In conversation with the designers: LDF 2018

Transcript of the talk:

James Mair: When we’re in Milan we’re trying to think what are we going to do in September?  This year, once again, we were getting fed up with the stuff that was this year’s fashion and what is the right colour for 2018.  We’re much more interested in things that last longer than that.  We were trying to think of a theme with designers who we currently admire.  We started on the idea of quality through simplicity.  That could mean quality of design or it could mean quality of life, however you want to take it.  Life by simplicity could be reducing things down to minimum or literally however you want to take it.  Gradually, as the designers’ work came through it resulted in the quest for something that’s a bit special.  The thing that made you quiver a bit when you think it’s got that something.  In different ways that’s what we’re all trying to do.

Ilse Crawford: Apart from having my studio in London, I also commute to Eindhoven where I am head of a department that I founded nearly 20 years ago.  The core of that department is essentially wellbeing in the real meaning of the word.  It’s being whole which means engaging with us as human beings through the senses, our connection with the physical world around us.  I believe in a digital age that physical connection is more important than ever.  Immediately, of course, you would hit issues around materials and what they mean through health, through social connections and then through to the system.  That’s why I wanted to bring together those materials here.  Ultimately, how materials are produced, how they are designed and how they are disposed of is a cornerstone, not just of environmental issues but for our humanity.

So, I looked into previous graduates and there are four here.  One, Tom van Soest, graduated six years ago and his project, StoneCycling, is recycled building materials.  Another, Nina Gautier, graduated four years ago and her project, Urtica, focuses on the idea that by focusing on the cash crop economy that’s existed for the last many hundred years.  What we’ve done is kick out not just the alternatives, the diversity, but also the bi-products that go with that.  With metal you not only get rid of what actually was a fantastic textile material but also the medicinal properties, the food properties, the dye and all the other properties that we had with that plant that meant so much to the people who harvested it.  

Then Agne Kucerenkaite who graduated two years ago who has a project where she has identified that the process of glazing makes toxic metal safe and that’s a given, but she then has taken it further back and thought why don’t I identify toxic waste whether it’s in a dump or a bi-product of water.  She had some amazing statistics about how much is created every month by various industries which they then have to mock up.  Why doesn’t that then get used as the starting point for the glazing and pigments?  Instead of saying I want a yellow tie, why don’t you just start with a zinc dump and see what happens.  She’s now got a small company in Rotterdam and is looking for investors.  

Finally Don Kwaning who has just graduated with a project that he’s worked on with Forbo, the linoleum company, for quite a while.  How to make it soft and more or less like a textile, like leather.  As you probably know, linoleum is completely environmental, it’s linseed.  It’s a natural product but he wanted to make it seductive.  I think it’s so important to see that these are projects which shape the way we understand materials because, ultimately, all design is making the imagined order real.  You just need somebody who can use their imagination to create this new reality.  That’s why design is such an important part of materials and progressive materials.

Farah Ebrahimi: I live and work in Frankfurt.  I was originally born in Iran.  I left just before the revolution in the late 70s to the US when I was a kid.  After living in LA for 18 years, then New York where I met my husband and partner and the co-founder of the German brand, E15 which was established in E15, London where he was at school. That brought me to Frankfurt, and speaking of fashion, my background is fashion.  I think it’s important not to go around with a CV but to see or peel back the layers in each one of us.  We all have a story to tell and it all reflects our choices.  I think my time is up.  

(Laughter)

James Mair: No it’s not.

Farah Ebrahimi: I think our choices, some of it seeps through subconsciously and some of it consciously.  It’s always a pressure on companies and also the designers to come up with something new.  I find that a problem because if I have something to say I’m going to say it.  If I don’t have something to say, it’s not going to happen.  What I’m about to present to you or show you is not new, none of it.  I developed an obsession with the Monobloc for some years because I find it quite honest, unpretentious.  It’s very advanced technology or industrial production, but it has evolved and every country has its own production of Monoblocs.  It’s very cheap and it’s usually even considered to be hideous but it serves its purpose.  It has no time, no date, no errors, no vibe, no trend, it serves its purpose and it’s honest.  I love that and I find it so glamorous because that’s the type of endurance that one desires in some things in life.  

The second thing is the Persian carpet.  Yes, I’m from Iran and of course I know a good carpet, but I discovered that everywhere I go, on every TV programme, every world leader that visits somebody in the White House or the palace there’s a damn Persian carpet somewhere.  Enemies meet on this carpet and it tells you stories.  I loved this one because my Father gave it to me some years ago.  It’s not very typical or cliché.  It’s not their flying carpet or the Islamic theme.  This is the culture that is the essence of where I come from.  It’s the garden, it’s the animals, it’s the birds, and it’s the heavens.  It’s based on paradise which is a Persian word.  I knew I had to have the carpet, I had to have the Monobloc and some ten or eleven years ago I designed a sofa with my husband, Phillip, and that’s the Shiraz sofa.  

At the time it was a bit radical because you turned modules 90 degrees to create rooms.  You have a basic platform with cushions which is a very basic Iranian idea.  In Iran you sit on the floor.  Chairs are not a topic.  That’s how it started.  The rest is quite interesting as well, at least to me, because it’s about pure materials.  As pure as the plastic Monobloc is, the brass Habibi table is also pure.  The Enoki solid nero marquina stone side table is pure.  It’s not polished, it’s just oiled stone.  The Backenzahn stool is solid walnut).

Nina Maso: Okay, my English is not very good.  Sorry for that.  I am Nina Masó, one of the co-founders from Santa & Cole.  Santa & Cole is a company from Barcelona.  We started in 1985 with and an old philosophy in the beginning and now it is the same.  It’s to instil life with the warmth of light.  This is very important for me.  It’s one of the first things when choosing the lights in the collection.  This is the most important thing.  The other thing is excite with simplicity.  This collection for me is good here.  When you see the light it excites with this object, not only with the light.  For me, this is important.  There is the Headhat light, a capsule with LED.  This is new technology for light.  It’s the same light but different shades.  With the same light it is possible to create different atmospheres.  There are the Cirio lights, which mean large candle in English, made with porcelain.  It is a very nice material and similar to a candle, beautiful light.  The other lights, include Cestita, this one is from a 50s design.  It’s all different and it’s possible to create a different atmosphere with the same warmth as incandescent light but with LED.

Nani Marquina: My English is worse is worse than Nina's.

(Laughter)

Nani Marquina: In 1993 I started working with the handcraft process.  At the moment, for me the most important is working to see very quickly the process to make the rugs, to show the different techniques, the different fibres.  There is wool, there is cotton and there is thinner wool.  In the rug it is important to show my desires when the people look at rugs and say, wow, this is made by the handcraft process.  For me, it is the most important.  It’s important the person I think it’s important they know that they feel good.  To be surrounded by things that we understand, we understand the origin.  How they are made just by looking at them.  This is what this has come from and it makes us feel good.  It’s important to have all these things when we are at home, to be surrounded by, or in our office where we work.

Libby Sellers: It falls to me now to raise some questions based on what this exhibition means in the context of the London Design Festival, but also in the wider design conversation.  As the exhibition is titled Common Senses with this hidden byline of quality through simplicity, I wanted to start on this notion of commonality.  Given how international this panel is and with the students from Design Academy Eindhoven included as well, finding something that is common across so many different nationalities is, I think, becoming increasingly difficult.  This idea of what is common is an interesting one and maybe we could start with that.  A lot of the exhibits here today or a lot of the object here today are investigating what I would call the hand, the role of the hand in production, craft for a looser term.  That might suggest to people, some kind of nostalgic throwback to a preindustrial era.  How can we make this idea of craft, of skill, of knowledge be relevant for a design community today?

Ilse Crawford: Certainly, at the Design Academy we are interested in the idea of craft and jobs and skill and employment and how that taps into the economy, into the livelihood, into the wellbeing of the makers.  There’s also just the fact that most things that are interesting start small.  They are, by definition, probably going to start as a small scale handmade thing.  If they’re lucky, if they want to, possibly, they will get investment and grow like Tom’s business.  He now has a partner and it’s a pretty substantial business.  It’s industrial.

Libby Sellers: The bricks?

Ilse Crawford: Yes, the bricks, StoneCycling.  It started off as a one man project, a handmade project.  I think we have to rethink our idea of what the lifecycle of businesses is if that’s where you want to go.  Some people don’t necessarily consider industrially made, let’s say, an iPad or an Apple computer.  Another graduate of the Design Academy did a project where she basically through a lot of surveys of engineering firms and Foxconn in China where they are made, she figured out that there’s a huge number of people who hand assemble those computers.  They look industrial, obviously the software is, but she tested the Sellotape on the inside and there was something like 55 different DNAs on that Sellotape so it is a crafted object.  What is craft, what is skill and what is handmade in our society?  I think we are a bit vague about what that means.  I would say that’s a skill.  Is it a craft?  I don’t know.  It’s certainly a skill to put one of those together.

Libby Sellers: It’s a very valid point.  It leads me neatly to ask Farah about the Monobloc.  I specifically remember at Salone De Mobile about fifteen years ago, a Spanish designer called Marti Guixé, apologies if I have said his name incorrectly, doing an installation with the Monobloc and graffitiing them with the phrase ‘Stop the discrimination against plastic chairs’.

Farah Ebrahimi: I really loved hearing, I'm paraphrasing already, what Ilse said about finding meaning for what you are doing or for your work.  That’s important to me, to communicate.  Whether you realise or not emotions are there and if you feel things and sense things and, of course, people say you can communicate with colour.  But for me, materials and how they fit in our world, I don’t want to live in a space, personally, where everything is finely chosen and curated, because when I leave the house I see all sorts of materials that I have to deal with.  As long as you take care of things and don’t throw them away irresponsibly, I think it’s okay.  I think there’s an honesty in plastic that I very much admire.  I don’t like this sense of pretentiousness that comes in the design world and I think we should free ourselves of these status and wealth giving materials, the idea that you can’t use this because that’s just not … I like the honesty in the statement that it brings.  It breaks up the conversation.

Libby Sellers: The idea of objects bearing meaning that goes beyond function.  I think that’s something that’s been developing in design criticism or an understanding of for the last two decades or so.  We’ve moved beyond function.  It’s very modernist ideology and to embrace an understanding of designer’s ability to read social, political and now also environmental ideologies.  The one thing that your comment there really made clear was object’s ability to concern themselves with emotion and histories either implied or literal, as your example.  I think that then might lead to talking about Nanimarquina and the origins and the histories that your company involves yourself with on a daily basis.

Nani Marquina: I connected with the handcraft process but also with a culture, another culture, a very traditional culture.  I had to learn what a rug meant, what it was used for.  What the purpose of it was and how it was made. Why I used wool and not other materials because that changed depending on the climate of the country.  What the artisans communicates with the rugs, the handcraft process.  When I learned what the rug was and how they were made I couldn’t stop learning and putting all this learning into practice and putting all these at the service of design.  My job was to put together handcraft and design and to unite the artisan with the designers.

Libby Sellers: How much heritage and history of these kinds of issues, the references to modernism that bringing 21st century technology is to be able to afford, like LED, in your works, in the objects that you additionally produce?  How is that a challenge for you?  How do you compensate for tradition and heritage and 21st century requirements through Santa & Cole?

Nina Maso: It is possible and design from the 50s with all the knowledge and incandescence.  Now it’s possible to update and put in LED, but it’s the same design.  This is interesting …

Translator: Recover?

Nina Maso: To Recover these kinds of designs from years ago and update with the new technology of today.  That is the important because, for me a design never dies. Not, if it’s a good design.

Libby Sellers: A glut of new, you’re revisiting archives and adapting them for 21st century technology?

Nina Maso: Yes.

Libby Sellers: That relates back to what Farah was talking about with the discovery of the chairs.  It is about seeing objects in a completely different way and not constantly to be searching for the new which is the premise of this exhibition in a way, rather than just going out to find what the latest trend and colour was.  Let’s appreciate the everyday, what we have, the quality of materials, the everyday of the ritual, be it through Fien's installation, through the movement of lamps, to the rugs in your living room.  But also creating the new everydays of the future of using materials that are responsible and forcing a dialogue for a future that is a bit more grounding.

Ilse Crawford: These are mostly materials that are right in front of us already.  Tile, brick, metal, lino, there’s nothing new there.  It’s looking at them with contemporary eyes and doing a slight shift.  I think that’s where it’s interesting, those small shifts.  You don’t need to reinvent the whole world every minute.  It’s looking at it with fresh eyes.