Founded in 2000, the IdeaFestival (IF) is a world-class event that attracts leading global innovators and thinkers to discuss and celebrate imagination, new perspectives and transformational ideas.

The IdeaFestival provides a unique stage to explore the cross-cutting nature of innovation involving a range of diverse disciplines, while supplying the creative tools needed to “see,” synthesize and apply this knowledge in new, dynamic ways.

Life in the vivarium: The carnivorous lampshade

19 August 2010

A reference to "acoustic botany" in BLDG BLOG reminded me yesterday that the imaginative and incredibly talented designer Stefan Sagmeister will be attending the IdeaFestival this year to discuss design and its future.

Lately, designers have been staging interventions.

And while a botanical redo that favors plants that sing over, say, plants that snap, might seem like scant improvement over mother nature, as the entry at BLDG BLOG points out, we've been tinkering with landscapes for as long as cultivation has been practiced.

That's the thing about design, according to Sagmeister. Unlike art, design must work.

In a Little Shop of Horrors-meets-Tim Burton moment of inspiration, designer James Auger describes in this LIFT '09 video how he might re-purpose the domestic appliance into something akin to the Pitcher plant. A carnivorous lampshade that attracts and digests flies to generate power? Well, alrighty.

The good bits start at the 9:30 mark.

Wayne

Linger after all

17 August 2010

Taken from the highest mountain in Lebanon, this moving image can be credited to Abouid.

Known by some as the "slow movement," contemplative living and the "new monasticism," perhaps you, too, would like to slow down life and speed up living, to linger after all.

So this year, after you've heard presenters like Daniel Tammet describe his "richly associative" thinking, Sean Carroll explain why time goes this way and not that, and Sapphire and Philippe Petit discuss their respective lives on the wire,

rest.

The Merton Institute for Contemplative Living will share modern and everyday life applications from the deeply-rooted contemplative tradition.

Wayne