Hasta La Ideas

10jours10designers (“10 Days, 10 Designers”) is the name of a recent design competition held by French furniture design house Minimalist Editions. The challenge was pretty simple: Each designer gets an oak slab, 400mm × 250mm × 28mm—that’s roughly 16” × 10” × 1” to us Yanks—access to a CNC workshop and an ebeniste, and has ten days to come up with an oddments tray, or whatever you call that little key-holding dish by the front door of your house.

While the end products are pretty refined, they remind me a lot of those design school projects, where groups of students are given identical materials and yet yield a surprising variety of designs. Check out Lionel Dinis Salazar’s artfully-kerfed “PAVO”:

Pierre Dubourg’s pretty bi-level number leaves no doubt as to what the form was inspired by—it’s called “Super Tanker”:

(more…)