The Studio is Two years old this week...

It's been a good while and we thought it was high time to show our face again!

Two years ago we formally started Ubiquity Design Studio and it's been quite a journey so far. Progress has been sure & steady yet we've been reflective too, evolving our concepts & ideas as well as learning from our good & bad experiences. We're not where we expected to be, but to be honest, all things being equal, we're rather impressed with where we are.

We're really just starting and there's a lot more to come...

Ultimately, food is our greatest priority and a great leveller...

As a family, we've had our allotment plot for about a year now and are slowly but surely making headway. Especially since the site was a fallow field for close to 30 years and each plot has been started from scratch!

Quite a community has evolved over that time, with a common unifying desire to be more self reliant in the production of the food we eat.

Not every one gets an opportunity to have such an piece of ground to cultivate, nor even access to a garden to plant for that matter. In this inspiring TED film, Britta Riley talks about the idea of a soil-less hydroponic structure in your window, that offers a realistic solution to those apartment and garden-less souls who yearn for the sense of being a little more food self sufficient.

Britta Riley: A garden in my apartment...

Mini Drome WOW - world's smallest velodrome.

What a fixie event!

Just watch the video, because this is just great...!

Marc Newson - an interview in design process...

Back in 2001, I visited the Design Museum in London and experienced a show of work by that years designer selected for the Conran Foundation Collection 2001. Amongst the exhibit was a concept car named the O21C and I found that I just had to drink in every detail, so fresh was its inspiration & ideas.

That designer, who had been given £30, 000 to come up with a design fantasy shopping list shown at the exhibit, was Marc Newson.

This was his car and through that experience, I knew design was a part of me. The past 10 years have been an unusual and unexpected journey into design for me, yet this is one of my significant inspirations and a mentor in the process and approach to what we do.

To quote Marc "The thing that has always driven me as a designer is feeling pissed off by the shitty stuff around me and wanting to make it better."

This is one of his most recent interviews, which gets to the nub of sweating the small stuff...


K01 by Marc Newson for Pentax from Dezeen on Vimeo.

The Studio now has fish...

I haven't had fish for quite some years and felt that the studio really needed some worthy distraction from those intense-staring-at-the-solution moments.

We now have these fantastic fantails in a BiOrb. There are three, which when ever I come into the studio always seem to be staring out of the glass together. Can I get a decent image of them like that...?

We have some names in mind but thought that we'd give them time to settle in so we could get to know their personalities first. Any imaginative ideas would be gratefully considered though...

Ooo! That's a contemporary, innovative design...

It's not every day that a Mydeco web advert tries to sell you your own design of Knelt™ (bottom right of the image)...

Power of Making

Presented in a beautiful three screen panorama, Power of Making is a short film that demonstrates the skill of a group of crafts people in a highly compelling and almost voyeuristic way.

As they focus on their projects in the vibrant noise of their work space, you get a truly tangible sense of the physical process of creating an object, from bespoke leather shoes to hand beaten car bodies.

As a consumer society, the vast majority have become divorced of a sense of where objects come from and have ceased to comprehend that people of these shores have any part in their creation.

Well, the British Crafts-Designer-Maker is alive and well...


Power of Making from Juriaan Booij on Vimeo.

Sublime images of the Europe winter freeze...

I came across this link this morning that had the most sublime collection of images of the Europe winter freeze. They truly had a National Geography quality and feel to them.

Here's just a taste...

An exciting year ahead of possibilities and a bit of (design) adventure...

Well, New Year greetings to everyone.

It's been a little while since I posted. I've been busy taking stock of last year and have been using these last few weeks since those busy months to restructure the layout of the studio. Which is coming together quite nicely. A much more creative and efficient space to work and think.

I'm itching to get prototyping some new ideas, as much to see that they work, so I'll be hiding out down at the MonkWorks™ (read "shed"!) putting things together and most likely pulling things apart...

I've also received word that the first batch of Knelt™ Adult is complete and will here by the end of the month. It would seem I've got a storage unit to rearrange too...