Tag Archive for '80s'

Décor wine coolers – 1980s Australian product design pt3

Published by Angelique Hutchison 7 Comments Tags: , , , , .

My earlier posts about 1980s Australian product design highlighted some serious and important Australian designs from that decade. Now for something different – something that represents the good times and the rise of a food and wine culture in Australia in the 1980s – the Décor wine coolers.

Collection: Powerhouse Museum. Graphic design by Andy Schmid.

The Décor BYO wine carrier was designed in 1978, but was the beginning of a range of products developed by Décor in the 1980s. It was very different from any other product on the market. It holds two bottles of wine or four drink cans, and the removable chiller can be frozen before being placed between the bottles to keep them cool.

The inspiration for the carrier came in 1978 when Décor founder Brian Davis attended an Australian Design Awards presentation, saw a canvas or hessian wine carry bag win an award and decided that his company could make a better one. The Australian practice of ‘BYO‘ began in the 1960s and dining out and wine consumption became popular in Australia from the 1970s. Prior to this plastic bags filled with ice cubes had been used to carry wine to restaurants. Sounds very messy!

Richard Carlson was employed to design the wine carrier and quickly developed the final design. The wine cooler had widespread success and was winner of an Australian Design Award in 1979 and the 1980 Prince Philip Prize for Australian Design. In 1980 the wine carrier was being manufactured under licence in USA, Sweden and West Germany and continues to sell more than 30 years later.

Collection: Powerhouse Museum

Décor decided in 1984 to take the same approach with a different product, the wine cask cooler. The idea for this new product sprang from the changing preferences of Australian drinkers – cask wine was becoming more popular and Décor decided to meet the needs of this new trend.

Again designed by Richard Carlson, over a period of two years, it holds the bag of wine from any four litre cask carton. The design presented many challenges for Carlson. He said, ‘fitting the cask bag into a box was like fitting a dozen pillows into the boot of a car’. However his ability to think in terms of mass, volume and space allowed him to translate an awkward situation into an elegant, useful solution which won an Australian Design Award in 1986. The cooler features a wedge shaped chiller bottle for the wine bag to sit on, this makes it easy to get all the wine from the bag.

This product indicates the popularity of wine sold by the cask, first introduced in the 1960s by Angoves Wines. Usually the cheapest wine available, the bag reduces the air contact with wine so once it is opened it lasts longer than wine in a bottle. In 2009 around 40% by volume of the wine sold in Australia was cask wine. Although now the cask is called a ‘soft pack’ and is often a smaller two litre bag containing the same wine as is sold by the bottle.

Along with the wine cask cooler Décor developed a new wine carrier, ice buckets and picnic hampers as a complete range of products. The company won more than 250 Australian Design Awards over the 1980s alone. In 1984 Richard Carlson was awarded the Design Institute of Australia Gold Medal Award for Industrial Design and Andy Schmid, graphic designer, was awarded a Design Institute of Australia National Award for graphic design. Décor founder Brian Davis, along with designers Richard Carlson and Tony Wolfenden were inducted into the Design Institute of Australia Hall of Fame in 1996.

Pedestrian button – 1980s Australian product design pt2

Published by Angelique Hutchison 1 Comment Tags: , , , .

 

Powerhouse Museum photography. © all rights reserved

The next instalment of my favourite Australian designed products from the 1980s continues on with the transport theme. 

The pedestrian button, found at a pedestrian crossing near you, was designed in 1984. But it is really the product of research and development done in the 1970s in response to public pressure on government.

In 1967 a member of the public asked the NSW Department of Main Roads (DMR), now the Roads and Traffic Authority (RTA), to introduce pedestrian traffic signals he could hear. At a city crossing, the RTA installed some bells and buzzers on both sides. Blind pedestrians were meant to cross when the buzzing sound replaced the ringing. Unfortunately they found that when the bells broke down they sounded like buzzers, which could cause deadly confusion in blind pedestrians.

The next version, installed in 1976, had a two-rhythm buzzer and included a vibrating panel to touch, because many vision-impaired people also have some loss of hearing. This new device was developed by acoustic and vibration engineers Louis A Challis and Associates. It had two different signals for ‘Walk’ and ‘Don’t Walk’, and the sound level was automatically lowered in response to background noise, reducing annoyance to people living near a crossing.

In the early 1980s Sydney consultants Nielsen Design Associates were asked to redesign the device to make it vandal-resistant. The new unit was made from cast aluminium with vandal-proof fixings. The large magnetic button (tested to withstand millions of pushes) is easy to find and push. A Braille arrow on the vibrating plate indicates the direction to cross. Listen to the different ‘Walk’ and ‘Don’t Walk’ sounds here.

More than 25 years later, the pedestrian button is still working well, and has been used in the Middle East, Asia, Europe, South Africa and the USA.

Baby capsule – 1980s Australian product design pt1

Published by Angelique Hutchison 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

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Collection: Powerhouse Museum

Visiting The 80s Are Back exhibition I wondered: if I had to pick the best in Australian product design from the 1980s, what would it be? A Sunbeam kettle or the décor wine cask cooler? The Stackhat or a Caroma toilet? Perhaps a mop bucket or an early ResMed CPAP machine? The 1980s was a productive decade for Australian industrial designers, and the Museum holds many examples of Australian products from the era. So I’ve decided to bring out a series of my favourite Australian-designed products from the 1980s.

Beginning with an innovation that has without doubt saved many lives – the baby safety capsule. Developed 26 years ago, this product is still one of the safest child restraints on the market. In Australia, babies up to six months of age must use rear facing restraints and new child restraint laws introduced this month recommend that children face the rear of the car until age four. All child restraints sold in Australia must meet strict standards, considered to be some of the most stringent in the world.

Of course safety standards haven’t always been this strict. Wearing car seat belts has only been compulsory in Australia since the 1970s and this is when restraints for children began to come onto the market. Babies were either held in arms or travelled in a traditional bassinet that lay across the back seat, secured by the seatbelt with a protective net over the top. There was no really secure way to protect babies in a smash until the baby capsule was developed in 1984.

Rainsfords (later called Britax Childcare), the makers of the Safe-n-Sound child seat restraint, came up with the idea of the capsule. It consists of a bassinet inside a base that can be secured by a seat belt. A release mechanism allows the bassinet to rotate in a crash, keeping the baby more upright and distributing forces uniformly over its body; at the same time, the bassinet pushes against an impact-absorbing bubble in the base. The capsule was designed to fit in an adult seat space. The bassinet can be removed from the base to carry the baby around outside the car.

The capsule was designed by PA Design (later known as Invetech) with Rainsfords Safe-n-Sound and took five years of research and development. It won an Australian Design Award and Design Council Selection in 1985 and the Prince Philip Prize for Australian Design in 1986. The design was improved by the introduction of a harness in 1991 to replace the Velcro body band on the capsule in our collection.

Stay tuned for the next instalment of 1980s Australian-designed products. In the meantime I’d be interested to know – what is your favourite Australian-designed product of the 1980s?

The 80s are Back- logistics of display

Published by Alison Brennan 0 Comments Tags: .

Photography by Emma Bjorndahl © Powerhouse Museum, all rights reserved.

It appears that the curatorial team are trying to break the PHM world record of number of lenders per exhibition. Currently sitting on about 70 lenders I understand they will settle for no less than …..yes, you guessed it 80 lenders – it’s a numbers thing.

Supporting the curators are a dedicated bunch of staff members virtually throwing LP covers and stuffed toys at the exhibition, revealing an awful lot about themselves in the process, or at least what they were up to in the 80s. To date fifteen staff members have kindly lent their beloved belongings including 94 LP covers, a plethora of posters, princess Diana doll (really Kathleen!) a care bear, Garfield, glo worm and of course a piece of the Berlin wall and motor scooter.

So what do they have to beat – a quick check of other exhibitions has me noticing a bit of a curatorial link here.

The top three loan generating exhibitions over the last 15 years are: 69 lenders for “Spinning around”, 83 lenders for “On the box” and a whopping 110 for “Real Wild Child” (including the travelling component). All of these exhibitions were the work of curator Peter Cox!

But this exhibition is more than the sum of its loans, the exhibition draws from the museums own collection and collected archives. The number of objects (not including parts) in our collection database which have been selected for the 80s exhibition is sitting at around 570 which includes furniture, textiles, numismatics, radios, badges, posters and much, much more.

Basically if it existed in the 80s we have one (or two) on display!

Come and visit the exhibition!

The 80s revived

Published by Charles Pickett 1 Comment Tags: , .
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Collection, Powerhouse Museum.

The Powerhouse is the perfect museum for ‘The 80s Are Back’. After all, the museum is itself an artefact of the 80s, one of Sydney’s major statements of ‘the design decade’. Its interior and exhibition design displayed a level of sophistication and consistency unprecedented in an Australian museum.

Style exhibition 1

Collection, Powerhouse Museum.

‘The 80s Are Back’ includes some pieces which were on display when the PHM opened in 1988. These include the Carlton room divider/bookcase designed by Ettore Sottsass, founder of the Memphis design collective.

The photo shows this signature statement of postmodernism in the ‘Style’ exhibition in 1988, together with Sottsass’ Treetops floor lamp, which also features in ‘The 80s Are Back’. The ‘Style’ fit out was designed by Iain Halliday, then barely out of design school, one of several young designers whose reputation was boosted by work at the new museum. As part of Burley Katon Halliday, he is now one of Sydney’s design eminences, with a portfolio which expanded from interiors to complete buildings.

Also on display in ‘The 80s Are Back’ is a credenza (or sideboard) designed by Halliday for the PHM boardroom on the top floor of the museum building.

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Collection, Powerhouse Museum.

obj 2009 39 025

Collection, Powerhouse Museum.

Unlike the Memphis works, this piece of 80s flamboyance has not been seen before in public. Together with a large meeting table, the credenza was intended to complement the decorative boardroom interior designed by project architect Lionel Glendenning. As well as being a talking point, the table was to be democratic, not creating any sense of hierarchy among those meeting around it.

The furniture was typical of 1980s design in being expressive and sculptural as well as highly crafted, and combining a range of exotic and prosaic materials. These included silver ash, birch, Macassa ebony veneer and marble as well as aluminium, steel and brass. However when installed in the boardroom, the commissioned furniture quickly became a source of controversy. The surface of the table was damaged at its first meeting, and the Knoll chairs purchased for the boardroom did not interact well with the table.

photo

Collection, Powerhouse Museum.

More generally, the size (more than six metres long) of the table made it impractical to move, meaning that the boardroom could not be used for larger functions or meetings.

By August 1988 a Liberal government had been elected in NSW,new trustees had been appointed to the Museum board andTerence Measham had been appointed as Acting Director. According to Measham,

the Board of Trustees loathed the Halliday board room table with a passion and immediately ordered me to get rid of it…The Trustees were unanimous. Not even the art/design Trustees defended the table… I was a very new Director and dragged my feet over this matter but at the next meeting they were incensed at my falure to carry out their wishes and made it clear that the matter was urgent and not negotiable. As a newly appointed Director I was aware that my terms of employment required me to carry out their orders. Publicly, I wore the blame…

[Communication with the acquiring curator, December 2009]

After a few months use, the furniture was disassembled and placed in storage. Plans were made to display it in the ‘Style’ exhibition, but curators refused to acquire it into the collection, hoping that it would be returned to its original purpose.

The furniture’s banishment resulted not from a failure of its design, which created the ‘jewel’ furniture sought by the brief. Similarly, the museum’s management was facing the challenges posed by the first major multi-disciplinary museum launched in Australia for decades, a status which tested the new building against a new set of practicalities including the need to gain revenue from hire of theatres and other spaces. The boardroom was not the only space to undergo change as a result.

Over two decades, the boardroom furniture gained something of a mythic reputation, an artefact of the heady 80s when the museum was a pioneer of the possibilities of museums and a high profile promoter and product of the best of Australian design. In 2009 I decided to acquire the furniture into the collection, and hopefully to display it in ‘The 80s Are Back’.

No photos could be found of the furniture during its stay in the boardroom. Its reassembly at Castle Hill store produced some surprises notably that the credenza was a larger piece than realised. The lower section consists of two refrigerated spaces beneath a row of drawers, but it was found that the credenza also featured an upper section containing a set of glass shelves within a curved Craftwood wall and intricate folding doors.

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Collection, Powerhouse Museum.

The brass mesh enclosure creates the impression of a postmodern Kalgoorlie safe.

Beautifully made, controversial and striking, the boardroom credenza is back.

Meet the curator- Campbell Bickerstaff

Published by Campbell Bickerstaff 3 Comments Tags: , , .

Photography by Marinco Kojdanovski © Powerhouse Museum all rights reserved

Name
Campbell Bickerstaff

What is your speciality area?
I don’t know if I have found it yet. A specialty sounds like the dish you’re best known for. Many would associate curator with expertise which implies a very deep knowledge of a relatively narrow field – like “Building Hexagonal Perovskites Based on Large B-Site Cations for Advanced Materials Applications”.

There is no doubt that knowledge has built up over time spent researching in my designated specialty area – information and communications technology, but I prefer to think of myself as a knowledge broker of some sort – in other words you just get good at research – if I don’t know the answer I know who does or where to find it.

I am usually the one people come to when they need help with technology that is used to capture, store, transmit or receive information. I got very interested in Olivetti for a while as their corporate identity and product design and development methods were highly successful and imitated by other multinationals – especially the work of Macello Nizzoli. More recently I have been researching materials, technologies and social histories tied to audio production and high fidelity.

How long have you been working at the Museum?
12 years

What is your favourite object in the collection?
The Sharp GF-777Z portable stereo cassette and radio player. Commonly referred to as a boombox or Ghetto Blaster the latter referring to the geographical epicentre of its popular use and a colourful reference to its musical amplification factor. It was also known to many in a more satirical or endearing frame as the Bronx Briefcase.

Two distinct types of portable music devices were used in the 1980s, one being almost the anathema of the other, the Walkman and the boombox. The two were used in very differing ways; the walkman as an extension of the user’s private space; the Ghetto Blaster for performance in public space. This factor in the boomboxes appeal is also driven by the communal nature of their enjoyment outside of the confines of the home where the style and level of the music played may have been prohibited.

The Ghetto Blaster was used to play mix tapes or records (through a dedicated phono input) quite loudly so a small gathering could be entertained. The music was sometimes accompanied by rapping (through a mixed microphone input with built in echo effect). This entertainment may in turn have been augmented with highly stylised street dancing or breaking – a form that borrowed and reciprocated moves extensively from popular culture performers.

The Ghetto Blaster evolved as a consumer product over the last years of the 1970s and its golden age is arbitrarily framed around 1981 – 1985. This particular box is regarded by the boombox cognoscente as the holy grail of all boomboxes. This accolade may be attributed to its size (752mm wide x 379mm High x 166 deep), weight (12.2 kg without 10 D cell batteries), amplification power (90W with 4 amplifiers driving 6 speakers (2 x 16cm super woofer, 2 x 16cm woofer and 2 x horn type tweeters) and dual cassette drives. It also features on the reverse of Run DMC’s debut album.

I also find I am entranced by a variety of materials, objects, designs or technologies. It’s a kind of fascination that is either there or not. Sometimes it is connected to the people that used them and their stories or the function performed or some fabulous design solution. I am also attracted to objects that stir up a certain melancholy or are just damn impressive.

What piece of research or exhibition are you most proud of in your career at the Museum?
I am really satisfied by research that tends to clear up my understanding of why something was used instead of something else – research into materials and objects that reveals the superior nature of the product or technology or design and how it came to be the preferred method or solution or choice. An example of this would be the triode – a glass vacuum tube with three elements that amplifies signals – it is also the most linear amplifier known. Understanding of it only came after a thorough investigation of its design, application, testing and appreciation. This appreciation of the triode evolved into a wider study of the enabling technologies, recording practices, production, manufacture and playing of high fidelity records.

Note from the editor: This boombox has now been acquired! Check it out here. It’s on current display in the 80s exhibition!