Ghosts of Furniture Future

This is the second post resulting from Council, who obviously have extremely good taste.  But I wanted to break it up to talk about this team they represent, San Francisco's One & Co.  I thought they deserved their own post.

Here's the stuff they're doing for Council, their "Aura" credenza:

Interesting things with light and shadow, opaqueness and translucence, it's a suave piece for sure.

Here's their "Chrysalis" stool:

Very simple, but great sleek angular lines, delicate but strong.  The seat is soft leather.

When I saw this one at the show, my mouth gaped open--the "Periodic Table":

Four giant slabs of wood, and looking at them now, I suppose they could very well be railroad ties, soaked in actual molten silver.  The silver soaks into the wood, though, so you can still see the grain.  This is likely way too heavy for me to ever get it into my apartment (if they wanted to give me a free sample), but it's truly unbelievably gorgeous.  It's hard to see here, but it has a real mirrored finish to it, it's quite striking.

Here's a couple chairs they did exploring new ways of using plastics to come up with surprisingly comfortable results.  I gather the name ADKD Furniture is their own for the case study:

Click them.  That second one has a pattern of little Man symbols perforating it.  I can't be certain, but it appears to me that the pattern of them responds to the support required by a person sitting in it, so it will flex and tighten in all the right places.

This concept is from their Welcome line.  There's a number of really amazing ideas that reinterpret the experience of inviting people into your home, but I most liked this one:

It's a coffee table and a digital jukebox, wired into your mp3 collection.  Guests can also download their own music into it, but it allows them to choose music from the library to play while you hang out.  There appears to be text scrolling around the outside edge of it, so I'm thinking maybe that's touch-sensitive.  In any case, a wonderfully interactive, social solution.

One & Co also appears to have a feel for watches.  Here's the Triax S line for Nike:

And these last ones completely blew my mind.  They were entries in the Timex 2154 Competition, which asks for visions of what watches will look like in the future.  This one was a runner-up:

It uses a magnetic field to exploit the metallic content of the wearer's blood to hover above the wrist, and never actually touches it:

And this one was so awesome, but then, I just love nanobots:

In the morning, you stick it onto your wrist (or wherever) for a few minutes like a Band-Aid.  It embeds nanobots right under the surface of your skin, and then you peel it off and go.  Your skin actually becomes the readout.  Organic nanobots dissolve after a few days, and then you can put on a new one.  I also love how they make a decorative pattern in the skin, also, like a tattoo.  I see no reason why that couldn't keep changing, as well.  I wonder what it would feel like, like would you constantly be feeling these tiny robots moving around under your skin?  I suppose you'd get used to it after a while and forget all about it, right?  Anyway, that's incredibly cool.

One & Co

415-621-6214

©2008, Ryan Witte