London-based Norwegian designer Magnus Pettersen launched new products at the Farmiloe Building, including some practical and elegant storage solutions.

Designed with a small footprint to fit the narrow hallways common in London’s Victorian properties, the steel frames are also visually unobtrusive. An anodised aluminium surface provides space for shoes and bags below the coat rail, and a tray at the base of the mirror can be used to hold keys, mail and other accoutrements.

The Raffaele pendant lamps by Federico Minarelli and Julie Janssen are made from sand-cast brass, which adds patina to the warm metal surfaces. The Italian/Dutch duo collaborate under the moniker Fred&Juul, and their range of interior products emerged as a result of commissioning custom made furniture from artisans local to their studio in Tuscany. Fred&Juul exhibited at the House of Detention which, as in previous years, hosted an eclectic collection of exhibitors including furniture makers Barnby & Day – see our previous story about wooden furniture at Clerkenwell Design Week.

Ying Chang, a first year student on the Royal College of Art’s Design Products course, showed a collection of moulded paper tableware as part of an exhibition of food-themed designs curated by non-profit organisation, Craft Central. The products include a vase, plate and vessels shaped from laminated paper, with a jesmonite coating creating an impermeable surface that enhances the functionality.

In the impressive surroundings of the Order of St John, work by designers predominantly dealing in decorative furnishings and fabrics was displayed. Eve Spencer’s digitally printed textiles and wallcoverings stood out thanks to their quirky motifs and hand painted detail. Furniture designers Larkbeck also showed a selection of beautifully crafted pieces at the same venue – see their work in our previous story about wooden furniture at Clerkenwell Design Week.

At the Museum of the Order of St John, designer Florian Dussopt and journalist Géraldine Vessière presented the second edition of a project called Design Exquis based on a game called cadavre exquis, originally devised by the Surrealist artists. The curators give a designer an industrial design object (in this case, a stethoscope) and ask them to use this as inspiration for a new object.

The outcome is then passed on to another designer to do the same. The last of the four designers involved was Matthew Plummer-Fernandez, who uploaded a photograph of the feather-covered light provided by Georg Œhler into Google search and generated an algorithm to create a 3D model based on one of the search results. “We see design as a language – everybody involved in this project speaks this language but with different accents,” explains Dussopt. “The result is a collection of objects that speak about the diversity of design.”

See more highlights from Clerkenwell Design Week 2013 on their website

Still based in Stockholm, Sweden, Tictail is part of a new generation of E-commerce network sites that enable smaller businesses to trade online. As many retailers know, setting up a cyber shop is not only complicated but also an expensive operation. Today there’s a range of sites that allow you to follow a simple template programme and start trading soon after, for free or with minimal costs. All you need is stock and a Paypal account. For Waldekranz, having grown up with the democratised idea of the Internet as guidance, there’s no doubt this is the way forward for small and mid-sized companies when it comes to establishing themselves online – in itself a must for any business with survival ambitions.

“I compare E-commerce to blogs. I’ve always liked Tumblr and always used it. By combining easy, pretty and social aspects it became the world’s most popular blog platform. They changed the blog format: they ceased to be just about publishing facts and content and became about self-expression with people posting just one image at a time. I think it’s interesting to think about Tictail in the same way as Tumblr – making it easy, pretty and social, we are redefining what an online store is and we’re making them widely available in the same way Tumblr did for blogs. We’re making it easier for people by changing the format of what an online store can actually be.”

“At the time we’d been doing a lot of E-commerce sites and for me, from a marketing and communications standpoint, E-commerce is so interesting because traditionally the message and the action is separate: you’d have a poster saying ‘Buy shoes!’ and then the action was that you’d have to go to a store to buy them. From a design standpoint I think E-commerce is brilliant because the communication and the action converge perfectly: you’ll have a well-designed message or experience and immediately you can see a result in the business side of things – and I think that’s always been what drives me, how branding and design are essential parts of a good business.”

Like all the best things in life, Tictail was born in an organic way. The knowledge and ambition was there, the duo – plus newly recruited Birk Nilson – just needed an area to apply it on. The E-commerce angle was always there, right underneath their noses. But there was another reason as well, a question mark regarding online retail that they needed an answer for: “We thought that it was strange that you could sit on a plane and have a video conversation on an iPad with someone on the other side of the world and it felt like mainstream technology, but that – even in 2013 – to create a simple online store that’s just beautiful and doesn’t cost a fortune was still a hassle!”

Once all set to go, the guys decided to move to Silicon Valley. “On the first day of Tictail we got on a plane! Our assumption was that when you go to Silicon Valley, you have to have a splash screen where you can sign-up for the beta version when it’s released, a blog and a jobs vacancy page. We were only able to tick off the first two due to time constraints.” But instead of having an official jobs page, Tictail put a line in the source code of the page that read, ‘If you find this, you’re probably as eager a developer as we are, write us a line and we’ll meet for coffee’. “This was May 2011 and no-one knew about us, my mother didn’t even know I’d quit my job. A month later, back in Stockholm, Birk calls me and says, ‘Carl, somebody just sent us an email!’ So Birk called him and they spoke for about an hour and a half – just aboutt the internet! We invited him to come over to the office the day after.” That person was Siavash Ghorbani, the fourth founding Tictail member.

Martins and swallows were but one example of the many life forms coexisting so unobtrusively alongside humans; and for which familiar objects and places had entirely different meanings (the village inn’s sign was a convenient resting place for a martin; one swallow had made a nest in a gentleman’s hat). White’s book, which rooted the observation of animals in a specific human context, naturally encourages us to consider how everything might seem to a swallow – and hence to appreciate the narrowness of our previous view of reality.

Why might this be interesting, or even inspiring? Perhaps because unhappiness often stems from having only one perspective to play with, from the world having grown too narrow.

When feeling out of sympathy with our era and the values of the elite, there may be relief in coming upon reminders of the diversity of life on the planet, in holding in mind that alongside the business of the great people of the land, there are also swallows who build nests and quietly set off over the English Channel for Madagascar.

Wonder

It seems certain things count as serious observations about animals and others don’t. It sounds highly serious to point out that hedgehogs have short posterodorsal maprocesses of maxillae, but it sounds rather less respectable to exclaim that they’re simply extraordinary-looking.

We might blame modern science for this censorship, for it encourages patient classification rather than emotional spasms. White, living before this vision of scientific seriousness had taken root, had greater freedom: He did not speak idly in referring to animals as ‘the wonders of Creation’; like many of his contemporaries White believed God had put stripes on the tiger and the antlers on the deer.

The belief may have been nonsense but the attitude which it inspired was less so, for it led White to express sentiments of uninhibited wonder about animals – which we have in subsequent ages grown shy of giving vent to. White’s tone of wonder is in evidence in his descriptions of a friend’s tortoise:

The Amateur Explorer 

White had another advantage: much about animals was still unknown; there was no predetermined corpus of knowledge to master. So reading White evokes the excitement that all subjects take on when we feel we could move from the rank of pupil to explorer. White was struck by a host of questions: Why do cats like eating fish so much? Can bees hear anything? And because no one knew, White carried out some touchingly homespun investigations:

It does not appear from experiment that bees are in any way capable of being affected by sounds: for I have often tried my own with a large speaking-trumpet held close to their hives, and with such an exertion of voice as would have hailed a ship at the distance of a mile, and still these insects pursued their various employments undisturbed, and without showing the least sensibility or resentment.

It may be good for science that so many facts are now known – it may be a sadder thing for the curiosity of most mortals. We cannot return to White’s ignorance but we may still be inspired by his engaged relationship with the animal world. We may not make original discoveries in science but we still have the option to follow our own curiosity.

Click here to enjoy more of Alain’s work, via his website

Brando wasn’t like any other actor. After Picasso, there was no-one who could paint like him, and it’s the same for Brando. His legacy has continued to inspire actors – he revolutionised the role of the actor, changing it forever. Brando encapsulated the perfect balance between the intellectual and physical capacities of an actor, which was very rare, especially as he had a profound understanding of literature. He went to incredible lengths to create a whole other person, a whole other world. His animalistic qualities and his unrivalled sensitivity, his physical transformations, and above all else, his improvisations, make him a genius.

Earning him worldwide fame, Marlon Brando’s Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), was a very masculine and macho character. This was the real discovery of Brando as an artist and his talent for literary interpretation. He had a perfect balance between the role’s attributes and who he really was.

In On the Waterfront (1954), he plays the character of Terry Malloy, a very romantic, poetic character. Terry is a boxer, and Brando having been a boxer, liked the role. The mix between the brutality of the character and sensitivity is what I admire the most; also because a lot of his acting was improvised. In the scene where Brando walks along the river with a future lover, for example, the actress accidentally drops a glove, which the actor spontaneously picks up and slips on, not cutting the scene and adding another very discreet dimension, reinforcing Terry Malloy’s eroticism in a single gesture.

On a more personal level, I really liked Brando’s Weldon Penderton in Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), who is a sexually repressed and fragile character where understanding his real desires would lead to his whole life falling apart. In this role, we see a completely different Brando.

For Last Tango in Paris (1972), he plays Paul, an American expatriate and hotel owner living in Paris. Recording scene of Brando’s monologue by the side of his deceased wife’s grave, Bertolucci asked Brando to share real childhood memories – and unrehearsed, Brando blew everyone away. The lines between play and reality are blurred. It was an extremely moving performance.

I would also have to say that he was excellent in The Godfather (1972), just because of the way Brando looks, his body language and constant improvisations. He gives a very strong performance as Don Vito Corleone, which is his most iconic role; extremely powerful. His presence is enough so that he doesn’t need to shout to show anger, he whispers.

The impact created by the overlap between Brando and his roles is central to his talent. He was a beautiful man but he never used his good looks to an end; instead he always chose roles that would push and explore the intellectual aspect of the character but its physicality too. For Terry, who had been a boxer, he had a broken nose, in The Godfather he was almost unrecognisable, as Sakini in The Teahouse of the August Moon he is made up to look like a Japanese character and in Apocalypse Now (1979), as Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, his head is shaven and he’d put on quite a bit of weight.