Train stories, train conversations, train drawings? It certainly is a bumpy ride.

Design for life, Philippe Starck, one of the world's best known product designers, invites 12 hopefuls to a school of design he has set up in Paris. Awesome, Project Runway for product designers!

Wednesday 8.30pm, 02/06/2010 on ABC2

Yoshimoto Nara said that without struggle, you cannot improve. Maybe artists block is an ambition to improve. That's why its important to keep drawing, not matter how hard it gets.

Kevin McCloud says Africa experiences a wider colour spectrum under their bright sunlight, reaping all the potential of their vividly coloured landscape. That is, in comparison to Britain's constant bleak sky, where Europe's greatest cloud cluster casts a grey shadow over the country. Which totally makes sense in the point of view of photography and colour filters. Right, even the grass looks bluer on the other side of the hemisphere.

What else have I learned about Grand Designs but that every staircase has the potential to be a beautiful functional sculpture to be commissioned by a master craftsman.

Kaibutsu-kun is a classic anime by Fujiko Fujio that is being made into a live action drama that will air in Japan soon. Discovered my modeling clay under a pile of stuff the other day and decided to put it to use.

This is the start of something new. Have been trying to find an easy way to make site updates using a blog, and have finally sussed out the coding. Also, I would like a place to put all those design-related posts I never really had much of an audience before. Look forward to it!

Masaki Aiba is a genius.

One of my favourite tv shows is Grand Designs with Kevin McCloud. He is a British architect who follows around people who make innovative houses (for ten years or however long it takes) from self-regulating eco houses made from old tyres to living under an arch brick bridge. You learn so much about triple glazed windows which are absolutely necessary in European climatic conditions, and revolutionary structural design. People want to live in crazy spaces, like in a hole in a hill, or a entirely glass building, and hire boat craftsman to make staircases. They all have enormous bank accounts of course, so they can dream ridiculously impractical and resource-draining things. Sometimes modern, sometimes traditional.

Sometimes its not so beautiful, but amazingly pompous and over-indulgently crass, but fascinating as a train wreck. Its awesome, architecture. Where art and science and craft meet people and space and life.

He has a new program called Kevin McCloud's Grand Tour, which he follows in the line of priveleged British squires in making a grand tour of Europe to get a taste of new experiences and sights.

Genoa architecture

The Palladian principle of designing by perfect proportion, as a reference to the Virituan Man.

Villa Pisani is a beautiful theatre stage with an optical illusion only 10m deep.

He's always witty and makes wonderful analogies for the layperson to understand architecture - like jumping on roof tiles in the form of an arch to demonstrate their structural integrity.. until they fall apart, or spreading vegemite on crackers just as how the walls will cement together, using playing cards to show how venetian walls are built with only two supporting sides and a roof, using tooth picks and ganache to mimic how Venice was built on mud slats along a canal. I just have so much respect for the architect craft. Last year I interviewed an American architect, and the connections their mind make in considering space is so awesome.

Apart from staring at the walls and floors, if that should ever bore you, he visits Parma and stands among million dollar valued cheese racks, eats frog legs, participates in the Carnivale, and is always wandering down dark cobbled alleyways to talk to prostitutes, about historical vices of course.

The scenes in this series are really breathtakingly beautiful, and will make you want to undertake your own grand tour. And McCloud is the perfect British gentleman to take you there.

Somehow I love architecture, yet I don't think I can ever aspire to it. Its like being an astronaut for me hah.