Login
Staff in ITS worked with the Office of General Counsel to plan, build, and test enhancements to the system supporting the annual conflict disclosure compliance for this academic year. These improvements address suggestions stemming from a recent audit and provide functionality found in commercial conflict of interest systems available in the market. For instance, the most important and useful feature was the ability for the form to adjust questions based on the previous question’s response. The new functionality and operational improvements help streamline the process for the community submitting the form, as well as for the form’s administrators.
Business stakeholders and IT staff across the London, Boston, and Oakland campuses collaborated on an upgrade that simplifies guest access to wireless services at all campus locations. Teams extended the access to allow guests up to 30 days of wireless service at a time. Previously, guests were required to create a new access code every day to connect to the campus network. This upgrade significantly eases the burden on guests, as well as their campus hosts, and allows for more effective collaboration and productivity.
Approximately 265 ITS staff members received incident management training over the course of three days and six live sessions in late February, fulfilling an audit requirement and providing staff with additional knowledge, tools, and resources for properly handling, prioritizing, and communicating IT incidents according to institutional processes. Using multiple baseline key performance metrics for comparison, the training is expected to help improve operational efficiencies, reduce the number and length of service disruptions, and increase overall customer satisfaction.
The Office of the Provost and ITS are partnering to develop and launch a new website and companion digital tools to support the new EXP makerspace and reflect the uniqueness and importance of the physical location set to open for fall 2023. The new website, which will be hosted on the university’s modern web hosting service, will be focused on attracting students to use the space while highlighting promotional elements aimed at industry partners. In addition to the website, the university’s enterprise service management tool, ServiceNow, along with related digital tools, will be leveraged to provide users of the makerspace convenient and self-service access to online training to become certified on makerspace tools and reserve those tools and spaces.
As part of an ongoing effort to modernize university website systems and services, the Bachelors-Completion website was recently successfully migrated from Northeastern’s aging on-premises server environment to the institution’s modern, cloud-based enterprise web hosting service. This move helps increase the reliability and security of a highly-visible, revenue-driving website that sees more than one million visitors a year, while also decreasing site loading time by 60%—ultimately creating a better user experience and higher-SEO value. The Bachelors-Completion website joins the more than 500 websites that have been migrated off the university’s legacy web servers, enabling a 54% reduction in on-premises web servers to-date, and helping the university reduce technical debt, risk, and cost.
In collaboration with business units throughout the university, including Public Safety, IT Services is establishing a more robust Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery Program. A formalized BCDR Program helps ensure business operational resumption after an outage or disruption, mitigates risk of data loss, and protects the university against reputational damages. This essential program will support the university’s expanded campus footprint and global reach to ensure continuity of critical products, services, and applications when major natural or human-caused disruptive events occur.
Leveraging the Outsystems enterprise platform, IT teams developed and delivered an updated voting form for the Student Government Association’s annual vote. The project team collaborated with SGA representatives to capture business requests and updates, demo the changes, and release the final product so that it is available for fair voting for student government representatives. New functionality added this year include added logic for no confidence voting, so that if only one candidate is standing for election, a no confidence message is displayed at the start of the candidate slates. Logic was also added to disable other voting options when a candidate is written in.
IT teams supported the ongoing expansion of the global campus in Seattle with a complete data communications buildout at 225 Terry Ave., 2nd floor. This work provides state of the art wireless connectivity with increased Wi-Fi speed, four new Global Learning Spaces classrooms, and seven additional breakout spaces. As a result, the infrastructure now supports up to 20 additional students per class and hundreds more personal devices on the wireless network.
An initiative is underway to automate the request process and provisioning of high-performance computing (HPC) resources for classroom use, which benefits around 1,000 students each year who need to use HPC resources as a part of their coursework. The provisioning of user access, groups, and storage are all being automated. At the same time, the request form is being updated, with the help of a Canvas integration recently developed by ITS, to further improve and simplify the experience for professors, instructors, and teaching faculty requesting resources. Additionally, HPC usage is being standardized and compute environments are being tailored for courses.
According to demographic data collected in recognition of March as Women’s History Month, women employees in ITS account for over 32% of the division’s full-time workforce. This percentage is up from 25% in 2018 and is above the IT industry average of 26%, as reported by Gartner, the respected business and technology research firm. This trend in ITS aligns with Northeastern’s commitment to building a diverse and inclusive university community, and is part of ITS’ ongoing efforts to amplify voices and initiatives that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion as best practice.
In a joint effort between IT Services and Human Resources, the Employee Hub was formally introduced to Northeastern employees on Monday, March 27 as the new digital home base for faculty and staff. An expansion of the Student Hub that launched in 2020, the Employee Hub provides quicker, easier access to many of the productivity tools and other resources that employees need to navigate day-to-day university and work life most effectively. Daily site visits to the Employee Hub, which replaces and builds upon the myNortheastern employee portal that will retire as of June 1, 2023, were up three times in the days immediately following the announcement.
The completion of all pre-requisite upgrades in Banner marked a significant milestone in the project to migrate Student Financial Services off of the current financial aid system, Powerfaids. This milestone puts the university one step closer to the expected transition to Banner Financial Aid starting with the incoming class of students this fall 2023. This work will result in a more stable and integrated platform for this critical university function, which awards approximately $1B in financial aid each year.
Matriarch is the sixth and final addition to the In Your Skin upholstery collection, a collaboration between HBF Textiles and product and interiors designer Erin Ruby. Aptly named, Matriarch is a twill weave with strong color combinations that evoke wisdom and experience. Visually, the twill blends bold complementary colored yarns to create a subtle melange and moire effect.
The six sensorial textiles in the woven fabric collection celebrate being comfortable in your own skin, inspired by the human experience and the ephemeral nature of life. Tactile with a handmade quality, In Your Skin looks like a residential product, yet has the durability for contract and hospitality environments. Each of the fabrics are certified Indoor Advantage Gold (SCS), woven and manufactured in the United States with wool locally sourced from the Midwest, and most patterns are made using post-consumer and/or recycled materials.
In Your Skin marks Ruby’s third collaboration with HBF Textiles. “Sometimes contract textiles can tend toward being cold or lifeless for pragmatic reasons, but this collection is so warm and tactile even with its high performance functionality. It’s full of life – imbued with optimism and aspiration, which I think will resonate within a space,” she shared.
The collaboration continues HBF Textiles’ focus on supporting women-owned businesses. “I love promoting talented female designers. It gives me a sense of pride to utilize the HBF Textiles platform to share their story and creative vision to a wider audience,” says Mary Jo Miller, Vice President of Design and Creative Direction at HBF Textiles. With like-minded mills and collaborators locally and globally, the brand continually explores the possibilities materiality can offer and how it can further connect us with other people and our environment.
Ultra Violet
Cernelion
Labradorite
Cernelion
Rose Quartz
Ultra Violet
Aura
To learn more about Matriarch, visit hbftextiles.com.
The university’s Discovery Cluster high-performance research storage systems, located at the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC), have been expanded in capacity, and updated to increase system performance. These updates enable the more than 6,000 research faculty and students throughout the global university network who use MGHPCC to work with larger data sets while reducing the amount of time they need to run simulations. MGHPCC is an intercollegiate high-performance computing facility located in Holyoke, Massachusetts, supported as a joint venture of Boston University, Harvard, MIT, Northeastern, and the University of Massachusetts system.
As part of ongoing work to support further integration of the Oakland campus with the global campus system, Northeastern IT teams in Oakland and Boston collaborated to migrate the legacy Mills housing data from a third-party vendor to Northeastern’s system. This transition provides Northeastern’s enterprise systems and housing teams with full control of this service, further enabling the university to move quickly as it coordinates enrollment growth.
The Mills email transition was completed when the final step of moving the @mills.edu mail domain to @northeastern.edu was done on January 31. Since the merger was finalized last summer, data from no fewer than 833 @mills.edu individual and shared Gmail accounts were migrated to Northeastern M365 accounts, while continuing to route all mail sent to those addresses to their new @northeastern.edu mailboxes. As a result, legacy Mills College employees and students are now fully integrated with Northeastern’s unified communication and collaboration platforms, allowing for more seamless messaging, meeting, and file-sharing with members of the university community around the global campus network.
ITS is moving forward with a Microsoft partner to help the university provide security responses across all global campuses on a 24/7/365 basis. Cyberattacks continue to increase around the world, making it more important than ever for Northeastern to ensure that its services, data, and people are protected around the clock. As Northeastern continues to expand globally, utilizing an outsourced security operations center will help the institution scale its security program. As a result, the university can continue to repel attackers and help keep the community safe from cyber threats.
The latest update to the Student Hub moves up the date by which admitted student data is brought into in the Hub. As a result, admitted students will now have earlier and expanded access to useful information and resources, beginning as soon as this data becomes available in related systems of record. Previously, admitted students did not receive the full Student Hub experience until the week before they started classes. Admitted students’ basic data, like their college and major, will now be displayed on the Me profile and searchable on the Discover page to foster connections, and the students will also be able to view their course registrations, billing statements, and more, directly through the Hub and well in advance of the start of classes. While improving the experience for admitted students, it is also expected this update will reduce the amount of support calls made to the university ahead of each new academic semester.
As follow-up to a 2019 assessment, the university has engaged Gartner, a leading global technology research and consulting firm, to refresh and expand the institution’s digital application assessment and roadmap. The effort will help Northeastern better manage risk while enabling improved prioritization and investment across the global university. Technical staff and business partners and leadership throughout the university will be included in the assessment process through surveys, interviews, and workshops.
Academic Technologies has been working with the Center for Advancing Teaching and Learning with Research to discuss and explore the recent technological advancements in generative AI, such as ChatGPT, and their impacts on education. Focus has been not just on the potential threats of this technology, but also the opportunities for providing a robot-proof education. Teams from Academic Technologies, CATLR, and other areas around the university co-wrote a whitepaper and presented in an educator exchange, “The Landscape of AI and ChatGPT: What is it and how can we work with it?” on Feb. 13. AT and CATLR will continue to support broad discussions about this new technology and create resources that help faculty to re-think assignment design to support more authentic learning and preparation for their future careers.
An interview with Mark Robertson about the CAST/STM report on open access and China.
The post China and Open Access appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
With controversial AI creations around so many corners, it’s refreshing to see an analogue project like DREAMHOUSES come along. Thought up by Fort Makers and stemming from the idea of vivid pandemic-induced dreams, the project is an online exhibition of abstract fantasy homes. Six artists and designers created their own “dream house” before being paired up with writers, who then used the creations as a prompt for an accompanying text work. The catch was that participants could only use materials that were available in their actual homes. The result is a digital neighborhood that explores the idea of what a home is to the creators.
“The past few years have forced us to radically reconsider our relationships with our homes, coming to realize that it is where our imagination comes together with reality: we create spaces in our own image while making sure they also serve our quotidian needs,” says Fort Makers Co-Founder Nana Spears. “With this project, we wanted to see what would happen if the artist is free to eschew the practical part of this equation and create a space of pure fantasy,” adds Co-Founder Noah Spencer.
CHIAOZZA X Janelle Zara
“Parallel House,” created by the duo at CHIAOZZA, features a horseshoe-style layout of two houses. With an all-white exterior and interior full of brightly-colored objects, the design takes advantage of indoor/outdoor living spaces. Entirely modeled of construction paper, this modern piece of architecture is ready for the California desert.
Janelle Zara wrote “Imagining Life Inside CHIAOZZA’s Dreamhouse, Which I’m Sure Exists in LA” in response. “In my dream house, time is an illusion, a social construct; here adherence to time is 100 percent a choice. There are no clocks, no scheduled zoom meetings, only the movement of light and shadow as the sun traces its path along the sky. Throughout the year, from day to day, this movement is never fixed; the day stretches and contracts according to the seasons.” Read it in full here.
CHIAOZZA X Janelle Zara
CHIAOZZA X Janelle Zara
Harry Nuriev X Drew Zeiba
Harry Nuriev’s immersive work likes to blur the line between actual and virtual realities, so it makes sense that “Off The Road” would follow suit. The 3D rendering uses his signature cobalt blue to highlight a canopy bed set in a green meadow. Once the sky dims, an otherworldly light of its own turns on.
In “Sense Index Zero,” Drew Zeiba dives into what we feel like when alone in the comfort of our homes and the color blue. “One can feel blue; blue is not something one wants to feel. In Maggie Nelson’s obsessive catalogue of the color, Bluets, she writes, “Loneliness is solitude with a problem.” Soot lands on my tongue as a reminder that there are things I cannot control, that home is not the shape of a globe, that there is no edge. The world escapes. I am beneath a sky of my own making as words crystalize carbon gray against my teeth. I shed description: I become primary.” Read it in full here.
Harry Nuriev X Drew Zeiba
Laurie Simmons X Natasha Stagg
Artist Laurie Simmons, explorer of nostalgia, gender, and consumerism, created “Sparkle House.” A sparsely furnished Victorian mansion of sorts, its personality comes from the patterned textiles used throughout its rooms – including the sparkling rugs that come to life when hit with light.
Undeniably a great setting, Natasha Stagg wrote “Nowhere to sit” in accompaniment. The short story tells of a group of roommates, their various personalities, and the dynamics that exist in such situations. “The couch was so unlike the image when it arrived. All of the roommates looked at it, delivered and out of the box, the first new piece of furniture they had bought as a group. It was supposed to be what brought the room together, a luxurious blue velvet thing. They should have known, they all thought, that cheap velvet would look it, giving away more than what their second-hand or inherited furniture did.” Read it in full here.
Laurie Simmons X Natasha Stagg
Laurie Simmons X Natasha Stagg
Laurie Simmons X Natasha Stagg
Noah Spencer X Philippa Snow
“Sunshine Daydream” was brought to life by Fort Makers Co-Founder, wood sculptor, and painter Noah Spencer. The tiny mixed-media hut features a single unfurnished room that can move across the accompanying desert landscape with you – almost like a pet.
Critic and essayist Philippa Snow wrote “Ithaca” in extension.
“Ithaca, whose name was actually Jane, had dropped out of her Creative Writing MFA to start a new life in the desert, where she’d planned to write a novel, drop some acid, and behave exactly like the kind of white girl who called things her ‘spirit animal.'” Read it in full here.
Noah Spencer X Philippa Snow
Noah Spencer X Philippa Snow
Marcel Alcalá X Whitney Mallett
Populated with non-binary figures, Marcel Alcalá’s “Corner Studio Girlies” uses glazed ceramic figures against a cardboard city painted red to share alternative expressions of queerness. It was photographed in the corner of Alcalá’s studio, which is also the piece’s namesake.
Whitney Mallet explored the hectic, playful yet dark, “Corner Studio Girlies” and wrote #Justiceforglitter. The piece revolves around Mariah Carey, 9/11, and the movie Glitter. “And while I’m not suggesting that sabotaging the vehicle intended to catapult Carey into cinema stardom played a role in Al Qaeda’s attack schedule, it has been documented that Osama Bin Laden’s preferred five-octave-range songstress was Whitney Houston.” Read it in full here.
Marcel Alcalá X Whitney Mallett
Marcel Alcalá X Whitney Mallett
Marcel Alcalá X Whitney Mallett
Samuel Harvey X Tash Nikol
Like something out of a fairytale, ceramicist Sam Harvey created a single tower. Covered in light blue shingles and waving a flag reading “having no idea as to what it all meant he chose to stay home,” your imagination just might run wild.
Poet, writer, and curator Rash Nikol interpreted the tower into words, perhaps as a link to another world, in “Waiting Room for Spirits.” “the wise ones speak of the spirit house / here and there / our ancestors speak of a place there / a holding room for spirits / outside of skin / not far from clouds.” Read it in full here.
Samuel Harvey X Tash Nikol
Samuel Harvey X Tash Nikol
Samuel Harvey X Tash Nikol
To learn more about DREAMHOUSES, visit dreamhouses.fortmakers.com.
“This felt like a really natural partnership, we have a joint appreciation for color and we wanted to find a way to celebrate this in a way neither studio would have come up with alone,” said Jemma Ooi, co-founder at CUSTHOM, of their collaboration with Jonathan Lawes. The Cut + Paste homeware collection, designed by the two London-based studios, adds some lighthearted fun to your home with its playful approach to color and form.
One of the best parts? The collection of tumblers, highballs, a vase, and artwork are designed so that each piece can be enjoyed singularly or as part of a set. The collage-like designs are chosen by the team for their bold, graphic color blocks.
Jonathan Lawes adds, “A lot of my work can get quite busy and numerous layers all interacting – this was a good way to reel that back in and focus on specific elements.”
Another fantastic quality of Cut + Paste is that its pieces are all made from recycled glass supplied by revered glassware brand, LSA International. In fact, both the color palette and designs are inspired by the green of the recycled glass being used. The art prints are made using water-based inks and FSC-managed papers, and the entirety of the Cut + Paste collection can be recycled.
Jonathan Lawes + CUSTHOM
To learn more about the Cut + Paste collection, visit custhom.co.uk.
Two of the biggest Nordic brands have united to bring us the BASTUA collection, launching globally in March 2023. The limited-edition series of 26 products, created by home furnishings giant IKEA and iconic printmaker Marimekko, brings together Nordic design and self-care rituals. From furniture to glassware to textiles, vibrant patterns reflect nature back at you.
“Collaborating with Marimekko was a natural choice for IKEA as we are both committed to enabling a better everyday life at home, and with the BASTUA collection, it begins with focusing on wellness first,” says Henrik Most, Creative Leader at IKEA. “The collaboration encapsulates the sensations of endless summers and the simple and aesthetic beauty of Nordic nature in furniture and accessories for the home.”
“BASTUA” describes a sauna in Småland, the region in southern Sweden where IKEA was founded. Self-care and Nordic sauna were the starting points of the collection that’s meant to be used when relaxing outdoors in warm weather or simply winding down at the end of a long day.
The launch of BASTUA marks the first time that Marimekko has designed prints exclusively for a brand collaboration. “Capturing the essence of Marimekko’s Finnish roots and its connection to the historic origins of sauna culture was a fundamental part of the design journey and the creation of the BASTUA prints,” says Rebekka Bay, Creative Director at Marimekko. When gathering inspiration from nature, the brand gravitated towards the large, decorative rhubarb leaves that are often found growing near saunas in Finland. You’ll find it throughout the collection, including on the ever-popular FRAKTA bag.
Within the BASTUA collection lies furniture, glassware, and textiles that include robes and towels – and even the first-ever sauna bucket – among other items. These are all things one might traditionally use when enjoying a sauna, or right before or after the ritual. You’ll find elements that can be used during a meal, a place to sit and feel grounded, and even a candle infused with the scents of elderflower, rhubarb, and sweet vanilla.
BASTUA’s furniture pieces are inspired by classic Nordic design. A side table offers a clever feature: the collection’s patterned trays fit perfectly on the top. You may even want to pull up the coordinating bench to enjoy a relaxing moment of Zen.
“Nordic furniture design has always been characterized by clean lines and simple constructions that focus on function” says Mikael Axelsson, Designer at IKEA. “The BASTUA side table is my take on this heritage, as it is made of birch veneer and with a high edge that keeps things in place.”
The BASTUA collection feels like a perfect partnership, neither pattern nor design overshadows the other. It’s a wonderful marriage between two brands that complement one another in harmony.
To learn more about BASTUA, visit ikea.com.
Throughout the winter break, necessary work was performed on the university’s technology to continue supporting the Northeastern community and to scale to support the expanding global network. Below are highlights of some of what was accomplished during the recess:
Earlier this month, the application servers for the university’s Banner ERP infrastructure were migrated to Linux. This migration improves the university’s security stance for these servers and keeps Northeastern in compliance with vendor software requirements. The move to the open, modern operating system also means that portions of the Banner infrastructure can be migrated to the cloud. Major releases to the Banner systems were also completed this month to keep the university compliant with updated tax regulations, including 1099 and 1098T reporting. To limit the impact of system outages during the releases, staff in ITS worked closely with business partners throughout the institution (including the Office of the Registrar, Finance, and Student Accounts) to plan the releases and navigate year-end processes, tax reporting deadlines, and start-of-term activities.
Instructors, administrators, and others can now find a dashboard of over 300 Boston and Oakland registrar-managed classrooms, including resources and information about the technology in each one. The classroom dashboard is publicly hosted on the Tech Service Portal on the ServiceNow platform, but when an instructor who is assigned to any of the classrooms is logged in, a personalized list of their classrooms and any current maintenance work or A/V issues is featured front and center for convenient access. The new classroom dashboard leverages data feeds from the Registrar, Facilities, and ITS to help better prepare faculty members to teach in their classroom and leverage the technology available to them.
Oakland-based ITS team members, in conjunction with partners including Facilities Management, took quick action to protect systems and data in the Oakland data center and throughout campus, following historic storms in the Bay Area that led to two-inches of standing water in the data center. Following the initial flooding and remediation, the teams took additional steps to mitigate against future water intrusion from the ongoing storms, including further elevating sensitive equipment and cables, backing up critical systems and data to another location, and reviewing and updating continuity plans for the data center and associated technical systems. Proactive reviews of network closets and other campus technology were also performed to identify any storm damage or potential for damage.
To kick-off spring semester classes and activities, the global university community leveraged the knowledge and assistance of IT Service Desk professionals by calling, chatting, emailing, and walking-up for support. In the first five days of the spring semester, the service desk fielded more than 3,000 interactions from university community members. More than 20% of interactions came in via chat, which is an increasingly preferred method for support. In addition to call, chat, email, and walk-up options, text messaging is also being explored as a future added method of support.
Enrollment Management and ITS collaborated to transition automated call distribution system vendors from Five9 to 3CLogic. Enrollment Management’s ACD system is used to connect with students, family members, and other audiences across 16 high-traffic support phone numbers including for Admissions, CPS, OGS, SFS, and the main university call center. The transition was accomplished on schedule under a tight 3.5-month timeframe, and it provides these areas greater integration with ServiceNow and a significant annual cost savings. ITS was the first university area to move to 3CLogic in 2020. For ITS, the integrations with ServiceNow and other university systems cut customer call wait times in half while enabling service desk agents to immediately identify callers and pre-fill information about a caller (including their call history) so that agents can more rapidly assist callers and provide a personalized experience.
Information Security and Kostas Research Institute, LLC partnered recently on a mock assessment as part of final preparation for seeking CMMC level 2 certification. This trial run gave the ITS and KRI teams the opportunity to experience the auditing process and assess what steps need to be taken prior to the actual government audit anticipated by late summer. The CMMC audit is required by the federal government to ensure that Northeastern meets the strict cybersecurity compliance regulations needed to work with controlled unclassified information, and so that the institution can continue its Department of Defense contracts and other government-funded research.
erviceNow’s Hardware Asset Management module launched the evening of Jan. 25, 2023, to facilitate greater operational efficiencies for the institution through automation. The HAM software can standardize asset data and tracking of IT assets, including university-managed laptops, loaner equipment through the Service Desk, and network infrastructure equipment. Using HAM, ITS can now view available inventory in various stockrooms, will receive “re-order” notifications when minimum inventory thresholds have been met, and can track asset age to inform automatic-replacement cycles. The launch of HAM will lead to a reduction of costs and risks associated with hardware inventory management while increasing customer satisfaction throughout the hardware lifecycle.
“I wanted to take an unexpected approach to exploring the idea of how lighting functions within the home, and to inspire people to consider new shapes and elements which blend into and highlight different types of interior spaces in new, bold, and artistic ways,” says Rotterdam-based designer Sabine Marcelis. Her 20-piece VARMBLIXT collection is a collaboration with IKEA that includes sculptural lighting objects, serveware, rugs, and more.
Each piece of lighting is designed to interact with both direct and indirect light, and align with IKEA’s hopes of shifting the perception of it in the home. Rather than simply being functional, lighting can be emotional in that it can transform the look, feel, and atmosphere of our spaces.
The four lighting pieces in the collection will become a permanent part of IKEA’s offerings. They include the VARMBLIXT LED pendant lamp, which features curved pipes of frosted white glass, and the VARMBLIXT LED wall mirror, designed with a semi-transparent glass panel and light strip. Both are sculptural objects when turned off, and a display of light engineering when illuminated.
“At home, I have mainly indirect lights, as I love the soft effect they give. I also have a lot of art objects that double as lighting, something I love because it blurs the boundaries of function and art,” said Marcelis. “It’s really a lost opportunity if you don’t think about the appeal of a lighting element when it’s in its ‘OFF’ mode – because a lot of the time a light might not be turned on, but you still need to live with it and have it be part of the interior.”
We find it to be a true sign of a successful collaboration when the designer features the products in their own space. “I have a donut lamp in my son’s room, which he loves, and the curved line in my living room high up on one of the structural columns,” Marcelis shared with us. “I love how it highlights the connection with the ceiling. I’m planning to mount them on all the columns to really add to this architectural feature.”
A motif that can be seen throughout Marcelis’ work – the infinite doughnut – finds its place as the VARMBLIXT LED lamp that can be wall-mounted or displayed on a table. You’ll also find two serveware sizes in orange and green in the same shape, alongside a beautiful set of glassware.
Marcelis admitted that, “Just yesterday I brought home a set of the champagne glasses and made some dry-January mocktails in them. I have to say, I’m very proud of how the glassware turned out. It’s a product category I have not worked on before, and it’s so satisfying to drink from something I have designed myself and directly interact with it on such a close level.”
With a focus on warm colors, VARMBLIXT includes two rugs inspired by the setting sun. The larger of the pair, made from 100% hand-tufted wool, features a sunset-like color gradient that fades from deep orange to amber yellow. An overlapping style adds extra interest while creating the illusion of depth.
Marcelis told us that she’s really learned how to get the maximum amount of effect with the least amount of materials/resources used through VARMBLIXT – and that was her aim all along. “To not solely rely on the lusciousness of materiality, but to strip everything back to essentials and with a singular gesture make it gain its desirability. The pieces needed to have my signature, but also be anonymous enough to be able to be applied in many different types of homes. It taught me more than ever that less is more.”
Sabine Marcelis
To learn more about the VARMBLIXT collection, which will launch in February 2023, visit https://about.ikea.com.
In her first-ever interiors collaboration, British eco-conscious pioneer Stella McCartney worked with B&B Italia on a series that launched at Art Basel Miami Beach. Based on both’s shared values of sustainability, the Le Bambole capsule collection features a hand-drawn “Fungi Forest” in a dark red and white toile print. The upholstery pattern was pulled from McCartney’s Summer 2022 runway collection, and can be seen adorning the exclusive Le Bambole armchair and Granbambola 3-seater sofa. In reimagining Mario Bellini’s armchair, McCartney was able to experiment with a designer’s work she loves while also celebrating Le Bambole’s 50th anniversary with B&B Italia.
Five decades after its introduction, Le Bambole has evolved using innovative design elements that contribute to its comfort and environmental footprint. The capsule collection brings together the quality and durability of B&B Italia with responsible materials and construction choices that are in line with McCartney’s eco-conscious mission. The new Le Bambole is designed to be fully disassembled, allowing for easy repairs when necessary and a circular end-of-life process to do the least harm.
While the original construction used a metal structure wrapped in polyurethane, the updated versions employ a recycled polyethylene frame, elements in polyurethane foam, and thermoplastic elastomers. These are encased in recycled polyester fabric beneath the upholstery to give Le Bambole its iconic shape, comfort, and breathability.
The capsule collection also introduces sustainable innovations developed by B&B Italia’s R&D team. Happily, Le Bambole’s upholstery is made of 100% biodegradable and toxin-free polyester that leaves no harmful microplastics in the environment. It’s produced using 25% bio-based, 75% petroleum based feedstock and made in audited mills which follow the strict OceanSafe Compliant standards, and the ink used for the print is Oeko-Tex® certified.
To learn more about Stella McCartney x B&B Italia three-piece capsule collection, visit bebitalia.com. They are available for purchase in all B&B Italia direct, mono-, and multi-brand stores globally as well as online.
Article tags
FreshRSS