Etudiant à la Design Academy d’Eindhoven, Michiel van Gageldonk a imaginé cette « Globe chair ». Avec un design très réussi, cette création alliant beauté et confort propose un dossier de forme sphérique. Un projet à découvrir en images sur son portfolio et dans la suite de l’article.
Frustrated with the lack of decent keyboard stands on the market, Mikael Jorgensen began sketching ideas for a stylish lightweight touring stand some ten years ago—as lead pianist and keyboardist for the band Wilco, he’d spent the better much of that time on the road—but with no background in design or fabrication, he didn’t really know how to proceed. He had given up hope until years later, when friend and producer Allen Farmelo, who showed him a mixing console that collapses for traveling, designed and built by François Chambard of UM Project. After an introduction from Farmelo, Jorgensen met with Chambard at his Greenpoint studio and immediately connected with his design sensibility and craftsmanship.
The stand breaks down to fit perfectly into a standard keyboard case for touring and can easily be configured to function as a desk for laptops; executed in Chambard’s signature style with a matching bench, the UMJ-1 looks like nothing else on the market. I stopped by UM Project’s studio to get a hands-on demo before the distinctive stand’s debut at Wilco’s Solid Sound Festival at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. Chambard enthusiastically assembled the unit before my eyes, explaining the thought process behind it, as the storage room next door was being set up for the photo shoot.
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We previously covered Hilla Shamia’s innovative “wood casting” technique and Andrew Perkins’ equally gorgeous wood-metal blended furniture. Another firm we’ve come across blending wood with an unlike material—in this case, resin—is MTH Woodworks, a “functional art and design company” out of British Columbia, Canada.
MTH’s Bloom Collection takes cedar and birch salvaged from Vancouver Island and surrounds it with resin, forming precisely flat, functional surfaces that nevertheless highlight the organic beauty of the encased wood.
“Our calling,” writes the company, “is to re-connect people with the fundamental feeling of strength and serenity the trees give us every day.” That being said, when they posted a video explaining where they get their inspiration from, we were expecting the usual—a sensitive-looking bearded guy talking about the majesty of craft while the camera slowly rack-focuses on a handtool. Instead we were treated to our favorite kind of video, GoPro footage shot from mountain bikes and snowboards:
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San Francisco-based Coalesse has been conducting ongoing research on ‘Nomadic Work’ for several years now, and the Massaud Work Lounge is the latest furniture solution for today’s mobile workforce. “The Work Lounge with Canopy is a self-contained sanctuary. It creates a quiet space within a public area and allows users to be in control of their work environment. It provides privacy and eliminates visual distraction by signaling to others if the users want to focus and not be disturbed or if they can be approached by the positioning of the canopy (closed, semi-closed or open).”
Designed by French architect and designer Jean-Marie Massaud, the Work Lounge debuted at NeoCon earlier this month, where we had the chance to speak to him about the project.
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We’ve been fans of Jamie Wolfond‘s work since he turned up on our radar at RISD Furniture Design’s “Transformations” exhibition in Milan last year. The Toronto native and recent grad has dabbled in a number of delightfully weird experiments in furniture design since then, from the previously-seen stools and chairs to the lighting and timepieces pictured below.
With his BFA under his belt, the young designer has secured an internship at Bertjan Pot’s Rotterdam studio for the summer; he’s not yet sure where he’ll end up afterward, but his future is looking bright. Wise beyond his years, Wolfond recently took the time to share his thoughts on the convoluted world of designing for manufacture.
I started my degree project intending to work with trades, machines and producers from outside the furniture industry to design and construct prototypes for accessible, producible furniture.
The idea for the project came out of my newfound interest in designing for production. As a young and inexperienced design student, I was immediately attracted to the increasingly popular ‘licensing’ model. Licensing allows a freelance designer to come up with a project, create a prototype, pitch it to a manufacturer, and hopefully sell the rights to its design, receiving a small royalty for every piece sold. This way of working is particularly attractive to students since it promises the possibility of having one’s work produced on a large scale without the financial risk, distribution channels or industry experience that it would take to start a business from scratch.
Further investigation of the licensing model as a way for young designers to see their work produced revealed several problems with the idea of designing products on speculation alone.
The Emergency Bench is a personal favorite—I love the way it looks like an animal as it inflates
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As data continues to indicate that spending all day on your ass isn’t good for your health, there are exciting opportunities for workstation and seating designers. Standing desks, treadmill desks and funky chairs may fade in and out of popularity, but we like seeing the weird permutations and risks that designers are willing to take in their quest to find the “correct” solution.
One such new seating product comes from Turnstone (the Steelcase brand dedicated to furniture solutions for small companies and startups) with their Buoy, designed by Michigan-based ID’er Ricky Biddle. “Research shows that even people who typically work out after work don’t receive the same benefit if they are sitting all day,” writes Turnstone. “Overall, we recognize that movement is good so any way we can bring movement to the office is something we look for.”
To that end, the Buoy is designed to be off-balance, like its namesake bobbing device, though not as extremely as a Pilates ball; the idea is that the microadjustments you’re continually making with your body are not annoying enough to be a hassle, but adequate to burn some calories. Also unlike a Pilates ball, the Buoy is height-adjustable.
We wanted to find a simple seating solution that would allow for movement and work in multiple environments and applications. Turnstone had explored some initial ideas around active seating with a rocking stool concept called Humma shared at Neocon a few years ago, but for Buoy we wanted to allow a greater freedom of movement and a create a highly functioning product that could complement multiple settings and work with different height tables and related items around the home and office from both a functional and aesthetic point of view.
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This photo began making the blog rounds some time last year, and continues to resurface on Pinterest, usually with the word “clever” in the description. But is it? Let’s think about this for a second.
First off there’s the table. Treehugger wrote “I don’t know how they get such a big table into the counter, perhaps there is a fold in it.” By zooming in on the photo, we can tick that box:
As you can see inside the circle, the faintest of reveals is visible, indicating the table’s in two halves. My guess is the front half folds up and back onto the rear half for stowage. The two red arrows indicate where conventional leaf hinges (as seen below) might be, conveniently concealed in the photo by the dish and the newspaper.
However, as this piece of furniture is ascribed to German manufacturer Alno (though I could not find it anywhere on their site, probably due to the language barrier), I wouldn’t be surprised if they used hidden hinges like this:
Those bad boys are inserted into simple holes drilled into the edges of each board, and then you join them like you’re doweling them together. Hinges like that don’t come cheap, maybe a hundred bucks U.S.
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“The first time somebody acknowledged your skill,” writes craftsperson Jeff Baenen, “and asked you to personally make them something (and they would pay you!)… was a moment I will always remember.” Years ago the Illinois-based Baenen, a mechanical designer by training, was having drinks with a co-worker who asked if Jeff could build him a special box: One that would hold his wife’s family Bible.
A box to hold a book, sounds simple, no? But religious tomes that double as family heirlooms require a certain amount of reverence, and there was also a nuts-and-bolts design problem to solve:
The size of the family bible had a huge impact on how the box would be designed. I think it was somewhere around 14”×10”×4”. Being of such a large size I didn’t want to have a person reach into the box to pull out the bible (it was pretty heavy). Nor did I want them picking the box up and dumping the bible out.
Baenen’s solution was to design and build an interior mechanism that would enable the user to raise the book up out of the box, like something from an Indiana Jones movie. “I designed a lifting mechanism that would allow the bible to ‘rise’ out of the box by rotating two cam arms,” Baenen explains. “In the down state the mechanism is only .75” thick. When actuated it will raise the bible 3.5” out of the box… easy to just grab with your hands.”
Here’s shots of the mechanism and the SolidWorks drawings he did to work it out:
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Vitsœ, exclusive licensee of Dieter Rams’ furniture designs, is very pleased to announce that they are re-releasing the “620 Chair Programme.” As of yesterday, the ultraminimal armchair is available on the Vitsœ website and will be in showrooms worldwide shortly.
Vitsœ’s new production of 620 shows characteristic rigour and attention to detail. The chair has been completely re-engineered, right down to the last purpose-designed stainless-steel bolt. In turn, the very best traditional upholstery skills have been revived to ensure a chair that will last for generations, a point reinforced by the choice of a sumptuous full-grain aniline-dyed leather that will only improve with age. All of this has been achieved while prices have been reduced.
Although Rams is best known for designing household wares for a certain German company, he also dabbled in larger objects such as furniture; as with the better-known Vitsœ 606 shelving unit, the 620 is modular (similarly, the first two numbers refer to the year in which the product was designed, per the company’s naming convention). As the story goes, a knockoff turned up by 1968; company co-founder “Niels Vitsœ, fought a lengthy court case that culminated in the chair being granted rare copyright protection in 1973.”
I was tempted to photobomb this image with Blown Away Guy…
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Last fall Core77 got the chance to participate in the jurying of a chair design competition sponsored by Wilsonart and held at the University of Oregon’s Product Design Department. It was a semester long assignment for the students and challenged them to use Wilsonart’s laminates to produce a NW cafe inspired chair. This coming week the results of that competition are going on display in NYC at the ICFF and we encourage you to stop by and see the winners yourself; the high level of thinking and polish applied by the class is well represented by the champion chairs. Here is a teaser of the work, continued from above…
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