Hasta La Ideas

This is the second of a mini series on lightweight backpacking and the designers who love it. We previously spoke with Mike St. Pierre of Hyperlite Mountain Gear.

Whether you think ultralight backpacking sounds like hell or vacation, it provides a special dilemma for design minds. Ultralight gear has to be minimal, ergonomic, versatile and very very light. To get a higher-level industry take on the lightweight challenge I spoke with Mike Pfotenhauer, founder, owner and and chief designer of Osprey Packs. Osprey is over four decades old and renowned for innovative, ergonomic and, yes, lightweight pack design. Still independently owned and operated, they’re a leading name in multiple fields of backpacking. When I caught up with Mike he had just gotten back from Southern California—a region he’s required as a Northerner to speak poorly of—where he’d had a nice time hiking around Big Sur. (Don’t tell him I told you.)

You guys have been doing pack design for a very long time. What sparks new ideas now?

For us a new design is often a compilation of older ideas that finally make sense. We build many iterations when developing a new product. Often it requires a minimum of 15 or 20 different versions before we can finalize a new product. All of this experimentation is never wasted. Our prototype archives are loaded with innovative concepts that are just waiting for the right opportunity. We have a lot of ideas stored. In fact, I just told everybody we have to dig out today! We have so many prototypes we’re tripping over them! It’s insane, we’re drowning, we could get lost in them!

Do you still have a hand in the design process?

I’m definitely still involved in the design process. We have a design office in Mill Valley, and up until two years ago I did almost all of it. Now I have two design assistants and a production manager, and the design team in Vietnam, who turn the designs into prototypes and so on. We get a lot of input from distributors and vendors too. We travel to Vietnam where we have 35 people in the development office. With web conferencing we keep the product on a 24-hour development path. They build samples and ship them here or we go over them online, and go over them again and again and again… until the curtain. It’s been worked to death by then. So that’s three designers—two less than half my age, which is interesting. Young minds to keep me thinking young.

You guys just put out a new Exos. What’s your take on going ultralight from a design perspective?

I really appreciate limitations. With any lightweight gear you have that rule—you want to keep it simple. It’s also nice from a sustainability angle. Less process, less material. I do gravitate towards lightweight, towards minimalism. I like the challenge to strip things away. We’re pretty known for that—gear that’s lighter but durable. Not too light, though. We have an extensive warranty program and we don’t want stuff coming back. Or getting thrown away!

How do you determine desired weight and work towards it?

Comfort, efficiency and load transfer are the concerns at the top of our list. Once we’ve accomplished those we do what we can to strip weight where it won’t be detrimental. Because we develop our prototypes entirely in-house we know the product intimately and every gram that’s not pulling its weight is discarded. With the Exos we knew that a highly tensioned back panel would be far lighter and more comfortable and ventilated than one with plastic or foam. We stripped dense foams out of the hipbelt and shoulder straps and created more ventilation by using layers of 3D mesh.

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While the Layers Cloud Chair might feel (and look) like you’re sitting on a cloud, the bulbous lounge is anything but weightless. It’s made from 550 pounds of solid wool—and its construction was a woolly beast of its own. Designed by Richard Hutten, the chair made its debut in Milan last week as part of an exhibit by the Danish textile manufacturer Kvadrat, which enlisted 22 international designers to explore the diverse capabilities of its Divina fabric.

“For me, designing is in the first place a thinking and research process,” the Rotterdam-based Hutten says. “So I looked into the material. What makes it special? How does it look, feel, smell? How can I use it in an exceptional way?” Divina is a durable wool blend, and Hutten chose to focus on what he considered the main qualities of the material—its soft tactility and its availability in a range of vibrant hues.

As an added challenge, the designer resolved to use Divina as the structure for the object itself. “I wanted to use the Divina material as the sole material for the piece, not only as a cover, which is the normal way it’s being used,” he says. “These I called ‘the rules of the game.’ From there, the playing started.”

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With an elegant silhouette that doesn’t scream “DIY,” the Zeta Aluminium lamp is a welcome addition to the realm of hardware-free, flat-pack, assemble-it-yourself housewares. Designed by the Florence, Italy-based ZPSTUDIO, the lamp uses a narrow template design to wring maximum utility out of a minimal amount of material—resulting in low cost and little environmental impact.

Zeta Aluminium is actually the second iteration of this project. The original Zeta, released in 2011, was created from sheets of laser-cut poplar. ZPSTUIO’S founders, Eva Parigi and Matteo Zetti, sold the prototype to another design company, but they have now taken back the patent to redevelop the concept into Zeta Aluminium. “We wanted to further extend the early idea to achieve a more advanced, tech-like version,” Parigi says.

Zeta Aluminium shares the same principles and silhouette of its predecessor, but instead of wood it uses Dibond, an industrial aluminum composite made of two pre-painted sheets of 0.012-inch-thick aluminum that sandwich a polyethylene core. This is a big upgrade from poplar: Dibond is lighter weight and more durable, and it will not warp or bow the way a sheet of wood might. Plus, the polyethylene core adds an additional layer of friction to hold the pieces together.

Assembling the original poplar version of the Zeta lamp

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Francesca Gattello was completing her master’s in product design at Politecnico di Milano last spring when she decided to enter Scenari di Innovazione (Innovation Scenarios), a competition that tasks students with creating new products for small artisan companies. After visiting many of the contest partners’ shops, Gattello was struck by huge sacks of waste outside a marble manufacturing facility, which she learned posed a serious environmental problem. Given the expense of proper disposal, many manufacturers opt to simply pour their stone waste into streams—damaging the local ecosystem. Gattello decided to kill two birds with one stone, so to speak, incorporating stone waste into pure clay sourced from another local shop to create an experimental material that could be used for a line of housewares.

Gattello’s project ended up winning the Scenari di Innovazione and, as a reward, she was able to prototype the products proposed. For her line of pots, cups, vases and bowls, dubbed Calcarea, the Verona-based designer drew inspiration from her collaborators’ existing products. “I chose to work with Attucci Marmi, a little stone industry, to get the waste, and Rossoramina, a family-run ceramic company, to develop the product concept, the prototypes and the collection,” Gattelo says. From Rossoramina, she got the idea for the vessels’ distinctive vertical grooves, as well as for using two surface finishes—”a transparent glazed one,” Gattello says, “to show the complete claylike production process, and a rough one, which shows the core mixed material, its nature, its visual and tactile qualities.”

Gattello had to hand-sift the stone waste to remove impurities, a process she hopes to automate for the production run.

The vessels are made via a combination of mold-casting and hand-turning on a wheel.

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From concrete planters cast from fruit to whittled toothbrush shanks, Pratt Institute graduates Chen Chen and Kai Williams (CCKW) have been exploring industrial processes and materials to create furniture, products and art since 2011. “Our design philosophy is very bottom-up,” Chen says. “We experiment with materials and allow them to inform us of what products to make from them.”

One of the first results of this design philosophy was a set of Cold Cut Coasters, inspired by the way in which deli meats are sliced at the point of purchase. Chen and Williams wanted to replicate that effect with a product where they could pre-make a “loaf” and slice it depending on how much a customer wanted.

“Eventually, we came to the realization that this was not going to be possible,” Chen says. “But in trying for that goal, we came up with a way to make composite materials with intricate patterns by soaking fabric in resin and then wrapping it around solid materials like wood. This process brought an element of chance into each composition we made, as we had no idea what the slices were going to look like until they were cut.” That material exploration also laid the groundwork for what would become a series of four rugs made in collaboration with Tai Ping Carpets and released during Art Basel Miami Beach last December.

Detail views of Coast Occult Dress (top)

The Oldest Stucco Star is another one of the four rugs Chen Chen and Kai Williams designed for Tai Ping Carpets

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