ThingsAmongMany

You’ve probably never heard of her – but you should have. Her most recent design is being featured alongside work from Yves Behar, Calvin Klein, Yoko Ono, and 31 of the hottest other designers around. Shelly Sabel is an Brooklyn-based lighting designer who splits her time among personal projects/explorations, paid work, and teaching young up-and-comers at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. And I have the pleasure of being able to say “I knew her when…” (I grew up with the youngest of the Sabel sisters and have had the opportunity to cross paths with Shelly over the years).

Shelly’s latest project is Vipp’s 70th Anniversary Charity Auction in conjunction with Design Within Reach. Thirty five designers were invited to use Vipp’s trash can as a canvas to create whatever they wanted. The resulting works will be auctioned off tomorrow at a gala event hosted at DWR’s SOHO store (the event starts at 7pm if you’re interested in placing a bid). The benefits will go to DIFFA – the Design Industries Foundation Fighting AIDS.

I caught up with Shelly last night to pick her brain about life, design, her work, and the Vipp project specifically. Read more – and see all of the different cans – after the jump…

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and they’re AWESOME!

Perhaps they have something to do with the design contest from January?

Music has never played a large enough role in my life for DJ’ing to have much draw. Technology, however, does play a pretty significant role, and the thought of exploring VJ’ing has indeed crossed my mind (though the equipment prices have kept me from doing much with the thought). Next drool-worthy piece of technology? Check out this new VJ hardware from Cue:

Phenomenal mix of touchscreen, tactile instrumentation, and the sliding function of the single knob puts it over the edge. it’s still in the conceptual phase at the moment, but if I ever comes to light, I’m sure we’ll see more VJ’s cropping up at the clubs around NYC.

Interesting way to look at things…

Fantastic moment by designer Richard Perez:

“Inspiration sites” are a dime a dozen these days. Despite the onslaught, however, GOOD inspiration sites are hard to find. I wrote about Singlefunction.com the other day - a great site with a mix of sites designed to do just one thing. But where do you go when you want to be inspired to build a site that has a little more to it?

siteInspire.net is a good place to start. Currently featuring 353 different websites, siteInspire breaks them all down into digestible categories like “big type”, “flash based”, and “horizontal scrolling”. Some are a little better than others, but for the most part, they’re all pretty stylishly designed. And the siteInspire showcase makes it easy to sift through them to find the perfect site to rip off inspire you when you’re looking to design something new.

Just beyond awesome! The potential for education (and toys) is sitting right there at your fingertips!

From TED:

MIT grad student David Merrill demos Siftables — cookie-sized, computerized tiles you can stack and shuffle in your hands. These future-toys can do math, play music, and talk to their friends, too. Is this the next thing in hands-on learning?

Learn more at David’s site.

The iconic musings of Droog Design will find their way to a new home in Soho (NYC for those across the pond) beginning on February 26. According to this NYTimes article, merchandise is already on a boat headed this way. Droog’s new shop will be at 76 Greene St. near Spring. According to Droog founder, Renny Ramakers,

a kind of exploded house made from bricks of blue foam, conceived by Jurgen Bey, the Rotterdam-based designer. Pieces of this structure will sprout from the SoHo showroom’s floor: a door here, a chimney there, a balcony in another corner. Droog products will perch on top or nestle within these deconstructed blue bits, and if you like the bits — a section of that balcony, for instance — you can buy them, too.

Known for their unique furniture and lighting solutions, Droog employees 200+ designers to create a unique collection of objects, etc.

Yup, it’s Monday again. Which, of course, means that come about 2pm you’ll be looking for some random tidbit to occupy your mind’s denial about having a pile of work to do and 30-some emails to catch up on. Well, if you have even the slightest interest in design or branding, The Dieline should hold you over for quite a while. They’re self-proclaimed as the #1 packade design website online - and I think they might just be right.

A quick scan down the page reveals image after image of amazingly put together package designs from major brands around the world. They’ve also managed to gain access to certain designs that will never hit the streets. Anyone interested in the commemorative Gatorade label designs for this year’s Superbowl teams (who won by the way?)?

Perhaps one of the most interesting forays into the world of packaging is the shipping configuration for Coto, a high-end fashion company based in NYC. Instead of adding to the issues presented by traditional mailer padding (bubble wrap, etc.), Coto has taken a natural approach by using Reindeer Moss to protect their goodies in transit.

Yeah, I’m a fan of Twitter. And yeah, I have to wash my clothes occasionally. Put the two together, and you’ve got Ryan Rose’s tweeting Washing Machine. Need I say more?

I’ll let him explain the rest:

EDIT: Apparently YouTube hasn’t approved the audio for the video yet. Hopefully it’ll be up soon.