IDEA Birmingham – the business think tank led by Birmingham City University – has brought together a group of influential business leaders to promote great brands and products using the campaign theme – Birmingham Made Me, the Original Design City.

Posters like the one above will adorn 200 billboards across the city advertising a Design EXPO and Awards to be held at The Mailbox in June. There’s more info here.

The designs being championed included the Land Rover Defender, AGA Range cooker, Pashley Clubman bike, Brooks England saddles and the Jaguar C-X75 concept car.

A little gloss has been added by the involvement of Alasdhair Willis, one of the founders of Wallpaper who is now, according to Tatler, “a high-octane creative consultant for brands such as Estée Lauder, Adidas and David Beckham”. He can now add Birmingham to that list.

are a Design and Fabrication Workshop based in Birmingham, UK.

Recent projects have included the design and fit out of a canal boat for Ikon Gallery, the Design & Fabrication of a modular wall system for Eastside Projects, the fabrication of a giant kite for Heather & Ivan Morison .

And here’s a very lovely film about that kite, called Little Shining Man.

Little Shining Man from Queen & Crawford on Vimeo.

I like the sound of their 3D printing workshops.

Aedas have teamed up with BIAD and Triumph Motorcycles for their latest exhibition, ‘Accessories’, which will launch with a preview show on 16 December at Aedas, Colmore Plaza.

The exhibition will feature pieces designed by MA Product Design Students at BIAD, who’ve produced a collection of 18 alternative lifestyle accessories inspired by components from the Triumph Bonneville T100.

‘Accessories’ will be on display until 20 December, and includes designs for cookware, furniture, audio equipment, household appliances and even pet toys. Triumph will also be awarding one student with a work place opportunity at the company

For more information on the exhibition, contact aedaspresents@aedas.com or take a look at this post on Beverley Nielsen’s Design and Innovation WM blog.

Here are the Birmingham people.

Claire Hartley‘s hand illustrated cards are priced at £6 for a pack of three different designs.

Abigail Borg‘s letterpress cards – ‘Daphne’s Pinecone’ – are priced at £2.99 each, or £7.99 for a pack of 3.

Stephie Says‘ polar bear and reindeer cards are priced at £4 a pack, or £2 each.

Ruth Green‘s hand printed cards come in packs of 5, and has four designs to choose from. Each pack is £5 each.

Night Owl‘s hand drawn cards include four different designs, and can be be bought separately or as a pack for £4.55.

Emma Hardicker‘s silkscreen printed cards come in a variety of designs and colours, priced at £14 for a pack of 5.

Jo Ruth‘s ‘Spirit of Birmingham’ charity cards are £5 and come in packs of 8.

Birmingham & Worcestershire based surface pattern designer and illustrator, Abigail Borg, recently won Best British Pattern in ELLE Decoration’s British Design Awards 2010. Big congrats!

So Acme make whistles. Millions of them a year. For everyone. That’s impressive.

Almost as impressive as this contraption – a two-man flying whistle called the Acme Meteor:

The idea was to drop it from 10.000 feet and have two parachutists pilot it around in a spiral. In the process it would break the world record for the loudest ever whistle.

That was back in 2003. I couldn’t work out whether anyone has ever flown it (and nor could Tom Whitwell when he looked at Acme). Given that there’s some doubt, I think we can assume it hasn’t happened.

I imagine they get a bit of stick over the company’s name, but when they make something that you could easily imagine Wil-E-Coyote riding to his doom then you’ve got to think they bring it on themselves. Which I think makes them even more wonderful.

I’ve often wondered why museums and galleries aren’t using their web presence in more innovative and useful ways.  I worked within a gallery for a number of years, and this gave me the unsurprising insight that many factors contributed to this: underpaid overworked staff, simply no capacity (in terms of time) to explore new avenues, gallery staff restricted to working within strictly defined roles with little room for experimentation, and those who do maintain the web side of things being under supported and in need of upskilling.  Plus above all, there are many challenges facing gallery collections (from conservation to valuation to interpretation and beyond) that the additional pressure of creating new ways of accessing that information sits at the bottom of anyone’s agenda, particularly when it could just end up as a copyright/intellectual property/Digital Rights Management nightmare.

Finally, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery have been brave enough to tackle these issues head on with the decision to publicly release their world-class Pre-Raphaelite collection, the largest in Europe, becoming the focal point for this work.  With assistance from JISC, BMAG appointed Birmingham-based digital agency TAK! after a five way pitch to design and develop a website application to achieve their goal.  And the resulting site is a beautiful, delicate and sensitive piece of design.  Visitors will be able to access high quality content which will enable schools, universities, and the general public to have a greater understanding of the collection in their own time, and in their own space – which in turn could encourage new visitors and raise the profile of the museum.

“TAK! have helped us create the largest online Pre-Raphaelite collection in the world” concludes Linda Suprdle, Project Manager at BMAG. “It’s a fantastic resource and provides an unparalleled level of access and quality to the works on display. Anyone with an interest in art should visit the site and discover the importance of the Pre-Raphaelites.”

I hope that this project will encourage other museums and galleries to consider making their collections accessible online.  They have the opportunity to create such valuable learning resources which could cross so many diversity and access barriers, and it seems a shame that the majority of artworks only ever see the light of day if and when a curator deems them relevant enough. Using online technology, all collections could eventually be available to view regardless of current exhibition theme!

If and when that does happen, I will be interested to see how the role of ‘the curator’ responds to that change.  The Pre-Raphaelite collection site already encourages users to create their own personal collections, so how far a leap would it be for people to share those collections and reasons for their choices with other users?  Imagine an itunes playlist or an amazon reading list – but for art, complete with personal interpretations, anecdotal thoughts, factual evidence and academic input.  THAT would be something I could become obsessive about!