Hasta La Ideas

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: in our penultimate movie recorded at the MINI Paceman Garage in Milan, New York designer Stephen Burks discusses the importance of having a design identity and journalist Henrietta Thompson explains why designers are starting to expand into retail.

Stephen Burks of Readymade Projects was one of the guest speakers at the series of workshops that were hosted in the MINI Paceman Garage during Milan design week.

“I really impressed upon the students that it was important to understand their own identity before choosing manufacturers to work with, before running off and making something,” he says of his talk. “I think now they have a better sense of what that identity can be.”

Henrietta Thompson, editor-at-large at Wallpaper magazine, believes that changes in manufacturing are enabling more and more designers to produce and sell their own products.

“There’s certainly a shift happening in the way that designers are taking much more control over exhibiting their own work and also selling their own work,” she says. “So you’ve actually got a new dynamic opening up and a lot of the galleries and the shows that you go to are actually retail environments as well.”

“You have a lot more designer-makers, so they’re making things in limited editions, which they’re then able to sell,” she adds.

“Because of all these new technologies coming in, which enable the way things are made to change dramatically, things can be made much cheaper. You’ve got 3D printing, which is completely changing the landscape as well. [A designer] can sell things online and actually distribute [their own work] fairly easily now.”

It’s not just designers that are moving into retail, Thompson suggests. “Magazines are getting into retail, exhibitions are getting into retail,” she says.

“It doesn’t necessarily have to be as cut-and-dry as ‘I’m a producer’, ‘I’m a designer’, ‘I’m a retailer’, ‘I’m a magazine’. Now everybody is doing all of those things all together.”

See all our stories about Milan 2013.

The music featured in this movie is a track called Konika by Italian disco DJ Daniele Baldelli, who played a set at the MINI Paceman Garage. You can listen to more music by Baldelli on Dezeen Music Project.

The post “It’s easy for designers today to
produce and sell their own work” appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: New York designer Stephen Burks tells us how his once rough-edged city is being tamed by world-class architecture, urban design improvements like the High Line and a European-style bike-sharing scheme in the first of our reports from the Big Apple.

“I think New Yorkers all of a sudden are interested in quality of life” rather than just working and making money, says Burks, pointing to the Citi Bike scheme that launches later this month.” It’s the kind of thing you could never have had in New York 15 or 20 years ago. They would have got vandalised.”

New York is becoming more international in its outlook, Burks believes, being both more welcoming to foreign visitors and more eager to employ overseas architects. “There wasn’t an emphasis on great, international architects working in New York, but today it’s a selling point,” he says, pointing to the way that Herzog & de Meuron’s 40 Bond luxury apartment development in NoHo has triggered improvements in the area.

However New York is still a brutally capitalist city, and even elite architectural projects have to pay their way. “In New York you have to understand that everything is about the commercial context, everything is about capitalism at the end of the day, and culture here isn’t necessarily culture for culture’s sake. So a great architect is hired because it allows them to to sell on a different level, or to compete with the building across the street. There’s more of a relationship to commerce here in New York.”

Burks takes us on a tour of New York’s west side, taking in Chelsea (where his studio Readymade Projects is located) and the West Village, where he lives. In recent years the area has been transformed from a dangerous district known for its nightclubs to a sophisticated art, fashion and leisure area.

The change was spearheaded by the arrival of prestigious private art galleries such as Gagosian, David Zwirner and Gladstone, which cluster in the Meatpacking District on Chelsea’s western fringe.

More recently the High Line, a park created from a disused elevated railway that cuts through the area from north to south, has brought swarms of visitors and triggered a fresh round of regeneration.

Dezeen was in New York during NYCxDESIGN, a new annual citywide initiative linking together various design events including the International Contemporary Furniture Fair and NoHo Design District. We stayed at the Ace Hotel.

We’ll be posting more Dezeen and MINI World Tour reports from New York over the coming days.

We drove around New York in our MINI Cooper S Paceman.

The music featured in the movie is a track called You Go To My Head by Kobi Glas, one of the crowd favourites from the set we played at new design show INTRO NY in New York last week. You can listen to the full version on Dezeen Music Project.

The post “New Yorkers all of a sudden
are interested in quality of life” appeared first on Dezeen.

A series of lamps, tables and storage made by New York designer Stephen Burks in collaboration with basket weavers in a village outside of Dakar is on show at the Design Exchange in Toronto.

The baskets are made from sweetgrass and colourful recycled plastics.

“The process is more like coil basket stitching than weaving because it involves building the form from a central spiral outward while ‘stitching’ the one sweetgrass bundle to the next,” says Burks.

He’s known for his projects linking artisans in the developing world with global brands like Artecnica and Moroso – see more stories about his work here.

The exhibition continues until 1 April.

Here are some more details from Stephen Burks:

I worked in Senegal for a week in and out of the village then for about three months in the studio with my team developing the pieces.

We looked at the baskets in many ways from “baskets re-invented” where we used existing baskets as a module to make a final product (like the Starburst lamp) to “baskets abstracted” where we used the baskets as a form for making a similar voluminous object with a completely other material (like the Untitled HDPE lamp).

My Man Made project is really about integrating centuries old artisanal processes into contemporary design products to extend these craft traditions into the future, while also building a bridge from these developing world hand factories to international distribution.

It’s about asking the question, “If these people can make your bread basket or clothes hamper, why couldn’t they also make your next chandelier or pendant lamp?”

Unfortunately, the pieces aren’t yet commercially available. Every piece in the exhibition is unique and one-of-a-kind, so our next step is to find partners to help commercialise the project.

Stephen Burks: Man Made Toronto

Stephen Burks: Man Made Toronto features the work of New York industrial designer Stephen Burks and his studio, Readymade Projects. Burks can be considered a design activist, whose work challenges the way that we think of traditionally crafted objects and contemporary design.

Burks collaborates with artisans in the developing world to transform raw and recycled materials into clever, functional products. Linking these products with the distribution and marketing of global design brands such as Artecnica, Cappellini and Moroso, Burks brings social, cultural and economic benefit to people in remote locations. In doing so, he also introduces new forms and aesthetics to contemporary design in the industrialized world.

For Man Made Toronto, Burks invites the Toronto public to consider basket lamps, shelving, tables and other interior products that he developed with Senegalese basket weavers in a village outside of Dakar. As authentic hybrids of two cultures, these products seem simultaneously fresh and
familiar.

Man Made Toronto is presented by Wedge Curatorial Projects and the Design Exchange, in collaboration with Chevalier Edition. The exhibition takes as its starting point the Museum in Harlem’s exhibition Stephen Burks: Man Made (March 31 – June 26, 2011).

January 23 – April 1 2012

The Design Exchange
234 Bay Street Toronto, ON