Toy Workshop

écal - one week workshop w/ Floris Hovers

Group work with Jérôme Rütsche

Think like a child. These are some home- made toys built from stuff found around the house. Instead of aiming at the design of another product during this one week workshop with dutch designer Floris Hovers, Jérôme and me wished to communicate and promote not a precise object, but rather a way of using ordinary things to create original objects to play with. As kids we enjoyed the act of making and building toys as much as the playing with it afterwards. To our minds the beauty of childhood is the intellectual innocence in the interaction with objects, kids see colors and shapes that possibly turn into anything they want to see in them.

As a kid you don't care about the intended use of a dust pan, a coathanger, tumblers, a corkscrew or whatsoever. These associated functions narrowing down the perception of an object only grow in numbers with the years. So we turned back in time for a day and produced whatever would come to our minds. But of course we are no kids anymore, and could not help to play with archetypes and clichées, such as guns, jetpacks and airplanes. Still we hope the combinations are somewhat original and that the objects could be regarded as a source of inspiration for children that will then come up with their own ideas for stuff, ten times better than what we, so called design students, can come up with.

The funny thing is millions of children built stuff like this on a daily basis, and it would never come to their mind to call it design!

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Weathervane / Girouette

Made at écal, 1st semester BA

One of the tasks in my first semester of Industrial Design at écal was to conceive a «girouette», a weathervane. I got inspired by Max Bill's notion of how Designers should operate when working on projects. «When they’re working on something, designers should not be thinking about the opportunities for self- expression: the only measure they should be applying is whether the object does its job completely. For it’s only in this way that the object will require a character that is particular to it - a character related not to the designer, but to the object itself.»

The weathervane I designed is intended for public space, keeping a strong character related to mundane and familiar signage. Drawing an aesthetic parallel to a familiar image, that one of a piece of newspaper or a leaf caught in the branches of a tree, an intuitive and comprehendible image is created by a bent sheet of powder coated aluminum sheet folding and rotating around a vertical pole. It measures 3 meters in height.

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Plywood Sphere

Made at écal, 1st semester BA

Construct a sphere from a 60x90 cm plate of 0.8mm thin veneer. As the only tool for producing the elements constructing the ball the laser cutter could be used. No glue, no nails, screws or any other element had to be used for the construction. The structure should consist solely of wood and be dimensionally stable at the same time. Review criteria included formal aesthetics, intelligent use of the properties, advantages and disadvantages of wood, its fiber- and its bending direction as well as subjective criteria such as a possibly most "magical" and "surprising" design. Moreover, the economic use of the material available (60 x 90 mm plywood board) and the product-specific implementation of the ideas in terms of the possibilities and the process of laser cutting. Models could be built from 1mm thick cardboard, thus, in principle, the main challenge of the project was to limit any room for chance, coincidence and contingency. There was only one attempt to construct the wooden ball. With the models and tests from a different material (cardboard) the behavior of the veneer had to be anticipated and predicted as far as only possible, assuring that the same construction would ultimately be feasible in wood. Each parameter had to be determined, every detail had to have its purpose always taking into account the final material wood that the assembled sphere was to consist of.

Every detail has a purpose in the design or specific steps in the assembly of this sphere. My focus lay thus on the material-saving production while at the same time achieving full elasticity and bending capacity of the timber, making the most use of its specific characteristics. Parallel, perpendicular and diagonal to the fiber direction the extensive deformation, twisting and tension in the wood created a self rectifying structure.

The force balance and the over-and under superposition of modules leads to a self-maintaining construction in which each of the 60 identical elements is both supported, pulled and pushed by another, as well as simultaneously supporting and deforming the next element, thereby statically rectifying the whole structure to a stable point, while containing a resilient tension.

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Pista

Inspired by Sports

Made at écal, Foundation Course

«Pista» is a tablelamp inspired by the system of the bicycle stem. Replacing the screw by a spring allows more flexibility and a faster adjustment of one tube in another. A tender pressing on the button on the upper end of the lamp deblocks the oblique stem in the tube, making it possible to continously move the light up and down or rotate it into any desired position.

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One Kilo

KAA & Liane

Made at écal, Foundation Course

Two lamps made within the context of a project under the direction of Martino d'Esposito at écal. We had to conceive an object that conceptualizes the idea of a kilo as its central characteristic. I was - somewhat bizarre I know - so completely fascinated by the haptical presence of the one kilo piece of polished inox steel that I centered my two ideas around the use of that very piece. I wanted to make the physical contact with the one kilo essential to the use of these objects, create a moment of perception - a notion of what a kilo actually feels like. Can you estimate the weight of a kilo? I mean, can you imagine it as you imagine the taste of chocolate or the impact of the sun on your skin? Do you have a physical notion of a 1000 grams in your hand?

The floorlamp KAA works with a basic physical principle of friction, a rectangular hole on a rectangular pole. The weight of the kilo keeps the light in place.

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Cloudlight ( Prototypes )

Dutch Design Week 2011

Revealing the filigree beauty of the 'in between' by inverting space.

Soaked into the incredibly fine mesh of hollows in between the expanded spheres of polystyrene ( EPS ) blocks, pigmented epoxy remains as a sturdy skeleton of what used to be but air. By epoxy- covering hollow shapes carved into styrofoam blocks and letting aceton corrode away the polystyrene mold, each time a completely unique Cloudlight is literally given birth to. Resembling the siliceous leftovers of deceased radiolarians or coral skeletons, the highly fractal yet amorph structure of these lamps is astonishingly strong and rigid, opening up tons possibilities to play with combinations of shapes, colors, density and thickness of all the other Cloudlights yet to be grown. Epoxy resin, pigment

Zip-To-Slip

Made at écal, Foundation Course

From flat to full in style and use, this shoehorn is the product of a project around the zipper. Similar to the one kilo project we had to conceive an object making unexpected use of the zipper, the "fermeture éclaire". This buddy comes flat, zipping it up turns it into a shoehorn.

Polypropylene Sheet, Leather, Zipper

Velcro Table Lamp

Three wooden feet, a socket, a cable, a sheet of paper and some velcro. That's all you need for this humble lamp.

Tack Five

Made at écal, Foundation Course

A "travail rapide" - realize a product - within 8 hours - based on the use of a nail to fix it, use it or whatever. Tack Five is a sticky note with a little more expression to it.

Steck Stopfen Lampe - Tuck Plug Light

Socket, plug, connector and lightbulb.
Tuck it into the socket on the wall. The plug of the lamp hides the ugly power socket underneath. The idea for this little light comes from the concept of a light that you can put anywhere for example on the tiles in the kitchen or the bathroom by its sucking force of the rubber plug.

Billy The Goat

Design of the Cologne mascot for "Blick nach Afrika" exhibition at Olympia und Sportmuseum Köln- World Soccer Championship 2010. This goat was sold to the Youth Art Galery of Cologne.

Plastering the given form of the goat in a dyed mantle of modelling plaster allowed me to carve lines into it's skin, creating multifarious two- tone patterns inspired by traditional native african arts and craft techniques normally applied to wood.

Plaster, natural cord, yarn, oil paint, woodstain