Design for Life starring Philippe Starck

Has anyone been watching this? Starck is fantastically entertaining, much more quirky and unpredictable than I would have predicted. Downside is the candidates are pretty dull so far apart from the supremely self confident Nebil who Starck sussed out pretty quickly.

Nebil's face when the rest of the team rallied around to save Mike was a quite wonderful.

The Apprentice

For some reason I thought it was on BBC4. This could be a graet programme if 75% of it wasn't 'previously... ' and 'coming up...'. Even the actual Apprentice lets you watch them do the task and then discuss it in the boardroom.

Er yeah, last post of that thread :)

Anyone watching the BBC4 version of the Apprentice called "Design for Life" with Philippe Starck as the Sir Alan? It's pretty good, despite 50% of it being shots of people walking in and out of train stations, talking about how much they want this opportunity etc etboringc.

Contrary to Apprentice form, though, the most irritating little shit got booted off in the first week. There are plenty left, mind..
Philippe Starck is pleasingly French & crazy.

Oh, didn't see that thread. I suspect the caliber of the candidates are so low that Starck will boot the lot of them out in the next couple of weeks.

Robble at Nebil being booted off after his "I am the best, I have no competitors" arrogance. Thing is, if he'd just shut up and got on with it (and come up with a less bobbins idea) I suspect he might have got far. Some of the other competitors do seem pretty poor but otoh an open brief is a nightmare.

Anyone still watching this? Bugger-all has happened.

i have been. but yes, is like watching design students do projects. i find that there's too much adam buxton voiceover on it, he tells us too much of what we either already know or can see on screen.

this is pretty awful. clearly there wasn't much producer involvement in selecting such an utterly dull bunch and reducing the line-up to the very dullest of those (apart from the liverpudlian girl who has some personality). the early stages were baffling: they were all, at some stage, design students, no? the thing about design schools is that they very often do give you a very amorphous subject matter and i would have thought most design students were adept at the kind of lateral thinking required for that. it's pretty obvious that if you are given a subject like sustainability or ecology then you go beyond the obvious - a bike, for example - to look at ways in which this superficially eco object embodies the opposite tendency, as starck pointed out. ana maria got through that early stage by tackling the question of male verses female and having to buy products that represented those two: she chose condoms for the male and tampons for the female. what? are you ten years old? that is the level of thinking from someone who got through to the finals round by producing this utter crap:

http://www.dezeen.com/2009/03/13/noose-light-by-ana-maria-pasescu-stewart/

and really the comments say it all there.

i don't know how light-glove woman made it to the last four considering that her previous "design" to tackle ecology was to switch off the worlds power for two weeks every year. um....

as for the latter stage it's problematic in another way. most product designers don't invent completely new products. if they do then the idea comes to them and develops over a long period, it doesn't come because and investor has come to ask them to "invent something" that does "anything at all". starck himself, to my knowledge, has never actually "invented" anything. he's produced some (a few) fine products but mostly bourgeois frippery. fine, if you like that sort of thing, but not it's very rarely great design and is never actually "new" in the sense that he's looking for here so why had he asked for it? he's asked for it to push the candidates as far as he can but it would have been more interesting for him to ask for refinements of existing products then, maybe, end on a challenge like this.

terrible terrible programme too. the editing! the split screen efects! the endless recaps!

he chose condoms for the male and tampons for the female. what? are you ten years old?

haha otm

er that quote should be she chose of course

A lot has been made of Starck's bluntness, but he seems more definite rather than brutal.

most of the time starck is as vague as he blames the contestants of being. maybe it's a language thing but he does usually start with what seems like an actual criticism before fading out into wackiness or sounds and throwing his arms around. it's the contestants who are overwhelmingly bad though - every one of their ideas seems a bit lame and thin. the guy with the portable smoothie maker for kids... he went out and bought like six or seven items with cutting/mashing mechanisms and then presented some illustrations of his "design" showing the outside and a wee crank on the top. maybe he didn't know that smoothies are usually made in blenders with little sharp blades in the bottom that rotate very fast and for a minute or so and that children on the whole are not massively strong - even if he'd given any indication of the mechanism beyond mentioning archimedes' screw in the studio it was a portable pulping device for kids at best. the liverpudlian girl who got through to the last round was/is a lecturer in, I think, product design? disappointing. ana-maria's tipping pot plant pot seemed the most like a real thing even thought it wasn't great and she was pretty lame in general even though I kind of fancied her - enjoyed her bitching with the liverpudlian girl about the girl who had got a pal back home to come up with a name and a logo maybe and then later on bitching with that girl who had got a pal back home about the guy who'd bought all the cutting/mashing mechanisms. meanwhile she hadn't thought of an idea of her own and then went into the garden for a fag and saw a pot plant. rubbish all round though

There is so much down to French having similar words that mean something different.

The old Superior/inferior, which in Eng is Best/crap, as opposed to just being above/underneath.

I reckon they needed a french dictionary for "Democratic"...

as for the latter stage it's problematic in another way. most product designers don't invent completely new products. if they do then the idea comes to them and develops over a long period, it doesn't come because and investor has come to ask them to "invent something" that does "anything at all". starck himself, to my knowledge, has never actually "invented" anything. he's produced some (a few) fine products but mostly bourgeois frippery. fine, if you like that sort of thing, but not it's very rarely great design and is never actually "new" in the sense that he's looking for here so why had he asked for it? he's asked for it to push the candidates as far as he can but it would have been more interesting for him to ask for refinements of existing products then, maybe, end on a challenge like this.

This otm. It did seem more like "Come up with a Dragon's Den-style idea for a product/business in two weeks, which might have a nice logo" rather than what I consider product design. We commented watching the last one that Starck is famous for frippery rather than 'democratic' (?) heal-the-world products.

Oh and the recaps. Ep 4 was really, really, taking the piss. Showing us each one's ideas throughout the whole show, showing them presenting them to starck in order, THEN recapping what they'd just presented! ARGGgghhhh

so, just then, the first bit of actual design, some technical drawing, something to do with the kid's chair. but they didn't explain it at all.

well they don't explain too much about actual cooking on masterchef. thought this was quite a reasonable episode actually, it did give some idea of the design process, rather than the product invention process that it seems to have been up till now.

The flamingo went straight in at number one, when it arrived.

That flamingo end product was good, the rest of it up til then pretty useless. How come no-one mentioned that Mike completely nicked that magnetic dinner set idea about 4 weeks ago?

It's all in the detail innit? There's nothing new under the sun...

i am unconvinced about the utility of that flamingo thing - starck seemed to have trouble using it to stand up.

yeah but it's design for people with mobility problems

this bronze axe from the 6th century bc reminds of starck's juice squeezer

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/51/Bronze_Axe_6th_cent_BC_Hermitage_Museum.JPG/800px-Bronze_Axe_6th_cent_BC_Hermitage_Museum.JPG

http://mikarchitect.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/philippe-starck-zitronenpresse1.jpg

For a designer Nebil's website isn't particularly inspiring http://www.avasnebil.com/ plus only has two entries on it.