The publicist Francesca Tur has visited us to offer a fresh, casual and fun session that reviews the sum of current impacts that allow us to sketch contemporary creativity with a view of the future. She is founder and creative director at Tendencias, a medium and agency dedicated to creative strategic advice for different brands and agencies at an international level.

Curiosity, observation, popular culture, tradition and creativity. These are the keys to open the pores and senses to perceive the various stimuli, ideas and madness that happen around us and know how to find inspiration in them. Through world icons such as Rosalía, Agnès Varda, Ali Cha’aban or Björk, the coolhunter has explained how to activate different firms in a contemporary way, giving them a universe full of experiences, content, value and, in short, entertainment.

"Technology is a platform that exponentially amplifies the impact of our work"

The strategic designer Andrés Botero has offered a CuldeTalk on the role of the designer in large organizations.  

Specialized in product strategy, UX and business and service design, Botero admits that right now the symbiosis of design and technology is not saving the world, but it is generating a change that designers must be able to manage. 

We must understand design as part of a strategy that adds value to the business and has repercussions for the future. In this way, companies have understood that, in order not to have a negative impact on society, the incorporation of designers in their templates plays a fundamental role.  

This brings us a new paradigm: the design of values inherent to each project. 

How do we live today? What objects belong to our everyday life? What new utilities do we want to endow them with? What future would we like to draw?

It was with these questions that Pepe García's workshop began in ELISAVA's Simultaneous Studies. As true genetic engineers, the students reflected during the session on our daily realities, positive and improvable, to isolate the gene from innovation and inject it into the most common objects.

In their mental laboratory and through genetics, the students transformed different objects by reconfiguring their DNA to provide them with new functions, experiences, sensations and, above all, new stories. 

The results of the workshop were very spontaneous mutations of the proposed objects, such as, a spray that instantly produces a ready-to-eat cake.

Shunsaku Komatsuzaki has visited our studio to talk about Service Design and Human-Centered Innovation in an inspiring and enriching CuldeTalk.

His knowledge and his experience acquired teaching in the most prestigious universities, such as University of Tokyo, the State University of New Jersey and Uniminuto of Colombia, have positioned Doctor Professor Komatsuzaki as a worldwide benchmark in the field of innovation and service design. 

During his talk in the studio, he has shared with us his tools and insights about Human-Centered Innovation and its importance in our profession.  

Analysis, creativity, innovation and design are the keys to understanding and improving the quality of society life.

Five years ago, our team began to build the brand universe of Turia, the Valencian beer. Today we announce that this iconic beer can already be found in the rest of Spain.

Turia breathes art and design, it is culture. Known historically in the Valencian Community, it now transmits its values to the rest of the country, positioning itself as the toasted beer of the market and remaining as a design product. The main magazines of Spain have reflected the launch and Turia is already among the pages of Esquire, AD, Vanity Fair or GQ.

In an elegant and simple environment and with a direct claim, Turia is beautiful, aspirational and refreshing. Through photography, it breaks the schemes and elevates its product category in a typical advertising design for perfumes or jewelry.

Turia is the beer of the roasted heart. 

JMM is a company with history. During these 120 years, the Martínez-Medina family has build its own universe and it has become a leader in the high quality furniture industry. Furthermore, they have taken another step in their long track record. 

The new collection Black Tone evokes Martínez-Medina's essence, experience, evolution and future and focuses on a contract design. A few days ago, they published 'JMM - Private Collection Magazine', the first edition of this magazine, to present this new collection. 

Alberto Martínez and Lucía del Portillo have collaborated in the launch with two articles in which they relate the sense of JMM for them.

CuldeSac is explorer by nature. There's nothing that we love more than getting out of the studio to meet new clients, locations, challenges or adventures. And destinies, that of course. It could be because of a client, such as Princess Yachts, that brings us all around the world with their boat shows, or because of our eagerness to expand our horizons. There is no occasion that we do not take advantage of to keep exploring and growing. This week that specific attribute of our personality has been perfectly visible and we have had representation in three different continents; being in Miami, México, Dubai and Senegal. Which will be our next destination?

Legit isn't a sneakers shop. Is the result of a personality full of sensibility. The contrast of a person who can live in a perfect chaos because there is nothing that matters to him more than his obsession: sneakers; treated with the delicacy of collectable pieces. It's the sort of a sneaker's collector's obsession, that turns his house into a museum. 

Wearing sneakers becomes a ritual, and each corner of the shop is like a museum. The embedded light of the floor draws the distribution of a partition that has been broken to ease the path, drilled to highlight certain products and make the collection completely visible. 

Legit is the refuge of he who only look at his feet. 

Photo: HelloBienStudio

Attention to detail has always been one of the CuldeSac’s standars, and it has its reflection on the work developed for Princess Yachts International under the ‘Crafted in Plymouth’ concept, with elements that reflect the manufacture process and the use of noble materias of the british Brand. 

Leather and Wood are the protagonists of the finishing of pieces that goes from coasters, to press kits bags that become a luxury element, and details that decorate the space of each and evry one of the events organised all around the world. 

The ‘handmade’ work realized by expert artisans specialized in leather is the seal of quality that prints in the Princess Ychts stands, turning them into the perfect display to show the exquisit making process of each one of the yachts that come out of Plymouth.

'For me, it has been a true gift having the opportunity of living this kind of shooting. We always see it from the backstage, so being able to receive all this attention, it has been great' - Fátima Ateyeh

'The four of us together, having all day ahead of us to share, to talk with enough time of our projects... An absolute luxury having in consideration the frenetic rhythm of the studio.' - Gemma Sastre

'We feel like we have found or own place in an area as competitive as any other, and see your work recognized as a referent is an absolute honor.' - Sophie Von Schönburg

'When Alberto asked me when I was 23 what was my dream, I was very sure of my answer. I wanted to open a store in NY, create an image for Inditex, appear in Vogue and generate a fashion show for Chanel. And the Vogue opportunity has finally come to reality.' - Lucía del Portillo

CuldeSac is a big family of designers and experience makers. Their objective is to stimulate with a feeling. Their method is simple: four eyes see more than two. Their projects grow when they are shared around a table. That is the main key: to share and take risks. And the challenge? To surprise with unexpected experiences.

‘We have Custom, a team that loves the retail and fashion world; Experience, that fights for the perfection in the care of people and details with events of the luxury world and Venture, lively to understand and find new ways that talk about the closest future at a spatial level. Everybody live together and grow day by day under the motto ‘Reason loves Emotion’.

[...Read the full interview at >> Diario Design  ]

1. If we think about including user experience in our daily work, we must reconsider every new project from its root.

2. We should understand UX (or user experience) as a novelty because design has been treated poorly.

3. On many occasions, design is surpassed by aesthetics.

4. It may comes a time when we require user experience while contracting design.

5. At the end of the journey, all those things that are debatable and we haven’t been able to justify loose their real importance. Because we should be able to defend the essence of every project. 

6. In conclusion: if we cannot defend a design, it’s our fault.

7. Because design, without UX, is not design.

[ Learnings from our last #CuldeTalk with Sergio de la Casa as a guest. He's CEO at Unexpendables. ]

Adding great quantities of emotion to the process... Constantly looking for sensitivity and the human ingredient... Finding links between the establishment and other ways to design...

Being creative isn’t about taking anything for granted, but outlining the problem and reality from their own roots. To understand that things often turn out like they do, not because they cannot be done in another way, but because no one ever thought before that they could be different. Being creative is not going further, but reaching places that aren't on the map yet. The real motivation of a creative spirit is not going faster than the rest; it's about going faster than yourself. Creativity is not a massive marathon; it's a solitary race where motivation and satisfaction are personal.

[ ... Full interview El Hedonista > CuldeSac, altamente creativos (Spanish reading) ]

There are some spaces where the past speaks to the present. Where studying classic aesthetics gives us the chance to draw the lines of the future. There are some places where materials, colours and processes explain to us the essence of nowadays.

Certain venues and moments remind us why we are who we are, and why we constantly look for quality in the result.

On this occasion, it’s been glass that has crossed our path. Or maybe CuldeSac has crossed glass’ path. At La Granja Royal Factory of Glass and Crystal we’ve reencountered a handicraft process that has remained in the service of our culture until today. With that savoir-faire that keeps us moving forward and once again lays the term innovation on the table.

Long live craftsmanship!

[ By ThisProjectWorks ]

On this occasion we worked as CuldeSac, for CuldeSac. The new website should be an atractive and modern element. Where innovation was a discreet ingredient. So we decided it would be directly related to the user experience, by generating delicated transitions. The main objective was to create a tool that communicated what is CuldeSac without any word...

We finally got a solid concept, "a three part changing Home". Dynamism is reached by the semi-random apperance of the projects; this is how every new visit is completely different to the previous one.

The second element was named by the team as "the reticle": composed by 3 parts, winking at the 3 phonetic hits of Cul-de-Sac and its claim, Reason-Loves-Emotion. We re-formuled the basic elements -present in every web- with the essence of the studio. It's a pleasure to see how the final result is a reflection of the CuldeSac colective.

The Delta Awards of industrial design have celebrated its last edition giving the Golden Delta Prize to Closca Fuga, an innovative and minimalist design created by Closca Design and CuldeSac.

The jury highlighted that it is "a sophisticated design that escapes from high technology, because of its aspect and its functionality. It stands out thanks to its excellent foldable mechanism, and always taking on account people who usually rent or ride a bike".

A project developed by the hand of [sintítulo] and Emilio Tuñón Arquitectos.

We wanted to represent our country via a descriptive and interactive space, where the public could live and understand the extraordinary fusion between the tradition and the modernity of Spain.

The Spanish pavilion for the Expo Milano 2015 was presented as a global project in which architecture, museography, interior design, contents and gastronomy acted in an integrated way, communicating direct and clear messages to every visitor.

The concept of 'diversity' contributed the central axis at the exhibition and helped us to define the claim for the Spanish Pavilion: 'Live the Diversity'.