"I think New Yorkers all of a sudden are interested in quality of life" rather than just working and making money, says Burks, pointing to the Citi Bike scheme that launches later this month." It's the kind of thing you could never have had in New York 15 or 20 years ago. They would have got vandalised."

New York is becoming more international in its outlook, Burks believes, being both more welcoming to foreign visitors and more eager to employ overseas architects. "There wasn't an emphasis on great, international architects working in New York, but today it's a selling point," he says, pointing to the way that Herzog & de Meuron's 40 Bond luxury apartment development in NoHo has triggered improvements in the area.

However New York is still a brutally capitalist city, and even elite architectural projects have to pay their way. "In New York you have to understand that everything is about the commercial context, everything is about capitalism at the end of the day, and culture here isn't necessarily culture for culture's sake. So a great architect is hired because it allows them to to sell on a different level, or to compete with the building across the street. There's more of a relationship to commerce here in New York."

Burks takes us on a tour of New York's west side, taking in Chelsea (where his studio Readymade Projects is located) and the West Village, where he lives. In recent years the area has been transformed from a dangerous district known for its nightclubs to a sophisticated art, fashion and leisure area.

The change was spearheaded by the arrival of prestigious private art galleries such as Gagosian, David Zwirner and Gladstone, which cluster in the Meatpacking District on Chelsea's western fringe.

More recently the High Line, a park created from a disused elevated railway that cuts through the area from north to south, has brought swarms of visitors and triggered a fresh round of regeneration.

Dezeen was in New York during NYCxDESIGN, a new annual citywide initiative linking together various design events including the International Contemporary Furniture Fair and NoHo Design District. We stayed at the Ace Hotel.

We'll be posting more Dezeen and MINI World Tour reports from New York over the coming days.

We drove around New York in our MINI Cooper S Paceman.

The music featured in the movie is a track called You Go To My Head by Kobi Glas, one of the crowd favourites from the set we played at new design show INTRO NY in New York last week. You can listen to the full version on Dezeen Music Project.

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are interested in quality of life" appeared first on Dezeen.

The workshop was a taster for the larger two to three day events that Maker Faire Africa put on in African cities for local makers to exhibit and develop their designs for gadgets or products.

"The concept is that people come together to show their ad hoc inventions that they've made in their garages, basements or studios," said Jennifer Wolfe of Maker Faire Africa, who organises the workshops.

"In Africa, the inventions tend to be focussed on items that solve immediate and fundamental needs - issues such as agriculture, health and electricity."

At Afrofuture, a series of African-oriented design talks and activities, designer Cyrus Nganga from Kenya helped visitors create their own versions of his C-Stunner glasses.

The decorative glasses are built from old spectacle frames and recycled wire, metal or other found materials.

Technology expert David Olaniyan was on hand to help integrate arduino microcontroller circuit boards with the designs so LEDs could be programmed to flash.

"We're trying to bring together some of these emerging technologies with grass root strategies, which you need to couple togther in a place like Africa," Wolfe told Dezeen.

Maker Faire is a global initiative that runs public workshops for designers to showcase their inventions and Maker Faire Africa has amassed a community of makers across the continent that have presented over 400 inventions.

Wolfe presented other projects championed by Maker Faire Africa during the event, including a generator than can produce six hours of electricity with one litre of urine and conductive woven textiles.

Maker Faire Africa has been running for five years and operates in Ghana, Egypt, Kenya and Nigeria, and has introduced 3D printers to Cairo and Lagos as part of its programme.

The organisation aims to help designers market their products and find funding, as well as introduce them to technologies that could make their items more useful and consumer friendly.

The Afrofuture exhibition took place at the La Rinascente department store in Milan during the city's design week last month and was curated by Beatrice Galilee.

Upcycling discarded materials in African design was one of the themes that emerged from our Dezeen and MINI World Tour reports from Cape Town - watch Ravi Naidoo explain the movement in our movie.

See more architecture and design from Africa »
See all our coverage of Milan 2013 »

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at Afrofuture appeared first on Dezeen.

Warming explains that the idea behind the design of the MINI Paceman was to combine the signature styling of the classic MINI with new features such as four-wheel drive and horizontal tail lights. "When you look at [the car] you feel and you see MINI, but you realise there is so much new to it," he says.

He also stresses that a lot of the design of the car was done by hand. "People say cars are just [designed] by computers today," he says. "A car is really done by hand. It's designed with sketches, we choose the lines that we like and we also spend a [lot of] time forming the shapes in clay and then from that make the tooling."

The guest in our Dezeen and MINI World Tour Studio is Kieran Long, senior curator of contemporary architecture, design and digital at the V&A museum in London. He believes the work of the current generation of designers lacks the boldness of the post-modern design Italy became famous for in the 1970s and 1980s.

"I sense a sort of tentative nature in the design that you see - even [work by] the younger designers, students and so on," he says. "There's not much boldness either in formal or colour terms, but also philosophical and ideas terms.

"It really struck me visiting the exhibition at the Triennale on Italian design, what a big contrast that is from the grand era of Italian design. You see the boldness of those forms and remind yourself of what Italian design was known for and you see now a sort of pastel-y sort of invisible feeling to design."

Despite this, Long says there are detectable trends that young designers are exploring. "We've had this fixing, repairing, ad hocism thing now for a couple of years," he says. "This year it's really identifiable that young designers work is occupied by new materials, often sustainable materials, new organic materials in the kind of Formafantasma mould. If somebody would just capture that and make a manifesto about it, it would seem like a real movement.

"I think the big problem is that they have no grasp of design history," he continues. "They have no idea of where they sit in relation to anything. It's my observation that most of those designers wish they were taught a formal didactic history of design alongside the freedom that the art school education gives them."

More generally, Long believes that design needs to be less introspective to remain relevant. "I think we've overrated what designers do as the thing that's interesting about design," he says. "What's really interesting is the problem solved, or the relationship made, or the fashion trend started or ended - those cultural currents that design contributes to.

"I think they could learn something from architecture in that sense; when you're an architect, when you write about architecture, you can also write about the city, and the city is everything in it. Design needs to find a category like that. They need to relax and say: 'what I do is not the interesting thing about design, it's what happens after it leaves my office.'"

See all our stories about Milan 2013.

The music featured in this movie is a track called Konika by Italian disco DJ Daniele Baldelli, who played a set at the MINI Paceman Garage. You can listen to more music by Baldelli on Dezeen Music Project.

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of design history" appeared first on Dezeen.

Experimental Jetset developed the graphic identity around the concept of a "responsive W" that forms both a symbol of the Whitney and a framework for accompanying text and images.

"We came up with the idea of the zig-zag line, with the zig-zag being a metaphor for a non-simplistic, more complicated (and thus more interesting) history of art," say the designers.

"We think the line also represents a pulse, a beat - the heartbeat of New York, of the USA. It shows the Whitney as an institute that is breathing (in and out), an institute that is open and closed at the same time."

The designers specified Neue Haas Grotesk - a redrawn version of a 1950s Swiss typeface - for any text positioned alongside the logo, while any images can be positioned underneath.

"We began to explore the possibilities of the W as a frame to put work in, or a stage to place work on," they explain. "The lines [of the W] can be seen as borders, arrows, connections [or] columns."

The new graphic identity replaces the Whitney's thirteen-year-old logo, designed by Abbott Miller of Pentagram, and marks a period of change that will see the museum relocate to a new building by architect Renzo Piano, set to open in 2015.

Other logos designed in recent months include one for the estate of Thunderbirds creator Gerry Anderson and one for Nivea designed by Yves Béhar. See more graphic design on Dezeen.

Photography is by Jens Mortensen.

Read on more information from the Whitney:

As the Whitney approaches the opening of its new building in 2015, museum staff are taking stock of all aspects of programming and operations. While much of this work is happening behind the scenes, one very visible aspect of this focus is the Whitney's graphic identity. While the museum has changed considerably in the thirteen years since it introduced the word mark designed by Abbott Miller of Pentagram, even more extensive institutional changes will come with the move downtown.

Two years ago, Museum staff began a thoughtful internal dialogue regarding the Whitney's graphic identity and selected the design studio Experimental Jetset to develop an approach which embraces the spirit of the Museum while serving as a visual ambassador for our new building. The result is a distinctive and inventive graphic system that literally responds to art — a fundamental attribute of the Whitney since its founding in 1930. This dynamic identity, which the designers refer to as the "responsive 'W'" also illustrates the Museum's ever-changing nature. In the upcoming years it will provide an important point of continuity for members, visitors, and the public during the transition to the new space.

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Okamoto designed the Liquid Tape Cutter as a tool for decorating walls and objects with lengths of sticky tape.

In the video, Okamoto first applies the tape from the top of the wall downwards, using the metal cutter to make a convex curve at the bottom.

He then sticks the remaining concave curve at the bottom of the wall and travels upwards.

Okamoto designed the tool for his own use at his studio, Kyouei Design, based in Shizuoka, Japan.

We previously featured a structure woven from kilometres of adhesive tape and an abandoned apartment where a wall, furniture and ornaments are covered by a layer of tape.

We also published stripy wallpaper designed to look like strips of coloured tape and rolls of patterned tape made for covering old and unwanted furniture.

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for Kyouei Design appeared first on Dezeen.