contributed by Deb Barrett [designer / business consultant / trendspotter / blogger]
One of my favorite things about making the January round of European design shows is soaking up the exhibitions by young and emerging designers. The thing about young designers is the crazy experimental stuff that you know doesn’t always have much of a chance  of survival in the marketplace, but you still find yourself marveling at their provocative approach to design. Out-of-the-box really doesn’t describe the offerings. You can’t help but feel privileged to be amongst so much talent and you hope that they’ll get noticed and that their products get picked up. After all it’s the crazy stuff – the experimental design – that drives the industry. A trip to IMM Cologne is not complete without seeing Hall 3 where D3 Talents, design schools and design professionals serve up a feast for the senses when it comes to home décor products. Come walk the virtual trade fair halls with me to see what the young buck, future design stars have been innovating this year.
Light In Motion
This year's Interior
Innovation award winner was an amazing light - Etirement by Rémi Bouhaniche of
USIN-e. His inspiration was based on the principle of an organic body composed
of skin and skeleton. In pulling the pendant light's center rod, the intensity
of the light is raised or lowered, coinciding with the distortion of the
light's fabric membrane. In order to produce a flowing and expressive movement,
the designer concentrated on a very precise and harmonious gesture focused on
one point. In this way, the lamp becomes a temporary shape creating a poetic
time from daily action. See the Etirement video here on my blog.
Wood As A Textile
Being a self
professed fabric junkie, I couldn't help but be in awe of German design student
Elisa Strozyk's Wooden Carpet. As her Master of Arts project, she started
experimenting with wood, looking at it in a new way. Always inspired by
materials and our presumptions about it, Strozyk likes to switch properties and
meanings and pose questions like "Can a hard material be liquid or soft?" She
looks at everyday objects around us and rethinks their function or imagines
hybrids between them.
Using wood veneer
castoffs from a workshop that was closing down, she cut different geometric
pieces, transforming them into a flexible and three-dimensional surface. The
pieces were hand- or laser-cut, playing with the shape until she found one that
gave her the result she was looking for and then stitched to a textile backing.
The results are stunning, winning honorable mention in the interior innovation
awards.
Knit1 Purl2
Chae Young Kim
created The Knitted Room. Last year we saw Chae at Design Talents with her
Urban Camouflage 05 that is now being produced by Tapeten Agentur. This year's
edition, Knitted Room, is proof that science and design can go hand in hand.
Kim pushes the
boundaries of digital textile design, combining her expertise in software and
using a complex graphic coding program, she creates new ways of imaging.
Manipulating lines and intersections, the results are breathtaking. Even though
the process is digital, the results aren't cold. Her work has soul; you can
sense the emotion that Chae puts into it.
Inspired by a
snowflake sweater she owned, Chae created the Knitted Room wallpaper by drawing
extremely fine 2-D vector graphic lines. These were re-interpreted as threads
to be braided and knitted onto hard surfaces and giving a warm and fuzzy
feeling of knitted fabrics. Printed in grey scale, the light and shadow effect
adds a 3-D illusion. I can't imagine the precision it takes to create the
illusion of knits. Furthermore, the opaque heat-sensitive ink will increase the
phantasmal vision revealing partly and randomly, as it gets warm from sun or
indoor light. It's better than an M.C. Escher image.
Toy Story
The Brick Series
started with Pepe Heykoop's viewing of a drawing called "all the chairs I sat
on" by James Gulliver Hancock. His reaction to the childlike but detailed
qualities of the drawing led him to create furniture pieces using colorful
wooden blocks.
Pepe commented that
the drawing took him back to his childhood and memories of building worlds with
Lego or wooden blocks. Those blocks became his materials to work with. His
Brick Chandelier has over 1,500 blocks and spans over 8 feet. The Brick series
will soon be produced by Furnism.
Financial Statement
Award winning Royal
College of Art Master Graduate Palvinder Nangla combines centuries of
indigenous craft skills in embroidery from his native Indian heritage in his
mixed media, printed and embroidered textiles. Nangla creates a sense of
timelessness in his finely hand stitched and knitted fabrics.
The piece showcased
during imm Cologne was inspired by the global credit crunch as the pieces of
the financial pages are intertwined in the warp. Small charms and bead randomly
scattered across the textile add to the textile's story. It blew me away!
In Confidence
See more young
emerging designers on my blog, Design Confidential, as well as items like the
IIT tassel lamp by Bormann Atelier and the Eine Wand wall system from ID Modus.
But remember - innovation certainly isn't reserved for the young. On Design
Confidential I've also paid homage to the equally genius industrially hand
crafted textiles of Jakob Schlaepfer, fabric provider to Haute Couture,
launched at Paris Deco Off. And many more...
EDITOR’S NOTE: By the way, if you have a design travel jones, Deb and a colleague are taking a tour group with them to MAISON & OBJET in Paris August 31-September 8, 2010. The group is limited to 12 designers and, besides the monumental show, they are planning insider access to several other design destinations in Paris. GO HERE to find out more. “Give me a ticket for an aeroplane…”
|
Home 
