We are very excited to announce the opening of our newest office, the showroom and design studio in Fashion Street in London.

Come visit! If you are going to be in London on Thursday the 23rd of March, please join us from 6 to 8 for the CuteCircuit Open House Aperitivo in lovely Fashion Street (#30) for a glass of nice Italian Wine! We’d love to see you!

For instructions on how to reach us please see the map on the Contact Page.

To see what the new studio looks like from the street see the image below:

The view from the window:

From February 13th to the 17th, CuteCircuit gave an intensive one week wearables workshop at AHO, the Oslo School of Architecture and Design.

In this workshop, participants imagined what the future of clothing might be like; drawing inspiration from cultural cues of today and the latest in new materials and technologies. The course ended with a fashion show presenting the designs developed during the week. Each design displayed an innovative take on how technology and new approaches to fashion combine to create innovative clothing possibilities.

The participants formed groups and each focused on a particular desire or need: the need for safety, the desire to control perception, the desire for personal space, the desire to express emotion. The resulting design solutions were colorful, exciting and very surprising! These interaction designers did a fantastic job!!!

London is cool every day of the week! Last night we went to the ICA Cinema, Institute for Contemporary Arts in London, for the screening of the Mirromask the fantasy movie written by Neil Gaiman and directed by Dave Mackean. Neil Gaiman is known for the series The Sandman, for the book Coraline, and dozens of other works. He also worked as a journalist and wrote a biography about Duran Duran! For the anime lovers: he also wrote the English script for Princess Mononoke!!! He also has a website, where you can keep up to date on his work.

Dave McKean directed beautifully, and the movie has a fantastic mix of fantasy visuals and suprisingly blue oceans from the coastal town of Brighton, that strangely reminded me of southern France. See his amazing illustrations on his personal website. I really love the Sphinx cats with rainbow wings!!!

If you are in London you should absolutely visit the ICA, they have several exhibits, movie screenings, a bar and club, and they also gift you with books and magazines. Last night we got a book about British Brands where more than half are Italian or American, and the latest issue of Dazed Magazine, that is really worth getting anyway since it features an article about John Maeda’s work and his 40th birthday!

See Dazed website.

On Thursday, February 16th Ryan and Francesca presented highlights of design work from CuteCircuit at Norsk Form Gallery for Oslo Fashion Week. The evening lecture demonstrated wearable technology, interactive fashion and discussed the history of wearable technology from its roots all the way up to the present-day and ended with a glimpse into future technologies and design possibilities.

Also on the lecture program was Suzanne Lee author of the book Fashioning the Future.

The event was sponsored by Grafill Interaktiv, Norsk Form, Istituto Italiano di Cultura, and the British Council.

Returning to the hub of Interaction Design in Northern Italy, Ryan and Francesca taught a one-day workshop on Intellectual Property for the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea at their Milan Campus. The workshop focused specifically on how IP issues affect designers, and particularly the inventive breed of interaction designers.

The workshop lasted all day and ended with the aperitivo in the swank studio. Nice to see traditions living on!

It was great to meet with this year’s graduating class and see that enthusiasm is still a central part of the experience there. See you all again at the end of year show!

Interaction-Ivrea rules!!

We found these two lovely OwlParrots while wandering in the lane off Cheshire Street (London). Thought they were extremely cool.

Learned recently that this nice image was a solution to the tagging graffiti that was going on (you can see it under the birds). The building owner was getting sick of painting over the ‘tags’ and asked this artist to do something nice there. Now, the tagging has stopped! Cool. Respect.