Sauce

Swedish furniture giant IKEA has converted the Kobe Portliner Monorail into a moving showroom before the April 14 opening of a new retail outlet at Port Island. The redecorated train, which features a colorful exterior, bright upholstery and fancy curtains, will carry passengers in style until May 6.

Is this the ultimate experiential catalogue for the time pressured urbanites. Ikea have mastered the art of ensuring anyone who interfaces with them at the store is taken on the choreograped journey. This just takes it one step beyond and gets it to us with little effort - great idea, although with Ikea being used to deck out most expats residences, seeing it all on the train too may be a tad too far.

TXTual Healing is a series of interactive projects that encourage public participation through text messaging from mobile phones. It looks at the cell phone as a device not just to remove oneself from a physical space, but to interact with and explore it. Build community through public story telling.

Using ‘always on’ technology, cell phones with SMS allow an audience to tell stories in public space through light projections on the structures that surround us, like the facade of a building for instance. Speech bubbles are projected on walls near windows and doors to encourage an audience to create the conversations happening inside. The public audience receives a paper tab with a phone number. A participant sends a text message to the provided phone number and it is then displayed inside the speech bubble. The whole system is automatic and uncensored.

The piece explores the use of mobile technology to trigger dialogue, action and create content for a staged public performance. By using the facade of a building the intention is to engage an audience to think about the physical spaces we move through, live in and share. They are rying to address public vs. private space and what kind of dialogue might transpire if people shared their private thoughts and stories in public. The piece was designed to encourage play, idea sharing, thought, discourse, and entertainment.

txtualhealing

For some time, designers, architects and builders all over the world have tinkered with the idea of turning excess standard shipping containers into living quarters. Some of the incarnations of the lowly metal box are downright chic, including artist-architect Adam Kalkin’s Quik House for which he apparently has more orders than he can handle.

But these metal containers have also drawn the attention of some leading brands that have started to use the eye-popping ideas to full advantage. Holiday shoppers milling about the Time Warner Center in New York will have a fabulous chance to experience one of these soon. Between November 28 and December 29, 2007, they can rest, relax and sip a perfect cup of illy espresso in one of Kalkin’s creations, the temporary Push Button House cafe that the Trieste, Italy-based illycaffè will install there.

The European premier of this concept by Alan Kalkin and illy took place at the 52nd Venice Biennale where illy continues to partner with the Fondazione La Biennale di Venezia by providing the visitors each year a space to relax and enjoy their complimentary espresso. This was illy’s fourth year of establishing the refreshment area at the Biennale but the Push Button House version created an unprecedented buzz.

With the push of a button, the house opens in 90 seconds like a flower and transforms from a compact container into a fully furnished and functional space with a kitchen, dining room, bathroom, bedroom, living room and library. All materials used in the Biennale house were recyclable or recycled. As Andrea Illy, chairman and CEO of illycaffe, has been quoted as saying, illy was initially interested in Kalkin’s idea as an examination of “home as one continuous mouldable surface, a relief against which human activity would pop out.”

Kalkin’s concepts have proven to be adaptable to many circumstances. His company has developed container-unit projects for everything from disaster-relief housing to luxury dwellings (pictured below), and for promotional purposes such as the illy cafe.