Hasta La Ideas

Our friend Alberto Villarreal sent us details about their recent collaboration with Guadalajara’s EOS México, a firm founded by brothers Mauricio and Sebastian Lara. Like many a clever design, “EOSkate” started with a mistake: the latter firm was preparing a book to commemorate a decade of their work when a printing error yield “several hundreds of (somehow) useless books.”

Instead of merely recycling the flawed volumes, “the creative minds of the Lara brothers turned this ‘error’ into a design opportunity.”

They saw this as an excuse to recycle the books into art and design pieces and invited 11 designers/firms to create objects using the books as a raw material, and gave 6 to 10 books to each invitee.

Alberto Villarreal and his team at AGENT (the Mexico City-based firm he leads), started brainstorming about what to do with the books they got. [They] roughed out several ideas and ended up designing a skateboard made out of paper (from the book pages) mixed with resin.

Villarreal tells us,

I saw this as an opportunity to experiment with materials—the book itself has so much color in the pages and this encouraged us to play up the graphic content, but when we started experimenting with the paper new things came up.

We didn’t follow a logical A to B process. We didn’t know what was going to be the outcome, but while experimenting and analyzing the properties of the paper, new ideas started to come out.

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