Hasta La Ideas

Fabian Dumas, The War of the Lights – Yokozuna suspension lamp (produced by DARK). Atame collection of suspension, table and floor lamps.

Celebrating it’s fifth year in Milan, DMY Berlin presents Instant Stories, tauting the work of eleven of the city’s finest young designers. Produced and presented as a traveling exhibition, the individual works were shown in “stage-cases” that felt like elevated dioramas—giving each piece a sense of theater. These stage-cases emphasized the narrative aspect of design and allowed each designer to create their own context, identify visual cues as inspiration and, like any good piece of fiction, invite the viewer to participate or reject the premise.

The format of the case-stages corresponds to the 4:3 proportion of digital images. Already pre-configured to be instantly turned into a two-dimensional, mobile and easy shareable medium, the sceneries help the objects to come to life not just within an ephemeral moment on the exhibition’s stage, but as a handy snapshot you can take home.

Rasko Naibaf Furniture, This is Not an Umbrella – parapluie table (produced by Rasko Naibaf Furniture).

The pieces and their corresponding backdrops ranged from the predictable (Rasko Naibaf Furniture’s umbrella-shaped “Parapluie Table” presented against a background of clouds) to the ethereal (HAW’s topographical bowls set against an otherworldly landscape). The challenge of this type of scenographic display becomes the way the storytelling itself can devalue or overextend the framed object.

DMY Berlin presents Instant Stories
Overlite
via Privata Oslavia 8
Ventura Lambrate District
Milan
Through April 22

Mark Braun – Hama Chair & Lounge Chair (produced by Atelier Haussmann). Fortune Drinking set TS 283 (produced by J&L Lobmeyr).

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The two fellas behind Sapore dei Mobili are Portuguese and Japanese—and they’re based in Milan, to boot—but they’ve gone French for the first product of their design studio, subverting the old clich&eacute: “Let them eat cake.” Rui Pereira and Ryosuke Fukusada have given new meaning to the notion of ‘good taste’ in furniture with their furniture cakes, a comment on “how consumers are unable to digest the huge amount of new products that companies are launching each year.”

To that end, they’ve created a waffle-press-style mold for tiny cakes… shaped like furniture.

Hungry for more?

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Tom Dixon, the British designer known for not only designing the modern classics that make up his lighting and furniture collections but also manufacturing them, kicked off Milan with a bang. On Tuesday Tom Dixon threw open the doors to the National Museum of Science and Technology for his first solo satellite show in Milan, MOST. Interwoven with the museum’s vintage transportation exhibitions and robotics labs were five buildings worth of design ranging from London’s Designers Block to North American favorites Blu Dot and Molo.

We were particularly excited to see the new lighting Tom Dixon presented at this year’s show. A departure from his highly finished signature metallic fixtures, I loved the primitive shapes and finish of the Lustre collection. Handmade ceramics give an iridescent glazed and twice-fired to create a shimmering effect that Dixon describes as, “reminiscent of hidden colours in nature, seen in peacock feathers or oil slicks on water.” In this year’s Milan shows we’ve witnessed a renewed interest in ceramics by designers across the board and it’s refreshing to see the material in lighting as well.

A new typology for Tom Dixon, the Fin collection was also quite arresting for its unique combination of materials and shapes. Not one to shy away from exposing the “messiness” of design, the Fin lights expose the inner workings and electrical components of the light, making the circuit board, “the hero of the design.” A heat sink forms the body and sturcture, a lens magnifies the exposed circuit board. Dixon calls this collection his, “ode to engineering and an introduction to new and rapidly changing lighting technologies.”

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Amsterdam’s Transnatural is a multidisciplinary organization that offers, among other things, a selection of well-curated design objects “in which nature & technology come together in unison without damaging the planet.” (They also host public programming and workshops, mostly in the space “between nature and technology with a combination of art, (speculative, future) design, and emerging technology.”)

Their group exhibition at the Salone occupied the very first space following the all-but-immersive maze of the MOST’s headliner (and ‘instigator,’ per the press language), an installation by Tom Dixon himself. A series of mirrors by Lex Pott & David Derksen ostensibly echoes (‘mirrors,’ perhaps) Dixon’s aesthetic, though the “Transcience Mirror” is more properly construed as an illustration of degradation over time, where the designers have accelerated the oxidation process with sulfur. Following their initial material exploration, Pott & Derksen have quantized the patina into geometric shapes in the finished products (above).

The mirrors are adjacent to Jólan van der Wiel‘s “Gravity Stools,” which are produced from a homogenous mixture of iron fillings and a plastic compound that cures in half an hour once he has extracted the material from the mold.

We’ll have more on him from his exhibit at Ventura Lambrate shortly, but the original production video (after the jump) is well worth watching:

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“Dexter” by Andreas Farkas. An interlocking stool with a strong graphic silhouette, the “Dexter” recalls the string-like, metal furniture found in personal and publis spaces in Sweden. Can be used as a stool, bench (when connected) or shelf (when stacked).

Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design, the Stockholm-based design school, showcased 13 student works at Spazio Rossana Orlandi under the exhibition theme Design for a Liquid Society. The show took inspiration from the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s phrase “liquid modernity,” an observation that individuals are more and more involved in planning their lives and careers through short-term projects and episodes.

This shifting terrain creates an interesting challenge for designed objects, putting into question their core functionalities, and demanding both nostalgia and future thinking from the same objects. The students of Konstfack explore the implications of a liquid society—as commentators, navigators and dreamers through a vivid collection of furniture that addresses the demands of today while considering the possibilities of tomorrow.

Design for a Liquid Society
presented by Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design
Spazio Rossana Orlandi
via Matteo Bandello 14/16
Through April 22nd

“Warp” by Oscar Sintring. A shelf and hanger system that pays homage to craft and the DIY movement by employing a simple wood and yarn system that packs easily, but requires the owner to weave all the supporting shelves and surfaces. “The process is similar to weaving the surface of a chair,” explains the designer.

“San Francisco” by Asa Agerstam. Crafted from solid foam, the “San Francisco” takes the brief of a Liquid Society quite literally. Based on a popular gin cocktail with the same name, the “San Francisco” is a nostalgic piece for Agerstam as she recalls the special cocktails her parents would make for friends and family—the gradient color of the stool looks like a tropical cocktail.

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