Hasta La Ideas

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: graduate designer Martijn Van Strien explains that his range of coats made from single sheets of black tarpaulin are designed for an imagined future world where money and resources are in short supply.

Dystopian Brutalist Outerwear, which Van Strien exhibited at the Design Academy Eindhoven graduate show during Dutch Design Week last year, consists of five coats made out of cut sheets of folded tarpaulin.

“It’s a kind of trend forecast for a dystopian future that, when everything is not so great with the economic stuff that’s going on right now, we might be heading towards,” says Van Strien. “It will be cold; people will be unhappy; we’ll be living in buildings that are just grey blocks. These are coats that we could produce for people that don’t have a lot of money, when we don’t have a lot of materials, when a coat needs to last for a lifetime.”

Van Strien says he chose tarpaulin because it is cheap, resilient and simple to work with.

“[The coats] are all cut from a single piece of black tarpaulin,” he says. “You then have to weld the parts together with heat. In the front I’ve made closures with magnets and that’s pretty much it. This material is super easy to work with, you don’t need to finish it or anything and it will last forever.”

The coats were designed to provoke a reaction and make people think about where the world could be heading, Van Strien says.

“A lot of people feel a bit creeped out [by the coats] and that is the goal, that we think about how we’re handling our social malaise,” he explains. “I see myself as a fashion designer, so I’ve looked at this from a purely aesthetic point of view. But the thought behind it is something that I feel very strongly about. I never make a garment just because it’s pretty, it always has to tell a story.”

Despite being designed for a future that does not exist yet, Van Strien says he has been approached by a number of people interested in putting the coats into production.

“I was not planning on putting these coats into production when I first made them, it was just a statement,” he says. “But a couple of parties have come up and they asked me if I wanted to take them into production so now I’m considering it.”

We drove around Eindhoven in our MINI Cooper S Paceman. The music in the movie is a track called Family Music by Eindhoven-based hip hop producer Y’Skid.

You can listen to more music by Y’Skid on Dezeen Music Project and watch more of our Dezeen and MINI World Tour movies here.

The post Martijn Van Strien’s Dystopian Brutalist
Outerwear is “a kind of trend forecast” appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: in the second part of our interview with Maarten Baas, the Dutch designer reflects on how his career has progressed since the burnt furniture he developed for his 2002 graduation project immediately brought him to the attention of the design world.

Baas’ career was launched by the success of his Smoke chair, which he developed for his graduation show at Design Academy Eindhoven in 2002.

“That was quite an instant success,” he says of the chair, which he created by singeing a second-hand piece of furniture with a blow torch and is now produced by Dutch design brand Moooi.

Baas continues: “In 2004, with Murray Moss [founder of design art company Moss] in New York, I made a solo show in which I did some design icons of the 20th century according to the Smoke principle – burning the furniture.”

Baas describes his range of Clay furniture, which is created by hand-moulding a synthetic clay around a metal frame, as a “next step”, before moving on to discuss his Real Time series of of video clocks.

Baas’ video clocks include Analog Digital (above), in which a performer replicates a digital clock by painting over and wiping clean panels on a glass screen. His Sweeper Clock (below) features two men with brooms pushing lines of debris to form moving clock hands.

He also created a grandfather clock, in which an old man seems to draw the hands of the clock from inside.

“Actually, all the concepts are still developing and still running,” he says. “Currently we’re working with Carpenters Workshop Gallery to make a series of two clocks: a grandfather clock and a grandmother clock.”

“As we speak, we are filming the grandmother clock. We are making a twelve-hour movie in which she is drawing the hands of the clock. In twelve hours time we should be finished.”

Although Baas has based his studio in the countryside outside of Eindhoven since 2009, he says that the city where he studied is still close to his heart.

“Eindhoven is a very industrial city, which makes it a very practical city,” he explains. “There are a lot of production companies that support people that want to make something and I like the rock and roll style of Eindhoven. It’s kind of rough and people have a lot of energy.”

“I didn’t want to be part of the city that much anymore, so I went out of the city to the countryside. But still, if I come to Eindhoven I feel that energy of everything that is going on there and I really like that.”

We drove around Eindhoven in our MINI Cooper S Paceman. The music in the movie is a track called Family Music by Eindhoven-based hip hop producer Y’Skid.

You can listen to more music by Y’Skid on Dezeen Music Project and watch more of our Dezeen and MINI World Tour movies here.

The post Maarten Baas: “My Smoke furniture was
an instant success” appeared first on Dezeen.

Dutch Design Week 2013: Amsterdam designer Pieke Bergmans developed a technique similar to glass blowing to create these plastic lighting installations (+ slideshow).

Pieke Bergmans experimented with heating and rapidly inflating the PVC plastic so the final form is partly left open to chance.

“I don’t like to design as a designer and be very precise about how things should look,” Bergmans told Dezeen. “I prefer that shapes grow into their natural environment, so the only thing I decide is to add more or less air or maybe a few colours, time or material.”

One group of objects have been extruded into twisting, rippled pipes with a light bulb illuminating them from within.

Another series is made by blowing air into the plastic until it stretches into a delicate, translucent tube at one end.

Bergmans explained that the collection is called VAPOR because “the lighting objects fade away into nothing, like a gas that seems to dissolve.”

The collection follows Bergmans’ previous experiments with glass blowing, which included her hand-blown organically-shaped light bulbs and a series of polished bronze objects with blown-glass lamps spilling out of them designed in collaboration with Studio Job.

VAPOR was presented in an old pump house in Eindhoven as part of Dutch Design Week, with the first series displayed nestled amongst the pipes and the billowing second series suspended in the central double-height space.

Here’s a brief project description from Pieke Bergmans:

Vapor

This time Bergmans did not blow glass but plastic instead! As usual she has been exploring new techniques and it resulted again in a stunning body of work. Something that we have never seen. Six meters high, fragile mystical lighting-objects, hanging down from the ceiling. A translucent and solid body that fades away to almost no substance. Illuminated with light.

VAPOR refers to a liquid or solid state where the same substance at a high temperature turns into a gas phase. It’s beautiful, magical and seems almost from a different planet. Either angles or ghosts, I am not sure, but this time for sure they exist. They are real and can be touched.

Name: VAPOR
Designer: Pieke Bergmans
Year: 2013
Edition: Installation of 6 objects – Unique objects
Material: PVC, electric bulb

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collection by Pieke Bergmans appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: the penultimate stop on our Dezeen and MINI World tour is Eindhoven. In our first video report from the city, co-founder of Dutch Design Week Miriam van der Lubbe explains how the small industrial town has become one of the leading centres for design and technology in the world.

“Eindhoven is actually a very small city compared to the big capitals in Europe or the world,” says van der Lubbe. “It’s a group of about seven villages that grew together into Eindhoven.”

It is also not a very pretty one. “The centre of Eindhoven really got destroyed [during the Second World War],” Van der Lubbe explains. “They built it up in the fifties and it became a really ugly city. In Eindhoven, it can only get better.”

Despite its size, the city has been a site for technological innovation since the industrial revolution, thanks almost entirely to Dutch electronics giant Philips.

The company was founded in Eindhoven in 1891 and, although it moved its headquarters to Amsterdam in 1997, its blue logo still adorns many of the buildings in the city.

Once Philips moved out, many people were afraid Eindhoven would become a “non-area”, Van der Lubbe says. In fact, the creative industries were quick to take advantage of the large amounts of cheap space Philips left behind.

One example Van der Lubbe takes us to is Strijp, a former Philips industrial complex that is now one of the central areas of Dutch Design Week.

“Strijp is a major part of Eindhoven centre actually,” says Van der Lubbe. “The owner of Strijp bought these industrial buildings and gave them to the creative people.”

An abundance of designers ready to take up these former industrial spaces graduate each year from Design Academy Eindhoven, which has gained a reputation as one of the foremost design schools in the world.

Former students include Hella Jongerius, Marcel Wanders and Tord Boontje and many graduates, such as Piet Hein Eek plus Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farrasin of Formafantasma, choose to stay in the city.

Van der Lubbe, herself a Design Academy Eindhoven alumni, shares a studio in nearby Geldrop with fellow academy graduate Niels van Eijk.

“It grew out of Philips, because they saw that design was an important aspect of products,” she says of the school.

“It used to be that as soon as people graduated they left. But now they’re coming back because they see that there’s something going on here that’s interesting.”

There is still an emphasis on science and technology in Eindhoven. Van der Lubbe takes us to the High Tech Campus on the outskirts of the city, where many technology companies are based, as well as Eindhoven University of Technology.

Having design, industry, science and technology in such close proximity is the key to Eindhoven’s success, says Van der Lubbe.

“There is a huge opportunity for Eindhoven because it has all these aspects in it,” she says. “It has the academic world, it has science, it has the creative world, it definitely has industry.”

“The potential of what is here is just starting to come out and there is so much more that can actually happen here. I really believe that.”

We drove around Eindhoven in our MINI Cooper S Paceman. The music in the movie is a track called Family Music by Eindhoven-based hip hop producer Y’Skid.

You can listen to more music by Y’Skid on Dezeen Music Project and watch more of our Dezeen and MINI World Tour movies here.

The post “Eindhoven has design, it has science
and it has industry” appeared first on Dezeen.

Dutch Design Week 2013: a team of ten Eindhoven architecture, design and advertising studios have been brought together as a “virtual” studio to design a new open-source identity for the Dutch city.

Variations of the “raw and rough” logo have been given to local businesses to adopt and design studios have been encouraged to create their own interpretations.

“We did something really unique we think,” said Peter Kentie, managing director of the city’s marketing organisation Eindhoven365, which commissioned the logo. “We started up something called the Virtual Design Agency and we picked the best of the best of the Eindhoven region – graphic and motion designers, fashion designers, architects, typographers – and we put them together as a new company to create the identity.”

Both the logo and the process of procuring it are intended to reflect the energy and creativity of Eindhoven, which has burgeoning creative and technology industries and which was named the world’s most “Intelligent Community of the Year” in 2011.

“Eindhoven is a city in development,” said Kentie. “The task originally was to create a marketing brand for the city but what we also did was take the opportunity to rebrand the logo, the identity of the city council, of the city itself.”

Graphic designers Raw Color, architect Marc Maurer and creative agency Scherpontwerp were among the studios selected to contribute to the project.

“Eindhoven as a city is about working together,” Marc Koppen of Scherpontwerp told Dezeen. “Everyone knows each other, works together, talks about the projects together. That’s why we came up with the idea of trying to work with many agencies, not just one.”

Koppen added that the open-source nature of the logo reflected the spirit of multi-disciplinary collaboration in the city. “That’s also the theory about the city, that everyone is involved and works together, working on it and with it,” he said. “If you want to do it in your own way, then it’s possible.”

After initial discussions between the ten studios Scherpontwerp, Edhv and Eric de Haas were asked to take the concept ideas forward together. They worked on the project from their separate office spaces, forming the Virtual Design Agency, with designers from the earlier stage acting as consultants.

Together the group came up with a simple grid of lines to create the logo, which comprises three thick zig-zag shapes spaced on top of each other to form an abstract letter E.

“The idea is about energy,” said Koppen. “We tried to find a way to visualise the energy of the city and what people often say about Eindhoven is that it’s a really raw and rough city.”

The grid behind the logo means the angular sections can be filled in different colours and shades, adapting it for companies or sectors across the city. A red graphic on a white background is used for the starting point as the city’s historic colours.

The team also created a font called Eindhoven to accompany the logo, formed in a similar style but without sticking to the grid. “[The font and logo] have the same kind of edginess,” Kentie said. “The typography also gives you the feeling that its not completely finished, like a work in progress.”

The identity was completed in June and has already been applied to civic vehicles, signage around the city and even T-shirts for runners competing in the Eindhoven marathon. Eindhoven365 have given the graphics to local businesses to customise and use as part of their own branding.

“With the energy symbol you can do everything,” Koppen told us. “You can load it with images, make it 3D or 2D, change the colours. You can really build it up with a lot of different pieces and angles. We show it now in a really basic way but underneath there’s the structure that you can use to transform it and everyone can do that in their own way.”

Eindhoven is currently hosting this year’s Dutch Design Week, where Daan Roosegaarde has unveiled an installation consisting of hundreds of wireless LED crystals and Iris van Herpen scooped the top prize at the Dutch Design Awards.

Read the full interview with Scherpontwerp’s Marc Koppen below:

Dan Howarth: Tell me about the origins of the project.

Marc Koppen: We started about one and a half years ago I think and we were asked by Eindhoven to give a short presentation on the city as the designer with ten different companies. They chose three companies to do the job, that was a little bit strange in the beginning because you have your own style of course. We had to find a new way of working together on such a huge project and we are three totally different design agencies. It was a little bit strange in the beginning, but after half a year it started to take off a little bit, it was great.

Dan Howarth: Which other design agencies did you work with?

Marc Koppen: One of the design agencies is called Edhv and the other is Eric de Haas. Most of the time we don’t physically work together, we aren’t in the same room but we try to discuss the work. We make our own work for the city then we bring it back together, to the group and discuss it.

Dan Howarth: Did you work with graphic designers and architects as well?

Marc Koppen: In the beginning it was really a big selection. There were artists, architects, photographers, colour designers, graphic designers and we all worked together on the decisions, but in the end it was really necessary to get the work done so they chose to do the work with graphic designers. But right now, at the moment we are still inviting people to work with us. Raw Color are advising us on the colours, we are still working with a lot of different agencies.

Dan Howarth: And they are all based in Eindhoven?

Marc Koppen: No, one is based in Amsterdam I believe, but they are all originally designers from Eindhoven. They moved to different cities but they are from Eindhoven.

Dan Howarth: Do you think this is the first time that so many agencies have come together to work on a project like this?

Marc Koppen: I’m not sure but coming from the briefing in the beginning we discussed that Eindhoven as a city is about making and working together, taking on different project together. Years ago, for example I worked in Amsterdam and there the agencies are really working for themselves. You don’t often talk with other designers or you’re not supposed to meet with the clients of other designers so its nice to work in Eindhoven, it’s really an open structure. Everyone knows each other, works together, talks about the projects together and thats why we came up with the idea of trying to work with many agencies, not just one. It won’t be the first time but I don’t know about another case.

Dan Howarth: So the logo is designed to reflect the fact that Eindhoven is a place where people collaborate.

Marc Koppen: Yeah we started that discussion very early on when we came together to talk about a vision for the city. They came up with the idea to work together, they chose three agencies to coordinate it and do the basic design work. But they are still asking us to talk with a lot of people about it and get a lot of people involved. It was their idea to do it this way yes.

Dan Howarth: So are you still operating under the title of Virtual Design Agency?

Marc Koppen: Yes because it’s the closest idea to what it is! We [each] have our own workspace, we are not sitting together. It was a little strange in the beginning.

Dan Howarth: How did you come up with the coloured zig-zags of the logo?

Marc Koppen: We tried to find a way to visualise the energy of the city. What people often say about Eindhoven is that it’s a really raw and rough city. For example if you take a look at Utrecht or Amsterdam, or The Hague, or Maastricht, they’re cultivated in a certain way and they have a history. Eindhoven is really a rough city where a lot of work has to be done. It’s called the City of Light because [electronics giant] Philips started their lighting company here. So we had to find a visual way to transform the energy and that all started with energy and lighting. That’s the really basic idea about it.

Dan Howarth: The city is encouraging local businesses to use and adapt the identity. Was the idea to have an open-source logo?

Marc Koppen: Yes sure, that’s also the theory about the city, that everyone is involved and works together, working on it and with it. If you want to do it in your own way, then it’s possible. The basics are done but now we have to translate it to other people. So we have to find a way of inspiring other people because we cannot write a book about how to use it, it would be too difficult, everything is possible, but we have to inspire other designers to use it in the right way. We’re working on it right now. That’s a really nice process.

Dan Howarth: What parts of the design allow it to be adapted?

Marc Koppen: The typography is our own. We call it the Eindhoven and you can work with it as a typeface. With the energy symbol you can do everything, you can load it with images, make it 3D or 2D, to change the colours. There’s a really nice grid underneath it so you can really build it up with a lot of different pieces and angles. We show it now in a really basic way but underneath there’s another structure that you can use to transform it so everyone can do that in their own way.

Dan Howarth: Are red and white the colours of the city?

Marc Koppen: Yes, they are really the colours of Eindhoven and we thought about changing it, but the fact that it has to stand for energy and have a rough edge to it. When you see it with other logos, its a little bit rough, its not really “nice”. We have to stand for that energy and the raw hard red does that.

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by Virtual Design Agency appeared first on Dezeen.