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Prototyping: Learning to Think and Make With Your Hands, by Paul Backett Old school tools © Paul Backett Despite the rise of digital tools and rapid prototyping, it has never been more important for designers to make things with their hands. Comfort with three dimensions as a sketch and development tool enhances a designer's sensitivity to form tremendously, and helps them understand how products are made in the real world. If you can build it, you're halfway to knowing how it could be manufactured. Instead, schools often allow students to jump into 3D CAD before they have a solid understanding of form and construction. More....

Garden Marathon - Saturday and Sunday 15 -16 October 2011 Stefano Boeri , Vertical Forest © Stefano Boeri The Serpentine Gallery Garden Marathon is the sixth in the Gallery’s acclaimed Marathon series. This two-day event is an exploration of the concept of the garden. A product of the creative encounter between the man-made and the natural, between order and disorder, the garden can offer productive metaphors for the interactions between human life and time, care, thought or space. More....

Beijing Design Week 2011: Rethinking Bamboo at the Beijing Design Triennial Bamboo Electric Vehicle, Professor Matsuhige Kazumi, Kyoto University Traveling through Asia, it's incredible to witness men scaling sky-high scaffolding constructed entirely out of bamboo. A lightweight and structurally strong "green" material, bamboo is a grass that is one of the world's fastest growing plants. Part of the inaugural Beijing Design Triennial exhibition at the National Museum, the Rethinking Bamboo exhibition explored new applications for this traditional material in architecture, transportation, furniture, lighting and craft. Curated by Freeman Lau (Vice Chairman of Hong Kong Design Center) and Tsinghua University's Hang Jian (Vice Dean of the Academy of Arts and Design), the exhibition showcases the work of 66 designers representing Asia, Europe and the United States.  More...

Sketching: Approaching the Paper with Purpose by Paul Backett This sketch exploration by Ziba designer Sam Amis shows a broad, rapid exploration of gestures for a snowboard-carrying backpack. This is the third post in a 6-part series from Ziba's Industrial Design Director, Paul Backett, on rethinking design education. Read the Introduction to the series, Teach Less, Integrate More here . Every design school teaches the mechanics of sketching: line, volume, perspective, shading and so on. But when it comes to project work, most fail to teach students to sketch with purpose. This makes all the other exercise pointless. All too often I see sketches that look fine, but when I ask, "Why did you choose that form?" I get a shrug. As with research, students often see sketching as a step to complete, rather than a tool to be used throughout the design process. More...

Punk meets plants: The International Park(ing) Festival comes to London The Parking Bay garden at the International Park(ing) Festival in London, 2011. Photograph: Julie Begon

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