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.

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Dezeen and MINI World Tour: in our next movie recorded at the MINI Paceman Garage in Milan last month, MINI head of design Anders Warming discusses the design of the new MINI Paceman and design journalist and curator Kieran Long gives us his thoughts on how the current generation of designers compares to the great masters. 

Warming explains that the idea behind the design of the MINI Paceman was to combine the signature styling of the classic MINI with new features such as four-wheel drive and horizontal tail lights. “When you look at [the car] you feel and you see MINI, but you realise there is so much new to it,” he says.

He also stresses that a lot of the design of the car was done by hand. “People say cars are just [designed] by computers today,” he says. “A car is really done by hand. It’s designed with sketches, we choose the lines that we like and we also spend a [lot of] time forming the shapes in clay and then from that make the tooling.”

The guest in our Dezeen and MINI World Tour Studio is Kieran Long, senior curator of contemporary architecture, design and digital at the V&A museum in London. He believes the work of the current generation of designers lacks the boldness of the post-modern design Italy became famous for in the 1970s and 1980s.

“I sense a sort of tentative nature in the design that you see – even [work by] the younger designers, students and so on,” he says. “There’s not much boldness either in formal or colour terms, but also philosophical and ideas terms.

“It really struck me visiting the exhibition at the Triennale on Italian design, what a big contrast that is from the grand era of Italian design. You see the boldness of those forms and remind yourself of what Italian design was known for and you see now a sort of pastel-y sort of invisible feeling to design.”

Despite this, Long says there are detectable trends that young designers are exploring. “We’ve had this fixing, repairing, ad hocism thing now for a couple of years,” he says. “This year it’s really identifiable that young designers work is occupied by new materials, often sustainable materials, new organic materials in the kind of Formafantasma mould. If somebody would just capture that and make a manifesto about it, it would seem like a real movement.

“I think the big problem is that they have no grasp of design history,” he continues. “They have no idea of where they sit in relation to anything. It’s my observation that most of those designers wish they were taught a formal didactic history of design alongside the freedom that the art school education gives them.”

More generally, Long believes that design needs to be less introspective to remain relevant. “I think we’ve overrated what designers do as the thing that’s interesting about design,” he says. “What’s really interesting is the problem solved, or the relationship made, or the fashion trend started or ended – those cultural currents that design contributes to.

“I think they could learn something from architecture in that sense; when you’re an architect, when you write about architecture, you can also write about the city, and the city is everything in it. Design needs to find a category like that. They need to relax and say: ‘what I do is not the interesting thing about design, it’s what happens after it leaves my office.'”

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.

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Dezeen and MINI World Tour: as digital technology changes the way we work and relax, Japanese designer Naoto Fukasawa discusses its impact on furniture design in this movie filmed in Milan last month.

Speaking to us at the B&B Italia showroom in Via Durini, Fukasawa shows us how he designed the Papilio range of armchairs, sofas and beds – which all feature wide, butterfly-like backs – in response to the way people use their mobile phones and tablet computers.

“In your life, everything is integrated,” he says. “So you lie down on the bed, watching TV, calling on your mobile, working, eating food. That’s why I designed these chairs and the bed with a back.”

Shrinking technology is changing the types of furniture people use at home, he says. “Why do we need such a big table to work at, or a huge screen?”

But Fukasawa rejects suggestions that furniture itself will become embedded with technology. Instead, he strives to create high-quality, iconic pieces of furniture that will last for years. “I don’t like to put any kind of technology in a lounge chair,” he says. “Hi-tech should be smaller but life doesn’t change much. Just keep the quality.”

Fukasawa also demonstrates the Infobar A02 mobile phone, which he designed in conjunction with legendary interface designer Yugo Nakamura. The phone’s interface features icons that behave like bubbles that can be dragged around on the screen.

The designer established the Infobar brand for Japanese manufacturer KDDI and has designed a number of devices including the Infobar 2, which have been extremely popular in Japan but have never been made available abroad.

Among Fukasawa’s other clients is MUJI, the Japanese homeware company for which he has anonymously designed numerous products, including the iconic wall-mounted CD player.  “I’ve designed a big number of products for them but they never give out the designer’s name,” he says.

“I’m really trying to design iconic products,” says Fukasawa, who was born in 1956 and is based in Tokyo. “I’m always using the same minimalistic, simple design. And people like it.”

Products featured in the movie include Fukasawa’s Meteo barometer, thermometer and hygrometer for Magis, his Blocco stool for Plank and his Trapezoid watch for Issey Miyake.

Also featured is his AWA side table for B&B Italia and a range of products designed for PlusMinusZero, the consumer electronics brand he founded. See all our stories about Naoto Fukasawa.

Transport was provided by our MINI Cooper S Paceman and the music featured is a track called Where are Your People? by We Have Band. You can listen to the full track on Dezeen Music Project. Watch all our Dezeen and MINI World Tour video reports from Milan here.

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Dezeen and MINI World Tour: in the first of a series of films recorded at the MINI Paceman Garage in Milan last month, MINI head of design Anders Warming explains the thinking behind the brand’s presentation during the furniture fair while Johanna Agerman Ross, editor-in-chief of Disegno magazine, gives her opinion on the highlights of the world’s most important design week.

“The MINI Paceman Garage is centred around how people act within a MINI community,” says Warming (above), explaining why the presentation – set up inside a car repair garage on Via Tortona – included features such as a record store, a coffee shop, a barber and a cinema. “They end up talking about anything that involves their life. And that’s why we have these different stations. It’s sort of like the extended life around the MINI.”

As part of our Dezeen and MINI World Tour, we set up a video studio within the garage, where we conducted interviews with some of the world’s leading design authorities to get their thoughts on the week.

Agerman Ross of Disegno, our first interviewee, believes a key theme this year was the renewed focus on the official fair, the Salone Internazionale del Mobile, at the expense of the independent exhibitions that take place around the city.

“I have found in the last few years that going to the city and going to the independent exhibitions have been where things have been really happening and interesting,”she says. “But I feel there’s a return to the reason why we’re all here – the commerce of the fair, the wheeling and dealing and the showing off of new products by the bigger brands.”

“Milan this year was more subdued that previous years, with the ongoing economic crisis clearly affecting many companies. This has led to a more pared-back and business-like week without the frivolity of previous years,” says Agerman Ross.

“I think so. After all if the industry doesn’t work, the other things can’t happen either. There needs to be an economy and a network for these things to function. The designers and the brands need to make money in order to exist, and without a healthy commercial branch of design, the other things won’t exist either. One supports the other.”

“Everyone’s taking a step back, trying to be quite precise in what they’re putting out and trying to show products that seem quite close to hitting the market, rather than being just a product for show that won’t go into production,” she says. “It’s a tighter output altogether.”

See all our stories about Milan 2013.

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Dezeen and MINI World Tour: in this movie filmed in Milan earlier this month, leading designers and manufacturers discuss the phenomenon of copying and how they are responding. “It’s become an increasingly big problem for us,” says Tom Dixon. “People can steal ideas and produce them almost faster than we can now.”

“An original design product will have a cost higher than its copy,” says designer Marcel Wanders (above). “It’s very simple. Stealing most of the time is more cheap than buying.”

Unscrupulous manufacturers visit Milan to photograph new prototypes and then rush out copies before the original products reach the market, according to Casper Vissers (below), CEO of furniture and lighting brand Moooi.

“It’s very sour if you have presented a product in April and it’s in the shops in September, but a bloody copier has it already in August,” says Vissers, speaking at Moooi’s spectacular Unexpected Welcome show in Milan (below). “This is what happens at the moment.”

Vissers adds that legal action against copiers in Asia is expensive and, even if it’s successful in the short term, it does little to stem the tide: “You need huge amounts of money [to launch a law suit in the Far East] and if you win – if – a new limited company in China will start production [of copies]”.

Copiers are increasingly shameless about their intentions, says Tom Dixon, speaking at his presentation at MOST in Milan. “People feel very confident copying things. Some people come around with spy glasses photographing things but other people are more overt and come in with iPads or film crews.”

Dixon says the problem is getting worse, with markets around the world and even the UK market increasingly flooded with copies. “Everywhere we go in Australia or Singapore or India we’ll see many, many copies, and that’s also hitting more and more the UK as well.”

Gregg Buchbinder (above), CEO of furniture company Emeco, says the solution is for designers to push manufacturers to make more sophisticated products that are harder to copy. The furniture collection Emeco developed with designer Konstantin Grcic for the Parrish Art Museum on Long Island (below), for example, “was a very difficult project to do. Although the chair looks simple, there’s nothing skipped.”

“The more difficult it is, the more difficult it is for people to knock it off,” Buchbinder adds.

Emeco aggressively pursues copyists through the courts and earlier this year won a case against fellow US manufacturer Restoration Hardware, which had copied the iconic Navy chair.

But outside Europe and the US, copyright law is less robust and harder to enforce. “It’s very, very difficult to protect yourself legally,” says Dixon.

Dixon’s company is directly responding to the problem of copying by developing a range of new products designed to make life more difficult for counterfeiters.

“What you’ll see [at our Milan presentation] is a number of coping strategies,” Dixon explains. “We’ve been trying as much as possible to invest in tooling and slightly more advanced technology. We’re working on adaptive models where we make specific things for clients. A new bespoke division where we make things for people, so we adapt our products to suit a client’s needs. So there’s ways of dealing with it. We’ve just got to be faster and smarter.”

See all our stories about copying in design ».

Milan is the second stop on our Dezeen and MINI World Tour. See all our reports from our first destination, Cape Town. This movie features a MINI Cooper S Paceman.

The music featured is a track called Divisive by We Are Band, a UK-based electronic act who played at the MINI Paceman Garage in Milan on Friday. You can listen to the full track on Dezeen Music Project.

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who copy our products” appeared first on Dezeen.