Web watch: Butterfly-field

1. Houzz:

When you sign up to Houzz, you get a lovely welcome email inviting you to browse the more than, count ‘em, 1,000,000 photos for ideas and inspiration. Then you can set up an ideabook to save your favourites. It’s got the collaborative vibe going on with the aim being to bring homeowners and professionals together, and all very social media and mobile device friendly, of course. So whether you need advice on a project, inspiration for a new bathroom design or basic product info, it’s all here. According to them, they have the largest residential design database in the world. The discussions are very distracting too, you get drawn into them. ‘What colour should I paint my house?’, ‘Help me redesign a 90s kitchen’, and my personal favourite: ‘New knobs for old buffet’.

* www.houzz.com

2. Mad museum:

This image of the Butterfly-field is reason enough to click on to this site, it’s a pinhole picture taken in the raspberry-field model and is photographed so close, says the site, that we “look into its eyes and feel its character“. The artist used lots of crazy stuff like Styrofoam, flock grass, casted rubber raspberries and, what do you know, butterflies. The Museum of Arts and Design (“MAD”) pitches itself as exploring the “blur zone between art, design, and craft today“. It’s all about contemporary creativity and the ways artists “transform materials through processes ranging from the artisanal to the digital“. That kind of scared me when I read it, because frankly, I don’t know what artisanal is, but then I happened upon Bespoke: The Handbuilt Bicycle and that was enough for me to get over it. You visit the exhibit with your own bike, then pose in the mybike photo booth. There are feet on the sidewalk in front of the museum, and then faster than you can ring your bell, you’re on the site as part of the whole thing. Love it.

* www.madmuseum.org