Guide vanes in the 19-foot Pressure Wind Tunnel at Langley Aeronautical Laboratory (March 15, 1950) Poetics of aeronautics design, when the technological turns cinematic sublime. Another great find by Maria Popova from NASA’s image archive. 

Guide vanes in the 19-foot Pressure Wind Tunnel at Langley Aeronautical Laboratory (March 15, 1950)

Poetics of aeronautics design, when the technological turns cinematic sublime. Another great find by Maria Popova from NASA’s image archive. 

Design In Unlikely Places: Ethnographic artefacts and documents presented in “Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles The Dakar Djibouti Mission” - surprisingly, one of the 11 exhibitions under Design Parade 7 - has effectively raised the conflicting (or multiple) realities of Design as dominantly late 19thC- early 20thC Euro-American canonical and professional phenomenon and construct and Design as a tacit human capacity that travels across time and place. From left: Banda wooden stool collected in Bangassu (1931); Copper zoomorph figurine collected in Cotonou (Benin) (1931); Program cover of the Boxing gala in Crique d’Hiver held May 15th 1931.

Design In Unlikely Places: Ethnographic artefacts and documents presented in “Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles The Dakar Djibouti Mission” - surprisingly, one of the 11 exhibitions under Design Parade 7 - has effectively raised the conflicting (or multiple) realities of Design as dominantly late 19thC- early 20thC Euro-American canonical and professional phenomenon and construct and Design as a tacit human capacity that travels across time and place.

From left: Banda wooden stool collected in Bangassu (1931); Copper zoomorph figurine collected in Cotonou (Benin) (1931); Program cover of the Boxing gala in Crique d’Hiver held May 15th 1931.

It’s not simply presenting artworks, design objects (both quickly becoming fetishized by market forces), and theoretical comments (which can easily become glorified sales-talk) in parallel to each other. Rather, Casco has been striving to find and articulate areas where making art, designing and theorizing as conceptual activities, not just as separate disciplines, challenge, penetrate, and stimulate each other—and gather in their tangent points. An example of the kind of question that Casco seeks to address, together with various practitioners, is: how can our designed world be understood, re-imagined and re-formalized?
A noteworthy statement on the means and ends of interdisciplinary practice by Binna Choi, Director of CASCO - Office for Art, Design and Theory. Something to aspire to. 
Heatherwick Studio’s Designing the Extraordinary, curated by V&A’s Abraham Thomas, is one model of superb display and documentation of design in its thinking, tinkering, and building, down to the details, like this single full-length rod from the Seed Cathedral at Shanghai Expo 2010. 

Heatherwick Studio’s Designing the Extraordinary, curated by V&A’s Abraham Thomas, is one model of superb display and documentation of design in its thinking, tinkering, and building, down to the details, like this single full-length rod from the Seed Cathedral at Shanghai Expo 2010. 

Physical encounters with the studio’s archived and latest products, clothing and furniture at Bless Home had captured my imagination much more than the images I’ve seen of ‘em.

Physical encounters with the studio’s archived and latest products, clothing and furniture at Bless Home had captured my imagination much more than the images I’ve seen of ‘em.