Blobby seat made of wood.
If a beanbag were made of wood, it would be Nananu (reminds me of Cobonpue). Made by WhiteFlax in Italy, but with designs and designers that come from Australasia. The collection is inspired by the "different and varied culture and unique mixture of indoor / outdoor living" of Polynesia, New Zealand and Australia. Other bent wood creations include a curvy rocking chair called Rocker, Dondola the undulating rocking recliner, Liferaft seating, the hammock-like Sling recliner, and the skeletal Coral Lamp.

Designer: David Trubridge
+ whiteflax.com

Plenty of books on sixties Scandi design, but here's one for this decade. With more than 400 photos of truly fresh designs for furniture, housewares, textiles and electronics, New Scandinavian Design "tweaks the myth of fair-haired citizens producing sober beech furniture". The book "goes 'beyond blond' to feature work that is anarchic, conceptual, and playful, while still exhibiting hallmark qualities of honesty and utility.". From one of my favorite publishers, Chronicle Books, with 272 pages, 400 images, $31.50 at Amazon.

+ New Scandinavian Design at Amazon

This week's MoCo picks + submissions.

+ +d.'s 3D Frame, for your three dimensional engravings. <Cool Hunting>

+ Bestor Architecture's Panel House. Nice. <Land+Living>

+ Targetted TV, that speaks to me. <Cool Hunting>

... and why.

+ Ambient light powered SensiTile ripples. <Core 77>

+ Harri Koskinen's Muu chairs, made by Montina (whose website was last updated in... 1999). <Apartment Therapy>

+ Thelermont Hupton's One-cup nested tables + storage. <TreeHugger>

+ Paul Stremple's Banana Bunker, great idea + design, bad joke fodder. <Apartment Therapy>

+ Japan's kei'ichi IRIE + Power Unit Studio, concrete + glass minimalism. <Dezain>

+ Stream Pool Flow mosaic by Sonia King. Thanks Sonia!

+ Nendo Drawer house - store it all, including rooms. <Sensory Impact>

Design submissions spike.
One of the benefits of being mentioned in the paper, is the mail you get afterwards. We got a lot of submissions. Make that a lot of great submissions.

Here's a sampling:

+ Scott Rench's computer generated ceramics.
+ Phuze crystal jewelry and home furnishings.
+ Lynn Moor's fine art mosaics.
+ Jeffrey Rothstein's photography.
+ Kornegay Design cast concrete amenities.
+ David Zelman's functional art.
+ John Greg Ball's Otto seating system.

Thank you all for the kind words and submissions.

New York Times article.
I like the irony, the design bloggers finally get to see each other in print. We're all featured in this brief piece on design blogs in today's New York Times. My guess is that writer Lockhart Steele's original submission was somewhat longer (my quotes alone would have filled the entire page!). BTW, congrats to Mr. Steele, he's the new Managing Editor over at Gawker. And, in the interest of full disclosure, my day job is in product marketing for the world's largest wholesale-only ISP and VoIP provider, the sideboard in the photo was found abandoned in a basement and subsequently refinished, the small blue skyscraper on top of it was created by my brother-in-law and the chair is an Artifort Globe designed by Pierre Paulin via Avant-Scene. ;)

Table made of sticks and glass.
Designer Thomas Malmberg's Superfamily furniture and lighting collection is mostly prototypes, including this table. I suspect not for long. What looks like wooden sticks is actually copper-plated steel supporting Stack's glass tabletop. "The sticks in the table are the lines on the paper" of the "sketch" you see when you look through the glass top. Malmberg's other creations include Node, a Meccano-like light made with acrylic cube connectors that include LEDs, the W(e)ave light structure made of bent acrylic tubes, Relative steel tube chair and the Buddy pendant light whose lampshade opens using the heat from the bulb.

Designer: Thomas Malmberg
+ superfamily.se