Hasta La Ideas

mischer’traxler with their Relumine prototype lamp for Bulb Fiction, top, and their Till You Stop automated cake icing machine in action, pictured bottom. Photo credit: kollectiv fischka

The Vienna based design studio mischer’traxler are so super prolific, that during Vienna Design Week they showed work in at least three exhibitions, exhibition the Till You Stop – How Much is Enough cake icing machine at Design Criminals, the first prototype of the ‘Relumine’ lamp at Bulb Fiction, ‘Nespresso Battery’ for the Nespresso Sustain.Ability competition, and the Rumkugelbahn installation in the MAKshop.

Despite their busy design week schedule, we managed to catch up with Katharina Mischer and Thomas Traxler to discuss cakes, rumkugelbahns, compromise and collaborations.

The Rumkugelbahn – The Rumballrun by mischer’traxler. Photo credit: kollectiv fischka

Core77: How did the Rumkugelbahn come about for Vienna Design Week?

Mischer’Traxler: Actually the Rumkugelbahn is old work that we originally did for the DMY Berlin this year. In the installation are different pieces of work by designers and manufacturers from Vienna., created during previous Vienna Design Weeks. It is actually an exhibition display to promote and advertise the Vienna Design Week, to encourage people to come and visit.

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Top, mischer’traxler’s Automated Cake Decorator and bottom, one of its finished cakes. Photo: mischer’traxler

Curated by Sam Jacob, British architect, designer and director of FAT, the Design Criminals Or a New Joy Into The World exhibition is situated in the Design space of the MAKVienna and co-organised by Thomas Geisler, one of the founding members of Neigungsgruppe Design.

A selection of young designers from Austria were invited to create new works based on the Adolf Loos’ ‘Ornament and Crime’ discourse written by the Austrian architect in 1908. In his essay, Loos explains that ornamentation can have the effect of causing objects to go out of style and become obsolete. Loos saw it was a ‘crime’ to waste the effort needed to add ornamentation, when the ornamentation would cause the object to soon go out of style. The exhibition title refers to this ambivalent debate about ornament and decoration and how the surface has become a form of cultural expression that conveys personal and social agendas.

As a way to explore this debate the selected graphic designers, product designers and architects focused on exploring the potential for ornament in more everyday and anonymous design activities such as cake decorating, hair dressing, tattoing and floristry.

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Vandasye, top, in front of their concept store installation, pictured bottom.

A nice concept for the Passionswege component of Vienna Design week (see earlier post about Mark Braun’s collaboration with J&L Lobmeyr) brought Vandasye to work with Dietmar Sulzberger at his clockmaking shop, Chronometrie Sulzberger.

Georg Schnitzer and Peter Umgeher of Vandasye—a product design studio based in Vienna—saw the potential to turn Mr. Sulzberger’s specialised and solitary shop in the Hernals neighbourhood into a network concept store whereby other Viennese manufacturers and merchants can also sell their high quality products and, in doing so, attract new customers.

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The development of the Everybody’s Bench

At the beginning of the Vienna Design week, Milan-based collective Esterni began a ten-day intervention on the streets of Vienna. Specialising in developing cultural exchange projects in public spaces since 1995, Esterni took over the Palffygasse in the Hernals district of Vienna and created, with Patrick Hubmann, Everybody’s Bench.

Everybody’s Bench is a public design intervention aimed at creating a public arena to stimulate the exchange of new ideas. It will consist of a long wooden bench that will eventually extend all along the Palffygasse, offering people a place to sit, relax, rest, organise small presentations, exhibit their own projects, live, and enjoy the public space.

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Mark Braun, a designer based in Berlin, collaborated with J&L Lobmeyr as part of the Vienna Design Week’s Passionswege – an initiative to bring emerging designers to work directly with local Viennese manufactures or retailers and create on-the-spot experimental projects and interventions.

Braun spent a few months working with the glassmakers and engravers of Lobmeyr to explore the possibilities of creating a functional product that would also comment on its value. As he explains in the video he worked with the copper wheel engraving technique – a long traditional technique used to personalise glass object at Lobmeyr – to realise a series of water carafes that each have been decorated with the outlines of 21 Austrian lakes, rivers, and glaciers. The sum total of these substances together represent the ultimate symbol of the essential wealth of everyday life.

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