Hasta La Ideas

This is the latest installment of our Core77 Questionnaire. Previously, we talked to Jonas Wagell.

Name: Inga Sempé

Occupation: Product designer

Location: Paris

Current projects: In Milan, I will present a pinboard called Pinorama, designed for the Danish company Hay. It’s a metal grid with rectangular holes and cork, so you can pin items in the cork or hook items in the grid, or you can add accessories like shelves and a mirror. It’s a kind of “wall furniture” that acts as storage for daily things like keys, papers, pictures. It can be put in an entrance, for instance, or in an office.

Also with Hay, I will also show some archive boxes that are made from cardboard, with a special lid like on letter boxes that allows you to insert your papers without opening the box. There is also a drawer in it, so that when you really want to organize your papers, you just pull the drawer out. The boxes come in different sizes and they are covered with some special patterns that I designed.

Mission: “Mission” sounds really Catholic, and I’m not Catholic. My job is to design objects that are easy to use and nice to see and possible to produce. This is the sum of industrial design. So there is a kind of trinity, with use, beauty and producibility.

A new line of blankets for the Norwegian company Røros Tweed. Photo by Erik Five

Sempé in her Ruché armchair for Ligne Roset, released last year

When did you decide that you wanted to be a designer? I never really decided, but I was always attracted to it. As a child, I was always building objects, and I was always looking at objects and thinking about the people who had conceived them, and imagining all the difficulties they had to find good solutions. But I didn’t know about being a “designer” until much later.

Education: I studied in Paris at a small public university for industrial design called ENSCI.

First design job: Working with Marc Newson in Paris for six months. I learned a lot from him, because he has a really strong technical knowledge and spirit. When you’re a student, you don’t realize the hard realities of producing objects, of making them really exist. With him, I learned that.

Who is your design hero? I’m really against that. I can’t have a design hero if I haven’t met this person. So, for instance, of course everybody likes Castiglioni or Vico Magistretti, but as long as you don’t meet people in real life, maybe they are good designers but bad people. So they couldn’t be my heroes.

In fact, I’m not a fan—I don’t have the spirit of a fan. I was always interested in objects but not that much in the personality of the people who designed them. I never read books about designers. My knowledge of objects comes from the flea market, where there are no names.

The Ruché collection also includes a sofa (above) and a bed (below)

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