Musee des Beaux-Arts

Thrilled to be allowed to take photos in a museum, I found myself focusing on textures and details.. as usual.

Peter Bruegel

Walter LeBlanc

Jan Fabre

Moules, Frites and Biere!

Last weekend I took me, myself and I on a wee stay to Brussels, what a lovely place! Museums, galleries, chocolate shops, antique markets, more chocolate shops...


This is a cool little gallery opposite my hotel (where coincidentally a friend of a friend works - small world eh?) housed in a beautiful old creamery which has a really interesting exhibition on about the conflict in the West Bank, and how that has spilled over into Lebanon. (www.halles.be)

This is a lovely little tea shop; each tea is under one of these little glass cloches, so you can lift it up and have a sniff!

The window of a shoe repair shop; I loved that this was next to a very high end designer shop

Last week I met someone who works at Transplant, a design centre in Dale, Norway which in itself was quite interesting because Dale is a very small place (around 1,500) and I had also been there, albeit a very long time ago as a teenager, it left quite a mark on me. But this led me to look them up at see what they do, and it seems like an awesome place.

I was particularly interested in this thread which talks about design which deals with time, something i've been thinking about a lot recently. I like the work of Kristine Bjaadal (above), which starts off fully tufted and gradually wears away to reveal the pattern. I wrote my dissertation on planned obsolescence; how products are generally designed to begin to lose their appeal soon after we buy them, so that we will soon buy new things. I am interested in ways that designers can respond to this trend; partly by designing things which are meant to be safely and sustainably thrown away (in the vein of cradle to cradle) and partly through design which encourages people to build up a longer, more personal relationship with their things, as Kristine Bjaadal has done here so beautifully.