mind when I was sitting outside my studio on a rainy day and observed a thin film of petrol on a water puddle. So I got inside again and started to recreate the setup in a more controlled environment. Finally, after many different setups and hundreds of images, the exploration resulted in these ten photographs.”
Hood House
With the number of stray cats in South Korea growing, a solution is required to help them get shelter during the cold winter months where they often find themselves hurt, abused or damaging property. Molly’s Petshop have come up with Hood House, an initiative which transforms donated padded clothing and hoods into dome houses for cats. Customers who visit the store and purchase food for stray cats will be gifted with the Hood House, which includes a roof, bed, food and water bowl and a tent-shaped waterproof cover which allows them to provide suitable shelter for their regular visitors. The process of reusing clothing, which would otherwise be thrown away really appeals to us – in a world where everyone is encouraging a recycle/reuse attitude, this project fits perfectly. With a 1254% increase in sales for the stray cat food brand and over 2,000 cats provided with shelter, it’s clear this project has been a huge success and it will be interesting to see how it progresses further.
IDEA collection
A project we’re big fans of from this month is the IDEA collection by Niklas Jacob. Along with 17 other designers, he produced a collection of satirical flat-packed products following the same style as Swedish brand IKEA. The project focuses on the development of furniture stores moving from specialised businesses to superstores, where individuals can furnish their house entirely with IKEA products.
Our favourite product from the collection is the Chatt. This consists of a round table with hollowed spaces to fit in mobile phones, representing the issue in society where we spend more time socialising on our smartphones than socialising in real life. The designer describes it as “the dining table for the family where you can communicate with anyone except the people next to you.”
