Milan 2014: a teaspoon that follows a cup around a table and a clock that mimics the actions of the person in front of it were among projects presented by students from Swiss university ECAL in Milan (+ movie).
Based around the title Delirious Home, ECAL‘s Bachelor of Industrial Design and Media & Interaction Design students explored alternatives to the idea of the electronically connected smart home by creating products with more tangible behaviours.
Broken Mirror by Guillaume Markwalder and Aurélia von Allmen
“Technology has become smart but without a sense of humour, let alone quirky unexpected behaviour,” explained the project’s leaders Alain Bellet and Chris Kabel in a statement.
“This lack of humanness became the starting point to imagine a home where reality takes a different turn, where objects behave in an uncanny way,” they added.
Mr Time by Léa Pereyre, Claire Pondard and Tom Zambaz
The projects employ sensor-based technology to enhance the interaction between user and product, encouraging people to touch them, listen to them, blow on them or move in front of them to see how they react.
Guillaume Markwalder and Aurélia von Allmen’s Broken Mirror features a round surface made from a sheet of wrinkled reflective material that is pulled taught to show a clear reflection when someone approaches it.
Mr Time by Léa Pereyre, Claire Pondard and Tom Zambaz is a clock that shows the correct time until someone stands in front of it, at which point the hands follow the position of the user’s arms.
Bonnie & Clyde by Romain Cazier, Anna Heck and Leon Laskowski
Bonnie & Clyde by Romain Cazier, Anna Heck and Leon Laskowski produces a playful interaction between a coffee cup and teaspoon.
The cup has a blue interior surface that is tracked by a camera suspended above the table, which sends a signal to a magnet mounted to a mechanism under the table surface. When the cup is moved, the magnet also moves to the same spot and causes the spoon to follow it.
Il Portinaio by Anne-Sophie Bazard, Tristan Caré and Léonard Golay
Il Portinaio by Anne-Sophie Bazard, Tristan Caré and Léonard Golay is a curtain of suspended threads that reacts to the presence of someone standing in front of it. A disembodied hand moves along a raised track to their location and draws back a section of the curtain so they can walk through.
Voodoo by Megan Elisabeth Dinius, Timothée Fuchs, Antoine Furstein and Bastien Girschig
Voodoo by Megan Elisabeth Dinius, Timothée Fuchs, Antoine Furstein and Bastien Girschig facilitates a tactile interaction between people sitting in two armchairs by making one of the chairs shudder and vibrate when someone moves in the other one.
Ostinati by Iris Andreadis, Nicolas Nahornyj and Jérôme Rütsche
Iris Andreadis, Nicolas Nahornyj and Jérôme Rütsche designed a series of containers called Ostinati that can be tipped over and spin on the edges of their bases thanks to embedded gyroscopes.
The Delicious Bells by Caroline Buttet, Louisa Carmona, Margaux De Giovannini and Antonio Quirarte
The Delicious Bells by Caroline Buttet, Louisa Carmona, Margaux De Giovannini and Antonio Quirarte turn dining into an aural experience by projecting noise from speakers embedded in the handles of glass cloches when the cloches are raised.
Chairoscuro by Léa Pereyre, Claire Pondard and Tom Zambaz
Touching the shadows of lamp shades projected onto a wall in Léa Pereyre, Claire Pondard and Tom Zambaz’s Chairoscuro installation causes the corresponding light to turn on and off.
Windblower by Victor Férier, Ludovica Gianoni and Daniele Walker
Victor Férier, Ludovica Gianoni and Daniele Walker designed a fan attached to a smaller version that users blow on to start the device.
Cactunes by Pierre Charreau, Martin Hertig and Pauline Lemberger
Cactunes by Pierre Charreau, Martin Hertig and Pauline Lemberger invites people to touch a series of cacti that each emit a different sound on contact.
Cactunes by Pierre Charreau, Martin Hertig and Pauline Lemberger
The project was presented at Spazio Orso 16 in Milan’s Brera district during the Salone Internazionale del Mobile last week.
Milan 2014: Japanese designer Jun Murakoshi’s tableware features patterned thread tops that create a geometric lattice for supporting flowers.
Tokyo-based Jun Murakoshi has created a collection of vases and fruit bowls called Bloom. The blown-glass tableware pieces feature small grooves on their edges, which allow thread to be criss-crossed over the tops in a geometric pattern.
“Blown glass has a feeling of both warmth and tension that looks like conflicting image,” said the designer. The glass was hand-blown by three young glass artists: Shunji Sasaki, Takeyoshi Mitsui and Emi Hirose in Toyama, Japan.
“The narrow lines create unlimited patterns, the transparency and exquisiteness that each materials possess make foil each other,” said the designer.
Flower stems can be threaded through the small gaps between the strings or rested in the larger hole in the centre of each piece.
Different coloured threads are used in combination to creating variations in the rings across the tops of the pieces, which are available in a range of sizes.
Milan 2014: Japanese design studio Nendo has unveiled several new pieces to accompany the Peg armchair it produced last year for Italian brand Cappellini (+ slideshow).
Peg sofa table
Also called Peg, Nendo‘s collection includes another chair, a series of beds, a chaise longue, a small and large table, a mirror, a corner cupboard and two sofas.
Peg sofa table
“Peg is a family of products that tells a history, comfort but also attention to detail, quality of materials and good shapes,” said Cappellini in a statement.
Peg column
The shape of the round armchair was influenced by the small cars that populate the streets of Milan. Its seat rests on a crossed ash frame, with the back legs poking up through the sides of the backrest to provide support.
Peg chair
The top and legs of the tables are both rounded – a distinctive element repeated throughout the collection. The tops of the legs puncture the tabletop so they are visible when viewed from above.
Peg chaise longue
Echoing a design feature from the table, the longest tripod supporting the mirror is visible through a hole at the head of the oval glass.
Peg mirror
The chaise longue and sofas come with removable cushions available in a range of colours and fabrics.
Peg bed
The beds in the collection have wood headboards that can be upholstered in fabric or leather. The corner cupboard is made with three poles that support four triangular moulded shelves.
Peg bed
All the pieces come in wenge, ebony, natural ash wood or bleached walnut.
Opinion: the photo-sharing site set the agenda at this year’s Milan design week and hints at how technology will transform the way we experience the world, says Marcus Fairs, who also shares a selection of his own Instagram images from the week (+ slideshow).
I was attending a talk in Milan the other day and I noticed that one of the panelists was far more interested in his iPhone than the discussion. The girl sitting next to me in the audience was similarly preoccupied. Then I realised what was going on: the guy was Instagramming a picture of the girl, who had just Instagrammed one of him.
For me, the star of Milan this year was Instagram. It was the lens though which I experienced the week: it was a kind of parallel digital version of my real-world experience.
Instagram is how I kept up with what friends were doing in Milan, and was a key source of research for what I should see. It’s how I found out about the things I’d missed. I know plenty of other people who said the same.
It was my preferred method of documenting my own experiences at the fair this year. And when a journalist from La Repubblica called to interview me about my Salone highlights, her first question was “What was your favourite Instagram moment?”
Instagram is how I found out that Massimo Morozzi had died. A few years ago news like that would have spread on Twitter, but this year the design cognoscenti have switched to the photo-sharing service.
But Instagram is a purely visual medium that does not criticise but instead, through its filtered trickery, burnishes. It’s not a surprise that designers, who collectively aspire to create a more beautiful world (and were largely silent during the 2011 twitterstorm), have embraced it too.
Dinner at Spazzio Rosanna Orlandi
This wasn’t a vintage Salone in terms of talking points and there appeared to be little consensus among Intagrammers as to the outstanding shows. Rather the city itself – and particularly its more photogenic venues – became the stars. The breezily atmospheric Palazzo Clerici in Brera; the eccentric Spazio Rosanna Orlandi; the breathtaking Villa Necchi Campiglio; the charming pop-up street cafes and garden bars in Ventura Lambrate; the surreal Fornasetti house. Under a benevolent sun, it felt more like a sprawling lifestyle festival than a design fair.
Instagram feeds are highly personal, highly curated visual diaries of an individual’s aesthetic interaction with a place. The filters and cropping tools allow you to achieve visual perfection within a little square frame, creating an idealised world free of the clutter and noise of the real world.
My own Milan Instagram diary is low on design but high on portraits of people I’ve met, dinners I’ve attended and incidental tableaux from my meanderings around the city. Trawling through my feed will no doubt strongly influence my memories of the week. It’s an airbrushed digital travelogue that paints both the city and my interaction with it in a flattering light.
Instagram is a powerful arbiter of taste because it favours certain aesthetic experiences over others. It likes a strong, colourful form against a plain background; it loves translucency and diffraction; it adores sunsets. I wouldn’t be surprised if brands soon start to rethink their presentation strategies to enhance the Instagrammability of their stands.
Interconnections by Nao Tamura at Lexus Design Amazing
Instagram also favours eclecticism: a typical fairgoer’s feed will feature a product followed by a selfie followed by a street scene followed by their lunch. Design has existed in a bubble of its own for decades: to walk round a design fair or flick through a design magazine is to see an aesthetic monoculture. But Instagram reveals how the design world intersects with other realities, and shows them to be just as beautiful.
Instagram is just a foretaste of the way we will use digital technology to experience events like the Salone del Mobile in future. Capturing technologies like 360-degree video – which records everything in all directions – allows the creation of convincing digital replicas of physical spaces.
And display technologies like Google Glass, augmented reality and virtual reality mean that we will be able to access additional layers of information as we move around an event, or even experience it without being there. One day the Salone del Mobile could be hosted in a huge server farm, accessible only through a virtual reality headset.
These technologies also allow users to inhabit enhanced, personalised worlds – or entirely artificial worlds – that can be designed around their preferences, edited on the move, Instagram-style, and filed for future enjoyment. Bored by the colour of your kitchen? Use a real-time filter to change it. Walk to work too drab? Brighten it up, adjust the contrast, cut and paste some sights from your last holiday.
To an extent we already inhabit a parallel space: time spent on Instagram, Twitter or other social media is time spent in a virtual community rather than the real world. The cliche of the person so entranced by their iPhone that they notice nothing of their physical surroundings is just the beginning of the migration towards parallel digital worlds that are as convincing as the real one.
Somebody will have to design these worlds but it is astonishing how little attention designers and the design industry is paying to this potential. In Milan this year only Moooi dared dip their toes into the water, presenting an online 360-degree digital walkthrough that allowed people who were not in the city to experience their show.
Elsewhere, Joseph Grima’s FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) project harvested images from Instagram, reactions from Twitter and combined them with robot-generated transcripts of discussions. It treated the fair as a giant data-generating event and used algorithms instead of journalists to decide what to publish.
An excerpt from one of the FOMO publications
Apart from those two examples, and a smattering of other projects, this year’s fair was largely a tech-free zone. The lack of innovative uses of technology at the fair was the elephant in the room. This is an extraordinary missed opportunity for an industry that needs to embrace technology if it is to have a future.
Milan 2014: designer Tom Dixon presented a collection of pendant and table lights that combine geometric brass-plated planes with spherical glass shades in Milan last week.
Dixon‘s Plane collection features two-dimensional surfaces surrounding spherical diffusers, creating lamps with geometric outlines that change depending on the aspect they’re viewed from.
“Geometry is a constant in my work,” Dixon told Dezeen, explaining the form of the lamps. “Actually I think in the main I have been minimal and geometric for many years now, starting with the Jack Lamp in 1997, or maximal and geometric, such as with the Pylon Chair in 1990.”
The flat planes are made from steel covered in reflective brass plating, while the spherical diffusers are produced from white glass.
“The flat and the round, the shiny and the matt, the reflective and the translucent is just part of the exploration of opposites that we started a couple of years ago with a collection called Rough & Smooth,” Dixon added.
Pendant versions are available with either round or triangular planes, while the table lamp balances on a separate surface fixed perpendicular to the rear of the metal section surrounding the light.
Electrical cords that carry current to the bulbs disappear into raised channels that lead from one edge of the flat surfaces to the central glass sphere.
Grouping the lights close to one another results in dynamic reflections across the warm brass surfaces.
Milan 2014: Anglo-Indian design duo Doshi Levien has created a lounge chair for B&B Italia based on memories of a trip to the Himalaya mountains in India (+ interview).
The Almora chair aims to recreate the experience of visiting a town of the same name in the Himalayan foothills.
“The idea of the chair really comes from this memory of seeing the snow-capped Himalayan peaks wrapped in a soft, warm blanket,” said Jonathan Levien.
“You are wrapped in the soft warm blanket so you enjoy the mountains but you are warm where you are,” added Nipa Doshi. “It was the idea of really capturing this in a piece.”
She added: “Of course at the end of the day it is a chair, but how do you replicate this feeling of being in the cold air but being warm? So I think that although the chair is open, it is also warm.”
The chair features a two-part conical plastic frame that forms the seat and back, plus a curved oak headrest that appears to balance on top of the frame.
The seat is upholstered in leather while the headrest is finished in shearling. The chair is mounted on a five-spoke aluminium swivel base and the accompanying ottoman has a round steel base and a curved wooden seat upholstered in leather.
The chair is the first product designed by Doshi Levien for Italian brand B&B Italia. It launched this week in Milan during the Salone del Mobile.
Here’s a short interview with the designers conducted in Milan:
Marcus Fairs: Tell us about the new lounge chair you’re showing today.
Nipa Doshi: The chair is called Almora. It is our new lounge chair for B&B Italia: two years in the making and designing. The idea of the chair really comes from this memory of seeing the snow-capped Himalayan peaks wrapped in a soft warm blanket.
First model of the Almora lounge chair
Jonathan Levien: What, the peaks are wrapped in soft warm blankets?
Nipa Doshi: No, you are wrapped in the soft warm blanket so you enjoy the mountains but you are warm where you are. And we imagined this chair almost to have the same feeling of warmth and comfort and to use the chair to enjoy the view outside and to sleep in; or equally to be with your children and read stories. It’s a chair very much to be alone in, but also to be with the family.
Marcus Fairs: What does Almora mean?
Nipa Doshi: Almora is the name of this place in India, in the Himalayan mountains.
Jonathan Levien: And where we were staying in the mountains was in this lodge, which had a really nice outdoor space. Indoor and outdoor were connected. We want to feel warm and secure in the place in which we are staying but very much engaged with our surroundings so the chair, in its gesture and form, is very open and it is almost like it is embracing not only the person sitting in it but also the view.
Concept model of the Almora lounge chair
Marcus Fairs: Is the chair really inspired by this village in the Himalayas? Or is it just a nice story?
Nipa Doshi: No, it is really. The materiality of the piece, you can see it is… the shearling, the leather. They are all materials that are very tactile, very human, living materials. It was the idea of really capturing this in a piece. Of course at the end of the day it is a chair, but how do you replicate this feeling of being in the cold air but being warm? So I think that although the chair is open, it is also warm.
Jonathan Levien: There has to be a starting point to every piece and for us it is a feeling. It is what do we want to evoke in the piece. We don’t come from a functional perspective. It is more from a sculptural point of view and that means thinking about the space in which it is going to be used and dreaming about that. But then of course that is only part of the project and the other part is what is the materiality of the chair? What is the technology, the structure? How are the parts composed? We are hiding the technology, we are trying to create a sense of overlapping forms and floating components and hide the technology. There are many strands to it and for us it helps to start with a dream, with a place, before it takes shape.
Concept model of the Almora lounge chair
Marcus Fairs: You are an Anglo-Indian couple and a lot of your work up to now has featured identifiable Indian motifs or forms. But this, if the story hadn’t been explained to me, I wouldn’t of thought of India and the mountains.
Nipa Doshi: But in a way I think it is not about India but about the mountains and I think it is more about nature. Almora was more a fictitious place; it could be Switzerland and the Alps. It can also be just looking at your garden. Many of us, even if we live in a city, have a very narrow view where we can have nature so it works in a home so the idea was very much about the experience you want to have in a home rather than a place as such.
Jonathan Levien: But, it is true also that the cultural aspect in our work is not as ostensible in this design in that you cannot see so clearly a partnership of Nipa and Jonathan in this design. It is not expressed in terms of a design-meets-a-decorative-graphic approach but I think it is very much a coming together of Nipa’s sense of visual identity and my ability to translate that into three-dimensions.
Milan 2014: Dutch architecture firm UNStudio has revealed a chair with an S-shaped seat that allows its user to move from sitting upright to relaxing with a leg up (+ slideshow).
Part of UNStudio‘s Gemini collection for Dutch brand Artifort, the asymmetric chair was designed to let sitters “sit up, slouch, lounge, hang, repose or hunker”, as well as to “shift, twist, turn, swing around, pivot to face each other or turn towards the room.”
Set upon an asymmetric frame, the body of the chair curves towards the floor on one side and arches upwards to form both an arm and a backrest on the other. This shape allows a user to sit in a variety of different positions.
“The main concept for the Gemini design is versatility,” Ben van Berkel, co-founder of UNStudio, told Dezeen.
“We approached this not only in terms of where the chairs can be used, but also in terms of how. The shape of the chair allows for a wide variety of seating positions and therefore also for variety in perspectives and views of the spaces in which it is placed.”
The chair is available in two varieties: one curving to the left and the other to the right. The seat shell is made with a metal insert that is padded with foam, covered with Dacron and upholstered with a stretch fabric. There are four types of upholstery available, in two different blues, beige and orange.
The Gemini collection also includes a small matching side table. This features a metal frame, upholstered sides and a tabletop made of solid oak.
Concept diagram
The chairs are on display in Pavilion 16, F30 at the Salone Internazionale del Mobile, Milan.
Here’s a project description from UNStudio:
Gemini, Artifort (Schijndel, NL) 2014
Gemini for Artifort has been designed as individual furniture pieces which can be placed as single seating elements, in pairs or in groups of various sizes and configurations. The concept for the design of the chair centers on flexibility of movement, versatility in seating positions and variety in spatial experiences.
Concept diagram
Set upon an asymmetric frame, the generously proportioned single-surface body of the chair curves towards the floor on one side and arches upwards to form both an arm and a backrest on the other. This contoured composition affords the user variety in seating positions and directionality: they can sit up, slouch, lounge, hang, repose or hunker, but they can also shift, twist, turn, swing around, pivot to face each other or turn towards the room.
Spatially Gemini introduces varying visual orientations of the spaces in which the chairs are placed and offers the possibility to choose between sitting alone, sitting together or simply enjoying different views of the surrounding space. When coupled with either its direct twin or its mirrored twin, the nonsymmetrical silhouette of both the frame and the soft element transforms to create a curvilinear symmetry.
Elevations
The horizontally subdivided soft body of the chairs can be upholstered in up to three ways in one or two colours, from a choice of many different shades. Gemini can be used in private, public and semi-public settings, such as waiting areas, lobbies, offices, lounge areas and libraries.
Milan 2014: London studio Poetic Lab has revealed a new iteration of Ripple – a lighting collection that imitates movement on water – at Milan design week (+ movie).
The concept design for Ripple was originally shown by Poetic Lab last year in Milan, but has since been developed further into two different sizes and put into production with Austrian crystal brand J. & L. Lobmeyr.
Each style consists of two unevenly hand-blown glass domes sitting on brass bases. A G4 halogen light shines from within the smaller dome through the larger dome as it slowly rotates. This creates a constantly changing mix of light and shadow to create a ripple effect on the surfaces around the lights.
“When I first saw Ripple I was totally struck by this effect and I had to sit down for about 30 minutes and watch it,” said Lobmeyr’s co-owner Leonid Rath. “It was really an emotional decision to take it into a range.”
“It’s not about designing a lamp, it’s about the experience and the emotion that is created by this moving light,” Poetic Lab co-founder and designer Hanhsi Chen told Dezeen.
Firing the glass in the furnace
“The inspiration of the collection comes from the nature beauty of light and fluid matters. We try to capture the essence of light through its gentle movements, just as all the nature light do,” said Chen.
The molten glass out of the furnace
“The process starts with the hot molten glass and as it interacts with the air, gravity and the breeze of the blower it gradually takes shape into a mysterious bubble,” added Chen.
Blowing air into the molten glass
Ripple is on show at the Spazio Rosanna Orlandi, Via Matteo Bandello 14-16, Milan.
Feature: thirty-three years after designs by the Memphis Group caused a “mass-media event” at the Salone del Mobile, the bold graphic style they created is back in favour in Milan and is appearing in some unusual places, finds Dan Howarth.
Clashing colours, blocky shapes and loud patterns could be spotted in galleries, shops and on stands around Milan this week, signalling a return of the Memphis style often associated with these elements.
The Memphis movement began in 1980 after Postmodernist designer Ettore Sottsass gathered together a group of like-minded designers working in Milan. The group allegedly took its name from the 1966 Bob Dylan track “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again” that was played throughout their meeting.
Carlton bookcase by Ettore Sottsass, 1981
The designers, including Sottsass, Alessandro Mendini, Michael Graves, Georges Snowden and Nathalie Du Pasquier, debuted a range of pieces designed to communicate ideas rather than being based on forms at the 1981 Salone del Mobile in Milan.
“It was probably the beginning of a new era,” Du Pasquier told Dezeen. “Form did not have to follow function any more, and design was about communication. Even though very few of the things were actually in production, it was a big mass-media event.”
These products included Sottsass’ unconventional Carlton bookcase, which featured colourful angled shelves and bookends, disconnected from one another. It aimed to question why a bookcase needed to look like a typical bookcase.
This notion fell under the Postmodern cultural style – a reaction to the functional aesthetic of the Modernism movement prevalent in the years before – and resulted in a series of pieces created from geometric shapes in bright colours.
Tahiti lamp by Ettore Sottsass, 1981
Over three decades later, the forms, patterns and colours typical of Memphis have returned to Milan’s design week and can be seen in exhibitions across the city.
The rise of the trend has followed a number of exhibitions and articles about Postmodernism and design in the 1980s, following Sottsass’ death in 2007.
After leaving the design world to work as an artist, Natalie du Pasquier has recently been thrown into the spotlight by lending her bold signature prints to products by well-known brands.
Nathalie Du Pasquier’s textile designs cover a chair in the Wrong for Hay
Her colourful patterns have been applied to cushions and accessories launched last year as part of the Wrong for Hay partnership between British designer Sebastian Wrong and Danish company Hay.
The Du Pasquier-patterned products are currently on display at the brand’s pop-up Mini Mart for Milan design week and press material is being given away in the tote bags, which have been spotted slung over many shoulders around the city.
According to a spokesperson for Hay, the range has been so successful that the brand has commissioned Du Pasquier to extend the collection with new designs.
“Memphis as a movement and philosophy has been in the public eye for a few years now,” said Johanna Agerman Ross, editor-in-chief of Disegno magazine, who approached Du Pasquier about a collaboration after seeing her prints resurface and curated an exhibition of her new work for Milan design week this year.
“Nathalie has had some prominence, for example with her textiles for Wrong for Hay,” said Agerman Ross. “There had also been some other balls in the air such as American Apparel, so it seemed like the perfect time to approach her.”
Nathalie Du Pasquier exhibition at her studio in Milan, curated by Disegno
An exhibition of original Memphis furniture is currently on show at Milan’s Fondazione Stelline, providing visitors with a handy comparative tool to spot elements from the designs in new work and inspiration for more young designers visiting the city.
“Memphis has been the last big movement so people remember very well,” said Alberto Bianchi Albrici, the exhibition’s curator and head of Post Design – the company that continues to produce the pieces.
“Sure it’s more popular today more than ten years ago,” he said. “Firstly because we have internet. Also because we are sought after by several people from stores who see the exhibition at the museum. I think that is normal.”
Sculpture by Nathalie Du Pasquier, used on the cover of Disegno magazine No. 6
With so many references around, designers are adapting the style and introducing new colours, geometries or patterns to create contemporary iterations.
“I think a lot of younger designers that belong to a generation that didn’t live through it come to it as a point of inspiration,” said Agerman Ross.
Terrazzo Project exhibition in Milan
Members of the Terrazzo Project have made the Terrazzo composite material in bright colours and used it to build geometric sculptures on show alongside the ECAL exhibition in Milan’s Brera district.
The colours and styling used for the installation are very similar to work by Sottsass. “What we wanted to do this year was colourful and it’s true, [the installation] is similar to Memphis in many ways.” said Philippe-Albert Lefebvre of the Terrazzo Project. “It’s something that’s in the air,” his colleague Ana Varela added.
Imagery from the Terrazzo Project exhibition in Milan
However, Memphis was not originally just about decoration, colour and graphics.
“Memphis is being used as a style and as a styling tool by a lot of designers and companies, whereas it was actually more of a philosophy and way of working,” explained Agerman Ross.
Albrici agrees that the term “Memphis” shouldn’t just be thrown around to describe the patterns and clashing colours added to designs.
“If you come to me and say ‘I am influenced heavily by Memphis’, my feeling is that you need to do something new,” said Albrici. “You can be influenced by Memphis but you must be careful, because to make strange drawings is easy but it’s not only strange, there was a more complicated structure.”
“Memphis wasn’t about decoration,” said Du Pasquier’s partner and fellow Memphis Group member George Snowden. “There wasn’t even a Memphis style, despite what everyone says.”
He believes that the Postmodern philosophy may still be present today, but that is has changed. “Maybe younger Postmodern designers are using it themselves also as communication, but I don’t think they’re doing it in the same way we were doing it during Memphis time.”
Nevertheless, Du Pasquier said she is happy to continue to her recent foray back into design. “I have started from where I stopped and I now have put the machine in motion again,” she said. “I’m going to design other things, textiles. If I have requests I am more than happy to do it.”
But she wonders how long the demand for her signature style will last.
“Maybe people will only be interested in stripes next year and won’t call me any more.”
Milan 2014: Japanese design studio YOY presented a lamp that projects the shape of a shade onto a wall and a rug that doubles as a chair in Milan this week (+ slideshow).
The new collection from YOY includes a tray that appears to defy gravity and a series of drawers that can be mounted on the wall, as well as the rug and two lamps.
“In this exhibition, we tried to make a new story between a product and a space,” YOY co-founder Naoki Ono told Dezeen. “We would like to create strange feelings with humour in an ordinary room.”
The table and floor lamps are both made from aluminium and plastic. Rather than using a light bulb, the designs have a hole in the head with an LED light inside, which projects the shape of a shade onto a nearby wall.
The rug has a 10-millimetre-thick aluminium sheet inside that makes it strong enough to hold the weight of a person when rolled, enabling it to be used as a seat. The black fabric is made from polyester and elastic.
The wooden tray, called Protrude, appears to be perilously perched on the edge of a table when in fact it is fixed with a stainless-steel clip.
The drawers are designed to hang on a wall and have a mirror inside to make them appear deeper. They come in small, medium and large, and are available in black and white plastic.
The pieces are showing at stand D-43, Salone Sattelite, Fiera Hall 15 in the Salone Internazionale del Mobile, Milan from 8 – 13 April.
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