Hasta La Ideas

This is the latest installment of our Core77 Questionnaire. We’ll be posting a new interview every other Tuesday.

Name: Piet Hein Eek

Occupation: Designer, producer, distributor, architect. I don’t like doing only one thing, and I like processes in general very much. I’m always very keen on the whole process, from the idea to the consumer.

Location: Eindhoven, the Netherlands

Current projects: We’re always doing different projects, either for customers or for ourselves—for the collection or for “free work,” as we call it. It’s work that’s not specifically commercial but more intellectually challenging and so on.

Right now we’re working on the Waste Project, with tables and chairs and other things that we make from waste material left over from our own production. This project started in 2000, but we’re still working on it on many different levels. One of the new things is a Waste Waste 40×40 series—so it’s made of the waste of the Waste Project. Instead of the leftovers determining the size and the image of the product, we cut everything down to 40-by-40-millimeter blocks. It’s a totally different approaching to using the leftovers, and we’re using almost everything because it’s a very small size. And that provides beautiful new objects.

Mission: I always try to make the world a little bit better—but I always feel a little incompetent saying that. Because if you’re a designer, you create products to be consumed. And one of the biggest issues in the world, of course, is our senseless way of consuming. So I try to communicate that the way we design, produce, consume, et cetera might be much more clever.

Above and below: an armchair and table from Eek’s new Waste Waste 40×40 collection

When did you decide that you wanted to be a designer? Well, as a child I was always building things, especially outside—huts and cabins and things in the trees. So the fact that I became a designer, and specifically one who is producing his own products, that was from childhood.

Education: Design Academy Eindhoven

First design job: The first design commissions I got were all friends of my mother. And with the third one I got in a little bit of a quarrel, and I promised myself never to work again for friends or relatives. Because you give it everything you have and then in the end they’re still not convinced that they have a good bargain, and they start arguing. So I stopped working for people who are close to me.

Who is your design hero? If I have to choose one, it would be Jean Prouvé. Out of all the designers, I feel the most close to his work. When I look at his work I always think, “If you gave me the same situation, I would love to have made that!” He was like an engineer, and he had his own factory, so in the end he was working with the possibilities he had at that moment, and that’s quite similar to my situation.

The workshop of Eek’s headquarters in Eindhoven, in a converted Philips factory

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