Hasta La Ideas

This is the latest installment of our Core77 Questionnaire. Previously, we talked to Jonas Wagell.

Name: Inga Sempé

Occupation: Product designer

Location: Paris

Current projects: In Milan, I will present a pinboard called Pinorama, designed for the Danish company Hay. It’s a metal grid with rectangular holes and cork, so you can pin items in the cork or hook items in the grid, or you can add accessories like shelves and a mirror. It’s a kind of “wall furniture” that acts as storage for daily things like keys, papers, pictures. It can be put in an entrance, for instance, or in an office.

Also with Hay, I will also show some archive boxes that are made from cardboard, with a special lid like on letter boxes that allows you to insert your papers without opening the box. There is also a drawer in it, so that when you really want to organize your papers, you just pull the drawer out. The boxes come in different sizes and they are covered with some special patterns that I designed.

Mission: “Mission” sounds really Catholic, and I’m not Catholic. My job is to design objects that are easy to use and nice to see and possible to produce. This is the sum of industrial design. So there is a kind of trinity, with use, beauty and producibility.

A new line of blankets for the Norwegian company Røros Tweed. Photo by Erik Five

Sempé in her Ruché armchair for Ligne Roset, released last year

When did you decide that you wanted to be a designer? I never really decided, but I was always attracted to it. As a child, I was always building objects, and I was always looking at objects and thinking about the people who had conceived them, and imagining all the difficulties they had to find good solutions. But I didn’t know about being a “designer” until much later.

Education: I studied in Paris at a small public university for industrial design called ENSCI.

First design job: Working with Marc Newson in Paris for six months. I learned a lot from him, because he has a really strong technical knowledge and spirit. When you’re a student, you don’t realize the hard realities of producing objects, of making them really exist. With him, I learned that.

Who is your design hero? I’m really against that. I can’t have a design hero if I haven’t met this person. So, for instance, of course everybody likes Castiglioni or Vico Magistretti, but as long as you don’t meet people in real life, maybe they are good designers but bad people. So they couldn’t be my heroes.

In fact, I’m not a fan—I don’t have the spirit of a fan. I was always interested in objects but not that much in the personality of the people who designed them. I never read books about designers. My knowledge of objects comes from the flea market, where there are no names.

The Ruché collection also includes a sofa (above) and a bed (below)

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This is the latest installment of our Core77 Questionnaire. Previously, we talked to Misha Kahn.

Name: Mathieu Lehanneur

Occupation: Designer

Location: Paris

Current projects: I just launched a radio for Lexon named Hybrid, and I’m working on new meeting spaces for Pullman Hotels. I recently won a competition for the interior design of the Grand Palais in Paris; that will be a project of maybe ten years in the works. I’m also working on new spaces for the luxury watch brand Audemars Piguet during Miami Art Basel. And I’m working on a project that will be launched next July in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It will be a place named Le Laboratoire that includes a cafe, a restaurant, a store, an auditorium and an art gallery. It will be just between Harvard University and MIT.

Mission: To be as close as I can to the human beings I work for, and not to consider them as “targets” or “consumers” or “clients” but as very complex machines—as human beings are—and try to find the best way to serve them.

Above and top right image: Lehanneur’s Business Playground for Pullman Hotels. Portrait by Jean-Luc Luyssen / Madame Figaro

Wiser, a collection of devices that measure and manage household energy consumption

When did you decide that you wanted to be a designer? When I was probably 15 or 16. Basically, I wanted to be an artist, and my father was an engineer, so I decided to combine both visions.

Education: I went to design school in Paris, at École Nationale Supérieure de Création Industrielle (ENSCI Les Ateliers). I was supposed to stay for five years but I ended up spending seven years there.

First design job: Actually, the day after I graduated, I decided to work without any boss, because it’s not easy to share vision. So my first job was as a freelancer for the Palais de la Découverte, a science museum in Paris. I was commissioned to design all of the interactive devices for explaining astrophysical phenomena to the public.

Who is your design hero? Probably Buckminster Fuller. He was a thinker, a scientist, an architect, an engineer—a designer, basically.

One of Lehanneur’s employees in the designer’s Paris studio

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This is the latest installment of our Core77 Questionnaire. Previously, we talked to Moritz Waldemeyer.

Name: Karim Rashid

Occupation: I am a designer—industrial design, interiors, architecture, graphics, art . . .

Location: Hell’s Kitchen, New York City. But that’s new for me. I just renovated an office here; we moved in four months ago. I was in Chelsea for 20 years, so it’s a big change.

Current projects: Right now I’m working on the architecture of seven buildings around the world—four in New York, one in St. Petersburg, one in Latvia and one in Toronto. And then in industrial design, I’m doing everything from branding for new drink bottles to lighting, kitchen design, jewelry, perfume bottles, and lots of furniture.

Mission: My number one mission in life has been to make design a public subject. To basically preach to the world how design not only shapes a better life, and shapes our future, but how it has a huge impact on our physical well-being.

Rashid’s recent product designs include the Bruno lamp for Verreum (above) and the Hooka for Gaia & Gino (below), both from 2013.

When did you decide that you wanted to be a designer? My first inkling of that was when I was about five years old in London with my father. He’s an artist, and he used to take me to sketch churches. We were drawing, and I looked up at these Gothic windows, and I started changing the shape of them, making them into ovals. My father looked at my drawing and showed me that I wasn’t drawing the shape I was looking at. But I had this weird little epiphany that, oh, I could decide to change the windows if I want. So that was a really abecedarian moment of feeling like I could have some impact or control in shaping the world I’m looking at.

Education: I studied industrial design as an undergraduate at Carlton University in Canada, and then I did graduate studies in Naples, Italy.

First design job: Between my third and fourth year of university, I got a summer job designing business telephones at Mitel, in Canada.

Who is your design hero? Naming one is impossible. It’s like saying, What’s your favorite song? Let me just name a few people that I think had a great influence on me. Luigi Colani. Ettore Sottass, whom I studied with. Joe Colombo. Philippe Starck. George Nelson. Charles Eames. I remember having a Buckminster Fuller lecture when I was at university—that was a huge inspiration for me. Victor Papanek, he was a professor of mine too. And one more I have to add is Marshall McLuhan, whom I also studied with for one semester. He made me realize that design has to embrace theory—that we’re not just doers, we can be thinkers.

Rashid’s recent interiors include the Amoji Food Capital in Seoul, completed last spring. Photo by Lee Gyeon Bae.

Rashid designed the exhibition Out of the Box: The Rise of Sneaker Culture, on view at the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto until March 30. Photo by Philip Castleton.

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Willenz and his Profile chair

This is the latest installment of our Core77 Questionnaire. Previously, we talked to the lighting designer Bec Brittain.

Name: Sylvain Willenz

Occupation: Industrial designer

Location: Brussels

Current projects: At the moment we are working on a variety of things. It’s mainly chairs and lighting, which are products that I have a strong interest in. And then there are some complementary accessories as well, such as tables and mirrors, for example. We are also working on a number of textile-based projects using several techniques; this is an area that we are developing and in which I enjoy working.

Mission: To design useful things that people will enjoy using. But also to contribute to the company that is making these things. So I’m not just concerned about the end user; I’m also concerned about the context of the product and it being something interesting and viable for whoever’s producing it.

Drop is a simple, affordable, injection-molded-plastic bucket designed by Willenz for the Belgian housewares company Xala.

The legs of Willenz’s Candy tables are steel rebar like that normally found on construction sites.

When did you decide that you wanted to be a designer? I guess when I was around 18 and I discovered that this profession existed. At first I wanted to be an illustrator, doing comics. Then when I discovered that you could actually design things and objects, I got really interested in that. But I believe that I have kept my interest in comics and sort of translated it into objects. Because I’ve always had a really strong interest in drawings—in drawing myself, in other people’s drawings, in comics, in how you can simplify reality into a drawing. And I liked the idea of doing that with products, of making sort of three-dimensional sketches that are resolved in really functional and useful objects.

Education: I studied in the UK. I did a B.A. in three-dimensional design, and then I did a two-year masters course at the Royal College of Art in London, in what they called Design Products, rather than product design. That was something that Ron Arad had put into place when he started as the director of the course. I believe he thought it was more interesting to turn things around and call it Design Products, because it opened the possibilities of what you could design.

First design job: The Brackets Included shelf, which was my graduation project and which went into production a year later, in 2004, with a company that no longer exists—and which now, ten years later, has been put back into production by Wrong For Hay in a revised design. The design concept is still the same, but we refined it and tuned a few details. It’s much nicer now.

Who is your design hero? There are many designers I admire for obvious reasons. Philippe Starck would be a major one, because I think he’s a fascinating mind. Not that I necessarily like what he does in terms of his work and style and products; not that I necessarily agree with everything or understand everything that he does—but I do think he is a profoundly interesting mind.

The Profile chair and table

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This is the latest installment of our Core77 Questionnaire. Previously, we talked to the Finnish designer Harri Koskinen.

Name: Bec Brittain

Occupation: Lighting designer

Location: Brooklyn

Current projects: Our latest project is the Twin Vise, which is a new iteration of a light that launched last spring. It’s these two hand-blown glass globes that are held in place with a metal infrastructure. The “twin” bit is that, in turning it from one globe to two, it’s actually sharing an infrastructure and it looks like a twinning crystal or a splitting cell. I’m very excited about it.

Mission: To make things that people would want to keep around for a while. I am very influenced in how I approach objects by my grandmother. She collected a lot of things, and it didn’t quite matter whether they were contemporary or older; she just put them all together in her house and they looked amazing. I think about how happy I am now to have a few of her things, and I’m very aware of how old these objects are but in what good condition they’re in. So I want to create things that are well made enough that they could be passed down to grandchildren, and that are timeless enough that a grandchild would even want them.

The Vise pendant (above) was released last spring. Brittain recently developed it into a new iteration called Twin Vise (below).

When did you decide that you wanted to be a designer? I came from a family of makers, and I always knew I was going to be some sort of maker. It went from maybe being a fashion designer to maybe being a product designer to architecture—there was a winding road. It was when I started working in metal for a hardware company that I realized that I really love metal, and that was a guiding force.

Also, working at Lindey Adelman’s was really helpful, to see her business model and experience making things to order. Making small things and being able to concentrate on them—essentially, being able to do product design while side-stepping the mass-production element of it—that’s what led me to doing this, to doing small production in metal and to dealing with light.

Education: I started out at Parsons, but I left there after a couple of years because it wasn’t a good fit. Instead I got a philosophy degree at NYU, and then I got an architecture degree at the Architectural Association in London.

First design job: Well, I worked for an interior designer all through my undergrad years. But my first graduated, adult job was working for the architecture firm Work AC as a project designer. I was on a project for Anthropologie; they wanted a new, crazy concept and were trying to refresh the brand, so that was my project for a year.

Who is your design hero? I’m going to go with the Dutch artist Madelon Vriesendrop. She’s just really great. She doesn’t take it all too seriously, but she’s a smart cookie.

Inside Brittain’s Brooklyn studio

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