Hasta La Ideas

Here’s some more nautical design from London designers PostlerFerguson (see their buoy-shaped lamps in our earlier story), this time a set of wooden toy ships. 

Top: Container Ship
Above: Oil Tanker

Called Wooden Giants, the three toy boats are based on the three largest cargo ships in the world.

Above: Liquid Gas Tanker

The toys were shown as part of the London Design Festival show Translations in September.

Translations was curated by Oscar Diaz and presented each designer’s latest project alongside the object or image that originally inspired them – in this case a photograph of the world’s largest container ship.

Here’s some information from the designers:

Wooden Toy Ships by Postlerferguson

The Emma Maersk, Arctic Princess and TI Asia are three of the largest cargo ships in the world transporting goods over thousands of miles from continent to continent. From the crude oil pumped into the belly of the tanker in the south Chinese sea to the refinery which produces the main synthetic raw materials to be delivered to factories and manufacturers around the globe, these giant machines are an overlooked but integral part of our daily lives.

Behind the sheer gigantic complexity and abstraction of the global logistic system hides an intriguing beauty of radical functionality and almost organic, nerve-like organisation. We aim to translate its machine protagonists into a very familiar format of classic wooden toys and objects. Wooden toys were on the height of success in the middle of the last century and quickly got pushed aside by a tsunami of cheap plastic toys and now barely occupy a niche segment.

The Wooden Toy Ship mini-series is about reintroducing a sense of the grandeur of current technological feats to the wooden toy. The quality of the materials, reduced aesthetic and sense of technological optimism draw on the classic language of wood toys, while the updated subject matter introduces essential aspects of global modernism into the home.

‘Translations’ acknowledge the fact that objects are just a link on a chain of objects, and cannot be understood in isolation. The exhibition showcases new work by a group of young designers, which use a mix of intuition and observation as a primary tool to generate their ideas. What do they have in common a shovel and a range of outdoor lighting? You may ask.  What about a pencil sharpener and an ashtray?

The link could be just a particular shape, a similar way of using them, or simply how the different materials are connected. The designers involved in ‘ Translations’ found inspiration for they projects on dented cars, a shovel, an ashtray, mailing envelopes, the world’s largest container ship, or a lab funnel, for example. In order to explain the designer’s thinking path, each prototype will be displayed alongside to the images or objects that inspired them. Translations’ intends to demystify the creative process by giving a rare insight into what inspire designers, and how they translate ideas into products.

Dimensions:

Container Ship:
800mm * 110mm
Birch

Liquid Gas Tanker:

590mm * 98mm
Ash

Oil Tanker:
750mm * 140mm
Maple

See also:

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Buoy Lamps by PostlerFerguson	More stories from London Design Festival 2010	More design stories on Dezeen