Hasta La Ideas

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: graduate designer Martijn Van Strien explains that his range of coats made from single sheets of black tarpaulin are designed for an imagined future world where money and resources are in short supply.

Dystopian Brutalist Outerwear, which Van Strien exhibited at the Design Academy Eindhoven graduate show during Dutch Design Week last year, consists of five coats made out of cut sheets of folded tarpaulin.

“It’s a kind of trend forecast for a dystopian future that, when everything is not so great with the economic stuff that’s going on right now, we might be heading towards,” says Van Strien. “It will be cold; people will be unhappy; we’ll be living in buildings that are just grey blocks. These are coats that we could produce for people that don’t have a lot of money, when we don’t have a lot of materials, when a coat needs to last for a lifetime.”

Van Strien says he chose tarpaulin because it is cheap, resilient and simple to work with.

“[The coats] are all cut from a single piece of black tarpaulin,” he says. “You then have to weld the parts together with heat. In the front I’ve made closures with magnets and that’s pretty much it. This material is super easy to work with, you don’t need to finish it or anything and it will last forever.”

The coats were designed to provoke a reaction and make people think about where the world could be heading, Van Strien says.

“A lot of people feel a bit creeped out [by the coats] and that is the goal, that we think about how we’re handling our social malaise,” he explains. “I see myself as a fashion designer, so I’ve looked at this from a purely aesthetic point of view. But the thought behind it is something that I feel very strongly about. I never make a garment just because it’s pretty, it always has to tell a story.”

Despite being designed for a future that does not exist yet, Van Strien says he has been approached by a number of people interested in putting the coats into production.

“I was not planning on putting these coats into production when I first made them, it was just a statement,” he says. “But a couple of parties have come up and they asked me if I wanted to take them into production so now I’m considering it.”

We drove around Eindhoven in our MINI Cooper S Paceman. The music in the movie is a track called Family Music by Eindhoven-based hip hop producer Y’Skid.

You can listen to more music by Y’Skid on Dezeen Music Project and watch more of our Dezeen and MINI World Tour movies here.

The post Martijn Van Strien’s Dystopian Brutalist
Outerwear is “a kind of trend forecast” appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: Amsterdam designer Pieke Bergmans explains that she used a process similar to glass blowing to create the plastic lighting she exhibited during Dutch Design Week 2013 in Eindhoven.

Showcased amongst the pipes in a former pump house in Eindhoven, Bergmans exhibited two groups of objects as part of her VAPOR collection, which she created by heating and rapidly inflating PVC plastic.

Swaying, ethereal shapes were hung in the main room, which Bergmans made by blowing air into the plastic until it stretched into an extremely thin, translucent tube at one end.

“The material is solid and somehow it fades away almost into nothingness,” she explains. “It dissolves like a gas. It’s very thin plastic at the ends, but on the top it’s quite solid.”

A second installation in the basement of the pump house consisted of a series of twisted, rippled pipes.

“The shapes are really organic, they grow like a plant or an animal,” she says. “That is something I really love, because I don’t like to design being very precise. I actually prefer that shapes grow into their natural environments.”

She continues: “So this plastic is actually grown. The only thing I decide is to add more or less air into it, or maybe add a few colours, or maybe add more material.”

Bergmans explains that the pieces she exhibited at Dutch Design Week were the result of many different experiments.

“I’m very free and experimental and I try to understand the boundaries [of a production process],” she explains. “I will make things with lots of air and it will explode, maybe. After lots of experiments I know the limits; I know the edges. And actually, the edges are most of the time the nicest.”

We drove around Eindhoven in our MINI Cooper S Paceman. The music in the movie is a track called Family Music by Eindhoven-based hip hop producer Y’Skid.

You can listen to more music by Y’Skid on Dezeen Music Project and watch more of our Dezeen and MINI World Tour movies here.

The post Pieke Bergmans’ blown-plastic VAPOR
lighting “grows like a plant or animal” appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: in this movie we filmed during Dutch Design Week, designer Maarten Baas gives us an exclusive tour of his studio on a former farm a few miles north of Eindhoven. 

“This place used to be a farm; the chickens and the pigs used to walk around here,” says Baas, who we interviewed in his office in the converted attic of the former farmhouse. “Now we turned it into a design studio.”

Baas’ office is home to the original Smoke Chair that he produced for his graduation project while at Design Academy Eindhoven, which is now manufactured by Dutch design brand Moooi.

“This was the prototype on which Moooi based the Smoke Chair,” Baas says. “It’s actually burnt furniture with an epoxy resin that sucks into the charcoal. It has been reproduced many times by Moooi, and still we make unique pieces here at the farm.”

Baas, who moved to the farm in 2009 with fellow designer Bas den Herder, converted the barn into a workshop where he produces other pieces of furniture such as his famous Clay series, created by moulding a synthetic clay around a metal frame.

“We squeeze our hands in the clay, you can see the fingerprints,” explains Baas. “After that, it dries out and it stays like furniture.”

Downstairs, Baas is in the middle of filming for his new Grandmother Clock, commissioned by Carpenters Workshop Gallery, in which an old lady seems to draw the time using a marker pen from inside the clock.

“You’re very lucky to be here just at the moment that we are filming the new Grandmother Clock,” Baas says. “What you see here is a little cabin in which the grandmother will sit and a video that is recording her. The grandmother will indicate the time every minute with a marker. She will draw the big hand and the small hand and after a minute she wipes away the big hand, does one minute later and like that she goes around the clock.”

Baas then takes us outside to show us his workshop in the barn, as well as a small sauna he made inside an old wooden caravan, before showing us a limited edition piece of Smoke furniture that is in the process of being charred with a blow-torch.

“This is a chair that we are burning for a client,” Baas starts to say, before having second thoughts about explaining the process in detail. “Ah, f**k it,” he says. “I’m not going to say.”

We drove around Eindhoven in our MINI Cooper S Paceman. The music in the movie is a track called Family Music by Eindhoven-based hip hop producer Y’Skid.

You can listen to more music by Y’Skid on Dezeen Music Project and watch more of our Dezeen and MINI World Tour movies here.

The post Dutch designer Maarten Baas shows us
his studio that “used to be a farm” appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: Eindhoven designer Miriam van der Lubbe takes us around the fair she co-founded, claiming: “What is visible in Milan in two years, you can see at Dutch Design Week now.”

This year’s Dutch Design Week, the 12th edition of the show, was attended by an estimated 250,000 visitors, more than the entire population of the city of Eindhoven where it takes place.

Van der Lubbe, who co-founded the event, remembers its much more humble beginnings when she was “happy with 5,000” visitors.

She reveals the first Dutch Design Week was borne out of a frustration among local designers over the lack of a proper platform to present their work.

“Why do we always have to go to Milan to show our work, as if you are only something in design if you are there?” she asks. “In Holland there was nothing, so let’s see if we can actually pull something off here.”

Van der Lubbe believes that the pro-active spirit of Eindhoven-based designers helped Dutch Design Week quickly get off the ground and grow into the event that it is today.

“There were all kinds of initiatives going on,” she says. “There’s a good urban culture here; people are actually doing stuff instead of talking, which is a big difference, and it grew up to be this huge event.”

The first area van der Lubbe takes us to is Strijp, a former Philips industrial complex that is now one of the central areas of Dutch Design Week.

“The Klokgebouw, one of the old industrial buildings, is the starting point of Dutch Design Week,” van der Lubbe says. “This week there are about 400 events of almost 2,000 designers.”

She then takes us to the graduation show at Design Academy Eindhoven, the school where most of Eindhoven’s designers, including van der Lubbe herself, received their education.

Van der Lubbe says that current graduates do not benefit from the same economic support that she enjoyed when she graduated.

“The government was very much aware of the importance of creative people,” she says. “There were a lot of funds and we did not have to earn our money from day one.”

“But when the [economic] crisis came in, that all changed. I think it is now the obligation of companies to create opportunities for creative people to grow. I think that is also the role of Dutch Design Week, to be between culture and the money.”

Next, van der Lubbe takes us to Sectie C, a new design district where young designers including Nacho Carbonell open their studios up to the public. We then head to Eat Drink Design at Kazerne, a gallery and restaurant housed in a former army barracks.

“[Dutch Design Week] is really different from all the design weeks in the world because it comes out of the designers themselves,” says van der Lubbe. “They open up their doors, you’re welcome in their studios or in their workspaces. You actually can feel the vibe of innovation and of new developments.”

“Martijn Paulen, the new director of Dutch Design Week, said: ‘what is visible in Milan in two years, you can see that here now.'”

We drove around Eindhoven in our MINI Cooper S Paceman. The music in the movie is a track called Family Music by Eindhoven-based hip hop producer Y’Skid.

You can listen to more music by Y’Skid on Dezeen Music Project and watch more of our Dezeen and MINI World Tour movies here.

The post Dutch Design Week presents trends
“two years ahead of Milan” appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: the penultimate stop on our Dezeen and MINI World tour is Eindhoven. In our first video report from the city, co-founder of Dutch Design Week Miriam van der Lubbe explains how the small industrial town has become one of the leading centres for design and technology in the world.

“Eindhoven is actually a very small city compared to the big capitals in Europe or the world,” says van der Lubbe. “It’s a group of about seven villages that grew together into Eindhoven.”

It is also not a very pretty one. “The centre of Eindhoven really got destroyed [during the Second World War],” Van der Lubbe explains. “They built it up in the fifties and it became a really ugly city. In Eindhoven, it can only get better.”

Despite its size, the city has been a site for technological innovation since the industrial revolution, thanks almost entirely to Dutch electronics giant Philips.

The company was founded in Eindhoven in 1891 and, although it moved its headquarters to Amsterdam in 1997, its blue logo still adorns many of the buildings in the city.

Once Philips moved out, many people were afraid Eindhoven would become a “non-area”, Van der Lubbe says. In fact, the creative industries were quick to take advantage of the large amounts of cheap space Philips left behind.

One example Van der Lubbe takes us to is Strijp, a former Philips industrial complex that is now one of the central areas of Dutch Design Week.

“Strijp is a major part of Eindhoven centre actually,” says Van der Lubbe. “The owner of Strijp bought these industrial buildings and gave them to the creative people.”

An abundance of designers ready to take up these former industrial spaces graduate each year from Design Academy Eindhoven, which has gained a reputation as one of the foremost design schools in the world.

Former students include Hella Jongerius, Marcel Wanders and Tord Boontje and many graduates, such as Piet Hein Eek plus Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farrasin of Formafantasma, choose to stay in the city.

Van der Lubbe, herself a Design Academy Eindhoven alumni, shares a studio in nearby Geldrop with fellow academy graduate Niels van Eijk.

“It grew out of Philips, because they saw that design was an important aspect of products,” she says of the school.

“It used to be that as soon as people graduated they left. But now they’re coming back because they see that there’s something going on here that’s interesting.”

There is still an emphasis on science and technology in Eindhoven. Van der Lubbe takes us to the High Tech Campus on the outskirts of the city, where many technology companies are based, as well as Eindhoven University of Technology.

Having design, industry, science and technology in such close proximity is the key to Eindhoven’s success, says Van der Lubbe.

“There is a huge opportunity for Eindhoven because it has all these aspects in it,” she says. “It has the academic world, it has science, it has the creative world, it definitely has industry.”

“The potential of what is here is just starting to come out and there is so much more that can actually happen here. I really believe that.”

We drove around Eindhoven in our MINI Cooper S Paceman. The music in the movie is a track called Family Music by Eindhoven-based hip hop producer Y’Skid.

You can listen to more music by Y’Skid on Dezeen Music Project and watch more of our Dezeen and MINI World Tour movies here.

The post “Eindhoven has design, it has science
and it has industry” appeared first on Dezeen.