In 2011, Amsterdam International Fashion Week and Vodafone presented the first Vodafone Creative Corner – a space at the main location of AIFW where visitors could meet each other and discuss.

Renny Ramakers was invited to participate in a discussion at the Vodafone Creative Corner together with participants from the fashion industry on Saturday, January 29th, 2011. The public discussions were led by Professor of Industrial Development and Innovation and lecturer in Art, Culture and Economy, Dany Jacobs.

Watch the video:

And read the reflection by Renny Ramakers.

Pioneers of Change, the festival of Dutch design, fashion and architecture that took place on Governors Island in New York in September 2009 now has a video. The event was curated by Renny Ramakers and attracted over 25,000 visitors over the course of two weekends.

85 lamps and Red revisted were spotted in Il Buco, an Italian restaurant recently opened in Psirri, Athens’s up-and-coming district sometimes described as the Soho of Athens. The restaurant was designed by the Athens-based Sotovikis and is located on the third floor of a neo-classical building, with views of the Acropolis.

Source: thecoolhunter.net

Darwin chair by Stefan Sagmeister for Droog is featured at Connecting The Past and The Future exhibition at the Graphic Design Museum in Breda, The Netherlands. The exhibition features an overview of the Museum collection with works from the 20th and 21st centuries, and is on until May 29th.

About the exhibition.

Two partnering stores feature the Droog collection and installations in Sao Paulo: Decameron and CARBONO. It was “…originality, freedom and, above all, the possibility of an unprecedented playful air…” that attracted store owner Marcus Ferreira to Droog.

During Amsterdam Fashion Week, BerlinFashion.TV director David Roth came by Droog Amsterdam for an interview with Renny Ramakers.

BerlinFashion.TV

Here is the Come a little closer bench in action. It’s just as fun as it looks.

Available here.

by Renny Ramakers

Sustainability is still a buzzword in today’s design society. I’ve even heard the word sustainism, in line with modernism, futurism and all the other isms that have been created in the past. I don’t understand why we should invent a new ism for an attitude that should be part of people’s everyday life.

With all this sustainability talk we should not forget that design is also about aesthetics, emotions and experience and that we can only succeed if there is a balance between everything that makes a product desirable.

In April 2010 Droog presented a manifesto (pictured above) in which we state that we want to redirect creative energy and to redesign the lifecycle. This manifesto was part of saved by droog., an experimental project in which we asked designers to redesign products that we bought from liquidation auctions.  Now we are working on the next step, a platform on which companies can offer their dead stock to designers.

If we simply redesign what does not sell, we can save a lot of energy. Not only because it saves the products from becoming waste  but also because this will redirect creativity. We all know how much time and effort it takes to design new products from scratch, trying to invent something new because so many versions already exist and it takes a long time before a designconcept has been developed into a functional product. If we start with what is already there, we can give the notion of styling a new dimension, no  longer as something superficial  but as something that is needed to save the product and that gives the designer more space to create what really matters. Of course it would be better just to design less products but companies  need to survive and the demand for new products from the emerging countries will continue to grow. So if we don’t supply, others will. And by redesigning the existing, we can do it quickly because the most difficult part of the design and development process has already been done.

Read more articles by Renny Ramakers.