I remember first seeing Yosuke Ushigome, now director at Takram’s London office, in 2014 at an exhibition at Tokyo’s 21_21 Design Sight. In a video titled Professional Sharing, Ushigome wears a homemade jacket with solar panels and pockets for various digital devices. He walks around Shibuya, as per requests from real-time clients, and gets paid for taking specific pictures at specific locations. Sometime during the video, he takes an online break while lending his devices’ processing powers to someone mining a digital currency. Later he queues up at a popular restaurant on someone else’s behalf, and likewise gets paid for his time. It was the sharing economy taken to the extreme, and a peek into the not-too-distant future, as he saw it at the time.
Ushigome calls himself a creative technologist. He studied system design engineering and later mechano-informatics in Tokyo before doing a master’s in design interactions at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London. ‘I wanted to be better at communicating technological and engineering ideas from a more humanistic perspective,’ he explains. He studied under Critical Design pioneers Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, and has been working in design and technology ever since. ‘I believe in the power of design to make ideas tangible – not to make you buy more, but to make you think.’ After graduating from the RCA, he freelanced and worked briefly at design studio Superflux in London before Takram approached him (and fellow RCA alumni Miles Pennington and Lukas Franciszkiewicz) in 2014 to help start its London office.
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Denne historien er fra August 2021-utgaven av Wallpaper.
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Guiding Light - Designer Joe Armitage follows his grandfather's footsteps in India, reissuing his elegant midcentury lamp and creating a new chandelier for Nilufar Gallery
For some of us, family inheritances I tend to be burdensome, taking up space, emotionally and physically, in both our minds and attics. For the London-based designer and architect Joe Armitage, however, a family heirloom has taken him somewhere lighter and brighter, across generations and continents, and into the path of Le Corbusier. This is the story of a lamp designed by Edward Armitage in India 72 years ago, which has today been expanded into a collection of lights by his grandson Joe.
POLE POSITION
A compact Melbourne house with a small footprint is big on efficiency and experimentation
URBAN OASIS
At an art-filled Mexico City residence, New York designer Giancarlo Valle has put his own spin on the country's traditional craft heritage
WARM FRONT
Designer Clive Lonstein elevates his carefully curated Manhattan home with rich textures and fabrics
BALCONY SCENE
A Brazilian island hotel offers a unique approach to the alfresco experience
ENSEMBLE CAST
How architect Anne Holtrop is leaving his mark on the Middle East
Survival mode
A new show looks at preparing for a post-apocalyptic landscape (and other catastrophes)
FLASK FORCE
A limited-edition perfume collaboration between two Spanish craft masters says it with flowers
BLOOM SERVICE
A flower-shaped brutalist beauty in Geneva gets a refresh
SECOND NATURE
A remodelled museum in Lisbon, by Kengo Kuma & Associates, meshes Japanese and Portuguese influences to create a space that sits in harmony with its surroundings