Having combed through the torrent of this summer’s design graduates, it’s gratifying to find someone we had the prescience to bookmark early on in his career: For Philipp Schenk-Mischke’s Process Plug-Ins project — the final collection of the designer’s Royal College of Art Design Products career — Schenk-Mischke looked at traditional modes of manufacturing, assembly, and use, and introduced physical “plug-ins” that might distort the final outcomes. Not unlike today’s web browser add-ons that enable digital customization, the designer hacked existing manufacturing techniques to add on specific features — and explore the expressive potential of industrial materials — in his physical objects.

For Schenk-Mischke’s Primitive Fixings shelving collection, for example, the designer devised a method of joining materials together by pouring liquid aluminum into pre-drilled channels. When solidified, the aluminum acts like a dowel, allowing the designer to connect once-complicated materials. Both functional and expressive, we like the collaged-together look of the aluminum and marble slab shelving units, with their glue-like, once-molten blobs looking more like organic jewelry pieces than typical construction screws.

The show-stealers here, however, are the BTM Ceramics: a collection of distorted, high-gloss ceramic vases. The vases are altered just after being taken out of the mold; the malleable pieces are placed on a body vibration plate — a piece of equipment hijacked from the fitness industry — and gently jiggled into more slumped, organic forms. Stay tuned for more RCA projects later this week!