Hasta La Ideas

Milan 2014: a product designed by Dutch designer Pepe Heykoop to be made in an Indian slum has been a runaway success, creating employment for 80 families within a year of launch (+ movie + interview).

Speaking to Dezeen in Milan last week, Heykoop said workers making his Paper Vase earned the equivalent of eight Euros per day, which is eight times the average wage in the Mumbai slum.

“The ambition is to have 700 people out of poverty in ten years time,” said Heykoop. “We are pretty much half way”.

Initially launched in February last year, Heykoop presented the vase at Ventura Lambrate in Milan this year along with a range of other products he designed as part of a project organised by charity the Tiny Miracles Foundation to lift people out of poverty in Mumbai.

Online orders for the vase are averaging around 100 per day, allowing the foundation to keep 80 families in regular employment.

However the other products proved unsuitable to the project, which struggled for the first couple of years.

“In 2012 we never thought this was actually happening and now there’s light at the end of the tunnel and there’s a really good vibe going,” Heykoop said.

The success of the flat-pack vase – which is made of paper and sewn together – has led Heykoop to develop another folded paper product. Prototypes of his flatpack Paper Lamp were on show at Ventura Lambrate.

“The paper vase was the breakthrough and for 2014 I have this paper folded light, which has the same principal and has been flat-packed in an envelope,” said Heykoop.

After they’re made, the products are shipped from Mumbai to Heykoop’s studio in Amsterdam then distributed to consumers worldwide. However, if the buyers live east of India then the designs are shipped straight from there to save them travelling all the way around the world.

The Tiny Miracles Foundation, set up in 2010, is half way towards its goal for 2020 to provide 150 families with a wage of ten euros a day – the UNICEF standard for a middle class wage – in return for their production skills.

Heykoop’s original ideas for the project were lampshades from lambskin, transforming traditional water carriers into leathery vases, but the products proved difficult for the community to produce and too expensive for consumers to purchase.

“I started off with leather lampshades; they’re like 550 Euros in the shop,” he said. “It’s nice when you sell a bunch of them but you have work and then you don’t have work for a few weeks. These ladies were coming to me and asking ‘can I work next month’, and I wanted to say yes but I couldn’t, because the products were not selling on a daily basis.”

Heykoop hopes to train the families in Mumbai to manage the distribution themselves, so the process becomes contained within the community after the programme finishes in six years time.

“This foundation stops in 2020 but it doesn’t mean that this workshop stops in 2020,” Heykoop explained. “If we stop the workshop in 2020, it will all collapse again. If the foundation stops providing the information, then they should be self sustainable.”

Here’s an edited transcript of the interview with Pepe Heykoop:

Marcus Fairs: Tell us about the project that you’re showing in Milan.

Pepe Heykoop: I’ve been a collaborator for four years with Tiny Miracles Foundation, which has been set up by my cousin. This community group that we’re aiming at lives in a slum in Mumbai and they used to be basketry weavers. They earned one euro a day for the whole family.

Most of them were illiterate, couldn’t count to ten it was like hardcore surviving on the streets. Then my cousin started the foundation and she asked me: “Pepe can you design some items that we can produce with them because we want to bring education, we want to bring healthcare but we also want to provide jobs so they can eventually pay for the healthcare and education themselves.”

So I went there and for me it was the second time in India, and it’s such a different world. When I started designing things, it was really heard to blend in with their way of thinking and their world and my world. It took two and a half years to find something that really worked.

Marcus Fairs: What’s the ambition of the Tiny Miracles Foundation? To employ people?

Pepe Heykoop: The ambition is to have 700 people out of poverty in ten years time. I’m only working on the creating jobs pillar and Laurien [Meuter] was taking care of the healthcare and education, other pillars.

Marcus Fairs: So the idea was for you to come up with some products that they could manufacture?

Pepe Heykoop: Well all of them can do basketry weaving with their eyes closed but I said I don’t want to do something with weaving or bamboo, because it has this ethnic look and this fair-trade image and I think we should focus on something new. That a product should sell itself. You want it because you like it, you buy it and then the story is a plus, an extra.

Marcus Fairs: You don’t buy it because you feel guilty, or feel sorry for people.

Pepe Heykoop: No, there’s a lot of good initiatives. You want to support them and then you get an ugly basket, you know what I mean. So these products don’t look like they’ve been made by these people living on the street and that’s where I wanted to go.

But it’s hard. It’s hard when people cannot count to ten to work with them but luckily there was this force within me to not give up and act like a pit bull, hanging on. We found something with the folded paper vase covering to be put around an empty bottle and shipped in an envelope. It comes as a gift and it works out really well. We’ve sold like 100 pieces a day at the moment and that’s why now, starting off with seven people in 2011, now we have over 80 people employed in 2014. We’e heading towards a goal of a group of 700 people, equal to about 150 families.

Marcus Fairs: So that’s the target?

Pepe Heykoop: This is half way. The project takes until 2020, so in four years we are pretty much halfway. In 2012 we never thought this was actually happening and now there’s light at the end of the tunnel and there’s a really good vibe going on since about one and a half years ago.

Marcus Fairs: Tell us briefly about the other two products.

Pepe Heykoop: The paper vase was the breakthrough and for 2014 I have this paper folded light, which has the same principal and has been flat packed in an envelope. The weight’s really low.

These samples I’ve been making during the last week in the studio are prototypes, and I’m testing colours now and colours of the treads and we’ll see which one it’s going to be. This paper should be coated and then within three seconds you just pop it up and there’s a certain tension in the paper, which gives it shape. So then we’re going to sell this separately, the electricity and separately the shade, if you want to change it for a different colour.

It should also be a low price range. The Paper Vase is 19 euros in the shop and this one we want to have 35, 39 euros for the other. Everybody can buy it, because that’s the only way we can have these women working on a daily basis.

I started off with leather lampshades; they’re like 550 euros in the shop. It’s nice when you sell a bunch of them but you have work and then you don’t have work for a few weeks and then there’s work and then there’s not work. These ladies were coming to me and asking “can I work next month”, and I wanted to say yes but I couldn’t, because the products were not selling on a daily basis.

Marcus Fairs: So what techniques do they use to manufacture these?

Pepe Heykoop: There’s paper and sewing. Actually I started off in 2011 with the welding and way too complex techniques, and I had failure after failure. Then at a certain moment, I said I’ll get a folding class and I invited 30 women to come and fold a sheet of paper in half. None of them could do this correctly and then I was shocked because I thought “this is the final try” if folding a sheet of paper doesn’t work.

So then of course after some training, I made something like a game out of it, because I want this workshop to have a really positive vibe and I hate production in China where you’re not allowed to see how stuff is done. If you know where your T-shirt is coming from in these factories in Bangladesh, you don’t want to wear it. So I said we can do, of course we can do production in such a nice way as I can do it in Amsterdam. We can do it there as well and we don’t just take something but we also give something back. That’s the whole.

Marcus Fairs: Do they work from home or is there a workshop they go to?

Pepe Heykoop: We started off with a really dark crappy spot near the street; there were rats running round and cockroaches and rain was coming in, but you should start from something. Then in 2012, we changed into a bigger room and now we have a big room, a proper room that’s clean and light. There’s no rain coming in.

Marcus Fairs: And you said that people get paid to eat, one euro a day. Do you pay them the same, or do you pay them more than the average?

Pepe Heykoop: No no no, they used to earn one euro a day with basketry weaving for the whole family and we go up to ten euros a day, which is the UNICEF standard for middle class. Now it’s eight euros but by 2020, it will be something around ten. If you increase the salary ten times more, you will only ruin the system over there because they will hate each other; who can work with us and who can’t. So we integrate this amount in education and doctor visits. So now behind the scenes we are paying that and every year they should pay 10 percent more for education and doctor visits. So within ten years, they are paying this themselves gradually.

Marcus Fairs: And finally, do they make the products and also ship the products to the customers, or do they put them in a big crate and send them to you in the Netherlands and then you do it from there?

Pepe Heykoop: For the moment, we have everything sent to Holland. Except for orders that go to Japan or Australia, like the other way round, then we ship them directly. But it involves a lot of training, because there should be final checks, so we do some final checking in Holland but we want to train them to do that.

This foundation stops in 2020 but it doesn’t mean that this workshop stops in 2020. So the foundation helps with understanding how it works, with the doctor visits and the schooling and whenever they make the money. If we stop the workshop in 2020, it will all collapse again. If the foundation stops providing the information, then they should be self sustainable.

The post “These products don’t look like they’ve been made
by people living on the street” – Pepe Heykoop appeared first on Dezeen.

Working with skilled local craftspeople is both a duty and an opportunity for Indian designers, says Prateek Jain of lighting design company Klove, in the third and final movie from BE OPEN’s Made In… India Samskara exhibition in New Delhi.

“It’s the biggest job of a designer to make sure that they work with handicrafts people,” says Prateek Jain, co-founder of Klove. “Whether it’s a fashion designer who works with an embroiderer or whether it’s us working with wood carvers or stone cutters.”

Both sides benefit when designers work with traditional craft producers, says Jain, and can help bring craftsmen’s work to new markets. “It’s very important to apply a more contemporary design aesthetic to these handicraft [skills]” he says.

Jain’s chosen medium is glass, thanks to an encounter he had with craftsmen in Ambala, a town in northern India. When he saw local glass-blowers creating intricate glassware for laboratories, he knew he had spotted an opportunity.

“We saw that they were doing these beautiful, flawless bowls of silica glass,” he says. “The blowers had been making beakers, flasks and test tubes for generations. We realised that [we could use] this skill set to explore home decor.”

Together with his partner Gautam Seth he took these techniques used for creating lab-ware into unexpected contexts: creating luxury lighting installations for an international client base.

Klove now creates large, ornate custom-made lighting installations working in a palette of blown glass, brass, steel and copper.

Klove was participating in the Made In… India Samskara exhibition. Curated by Fashion Design Council of India president Sunil Sethi and creative think tank BE OPEN, the show celebrates collaborations between contemporary Indian designers and skilled Indian craftsmen.

For the show Klove used blown glass and beaten metal to create a large lighting installation in the shape of a peacock, India’s national bird.

“We knew that [the curators] wanted to represent India in a modern way. Instantly the idea of a peacock came into our head because it’s the national bird,” says Jain. “We wanted to represent the peacock in a contemporary manner but at the same time have a strong Indian aesthetic to it”.

The feathers that make up the peacock’s fanned tail are represented by 48 slender glass stems, similar in form to elongated laboratory flasks.

“The great part about being in this country is that you have great access to a great resource of talent. You have craftsmen who have been doing this work for many centuries” says Jain.

Samskara, which ran from 10 to 28 February at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts in New Delhi, launched BE OPEN’s Made In… programme, a two-year-long project focussing on the future of craft in design.

The music featured in the movie is a track called Bonjour by Kartick & Gotam on Indian record label EarthSync.

The post Work with Indian craftsmen to keep handcrafting
skills alive, says designer Prateek Jain appeared first on Dezeen.

Milan 2014: Dutch designer Hella Jongerius is launching her first range of rugs as the newly appointed design director for Dutch firm Danskina (+ movie).

Showing at the Salone Internazionale del Mobile in Milan, the collection includes six designs, four of which are by Jongerius. Her designs are called Bold, Cork&Felt, Duotone and Multitone.

“A rug is a two-dimensional product,” Jongerius said. “There is no construction needed, just an expression of yarn and colour. A Danskina rug has clear colour concepts, the colour and texture on the floor is very important in giving a space a certain atmosphere.”

Each design is created using a different mix of techniques, materials and colours. According to senior designer at Danskina, Edith van Berkel, Duotone took the longest to design. “We worked on this fabric for a longer time. We thought it was interesting to make a nice balance of colours. It was made with a flat woven carpet warp in one colour and weft in the other so that the design appears in squares.”

In contrast, the hand woven Bold design is created by using just one piece of wool yarn that is dyed in two different colours. This makes the two block colours in the rug appear to grip one another.

The Cork&Felt design is the only unwoven design, instead made of assembled strips of cork and felt. The strips appear randomly in the design making each rug unique.

The Multitone rug started out as a colour blanket to see how colours mixed and was not supposed to be in the collection at all. “We thought the colours worked so well that it deserved a place in our collection,” said van Berkel.

The other pieces in the collection are two hand-knotted designs by Dutch designer Karin An Rijlaarsdam.

The rugs will be on show in Pavilion 16, stand D20 at the Salone Internazionale del Mobile, Milan until 13 April.

The post Hella Jongerius reveals “expression of yarn
and colour” with rugs in Milan appeared first on Dezeen.

High street fashion chain American Apparel has launched a 43-piece collection of clothing featuring graphic prints by Memphis Group designer Nathalie Du Pasquier (+ movie).

The Nathalie Du Pasquier for American Apparel collection includes womenswear, menswear and accessories in minimalistic shapes covered in colourful, graphic prints.

Du Pasquier was a core member of the Milan-based Memphis Group that pioneered post-modern furniture and fabric design in the 1980s, but has since nurtured a career as an artist.

She was approached by American Apparel creative director Iris Alonzo who asked her to create prints similar to those she designed during the Memphis era.

“It was the first collaboration with a fashion company in many, many years actually because I am a painter,” Du Pasquier told the New York Times. “I have not done that kind of work in a long time.”

The collection marks a departure from American Apparel’s signature style of single-colour staples, with its womenswear often produced in skin tight stretch jersey.

Prints by Du Pasquier also feature in the Wrong for Hay collection launched last year, which is expanding due to popularity.

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Memphis Group’s Nathalie Du Pasquier appeared first on Dezeen.

In the first of a series of movies from BE OPEN’s Made In… India Samskara exhibition in New Delhi, exhibiting designers and co-curator Sunil Sethi discuss the importance of Indian craft and its significance in the modern world.

Fashion Design Council of India president Sunil Sethi, who curated the exhibition with creative think tank BE OPEN, explains that the aim of the show was to highlight the quality of products that are both designed and produced in India.

“BE OPEN has given a very nice platform to the Indian designer, in different disciplines, to be able to show their best,” he says. “Traditional craftsmen – when they team up with an Indian designer – the product can be truly of an international quality.”

Sethi believes there is a demand for high-quality, hand-made products, which, with its rich craft tradition, India needs to take advantage of.

“I feel that, in the international market, the customer wants to take home something special,” he says. “India needs to cash in on its handicrafts. That is the key thing to take from this exhibition.”

Products on show at the exhibition included homeware, lighting, clothes and textiles, as well as contemporary furniture, all made using traditional techniques.

Delhi-based designer Gunjan Gupta presented a range of chairs made from everyday Indian objects, including laundry sacks and traditional Indian masand cushions.

“I’m bringing craft back into the design vocabulary,” she claims.”It’s important for us as a rapidly modernising culture [not to lose traditional craft skills]. It’s also something that has extremely unique artisanal value around the world.”

Fashion designer Rahul Mishra, who had a range of intricately-embroidered dresses on show, says that using traditional craft techniques is a way of boosting the economy in India’s countryside at a time when more and more people are flocking to overcrowded cities.

“The beauty of craft is that it allows a rural Indian – who has never been to a city, who has never been outside of his village – it gives him power to execute his artistry,” he says. “I am here to create jobs in villages. Rather than just designing a product, if you can create a nice system, I think that is a job well done.”

Prateek Jain of design studio Klove presented a peacock-shaped lighting installation made from glass produced by glass-blowers who usually make laboratory equipment.

“We use skilled blowers to make our products who make scientific equipment for labs,” he explains. “It’s a new way of applying a skill set that has been available to us for many years.”

Samskara, which ran from 10 to 28 February at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts in New Delhi, launched BE OPEN’s Made In… programme, a two-year-long project focussing on the future of craft in design.

The music featured in the movie is a track called Bonjour by Kartick & Gotam on Indian record label EarthSync.

The post “India needs to cash in on its handicrafts”
says Made in… India exhibition co-curator appeared first on Dezeen.