Hasta La Ideas

This September, we’re getting design education-y here on Core77, so it seemed appropriate to highlight a student project for this week’s column.

Parametric Pendants is a series of generative lighting by Colin Westeinde, a BFA furniture student at the Rhode Island School of Design. Completed last May during Westeinde’s third year at RISD, the lights are a direct result of Westeinde’s work experience—his internships and apprenticeships led the Vancouver-born designer to explore the space between handcraft and machine work in the lighting series.

After an internship at Amsterdam’s Joris Laarman Lab (whose Gradient Chair we previously covered in this column), Westeinde was struck by the studio’s approach of designing systems of making rather than specific objects. Particularly with regard to code, Westeinde observed the massive front-load of work taken on by Laarman’s specialists that allowed for quick iterations and fine tuning of a design once complete. “This workflow allowed rapid responses and efficient adaptability to the unexpected challenges that inevitably arise in any process—within the established framework, of course,” Westeinde says.

During his internship and back in the classroom, Westeinde found himself questioning the subjective value placed on handcraft over the machine-made—and found inspiration in the work of another Dutch designer. “Though I don’t believe the aforementioned categories will ever truly blur, [Maarten] Baas’s More or Less chair proposed possible answers to my dilemma,” Westeinde says. “This design identified one of the main defining qualities of mass produced objects—their uniformity—and broke it.”

Using Grasshopper, Westeinde could create a script and then vary its parameters to make each light unique.</small

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