03.04.19

Excerpt: Exhibition

A Showcase for Experimental Craft — And Iridescence — On View in London

Like Salon in New York, the Collect fair in London has recently evolved to become a platform for enabling more risk-taking work, showcasing the latest possibilities, processes, and technologies at play in the field of making. The peripatetic London gallery Seeds, a longtime SU favorite, returned to the fair this year with newly commissioned works from nine contemporary designers.

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07.02.18

Up and Coming

The RCA Grad Who Hacked a Piece of Gym Equipment to Create These Slumped, Ceramic Vases

For Philipp Schenk-Mischke’s recent Process Plug-Ins project, the designer looked at traditional modes of manufacturing, assembly, and use, and introduced physical "plug-ins" that might distort the final outcomes. For his BTM Ceramics — a collection of distorted, high-gloss vases — the still-wet, malleable pieces are placed on a body vibration plate and gently jiggled into more slumped, organic forms.

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02.01.18

Up and Coming

The Chilean Floral Artist Taking Over Your Instagram Feed

Getting ahold of Carolina Spencer isn’t easy. When she’s not designing ceramic vases, the Barcelona-based creative behind the floral Instagram sensation Matagalan is busy finessing ikebana-like installations for the foyers of the relaxed fashion label Masscob, or refreshing weekly foliage amongst the city’s flourishing cafés and coffee shops — Casa Bonay and Satan’s Coffee among them. In fact, you’re probably already familiar with her work even if you aren’t based in the Catalonian capital. In her feed, artfully balanced ceramic totems and ikebana-inspired botanicals make for an enviably satisfying scroll.

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05.02.17

At Home With

Dutch Design’s Masters of Color At Home in Their Eindhoven Loft

When we caught up with Raw Color last fall amid the madness of Dutch Design Week, Christoph Brach and Daniera ter Haar — along with their son, Ando — had been living and working in their new house for exactly a year. Theirs, like other lofty, new-build homes in Eindhoven, artfully blends the parallels of modern-day life: the family eats and rests upstairs, and works downstairs, following a studio build in the basement last March.

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04.14.17

Up and Coming

This Dutch-Based Studio Was the Best Thing We Saw at Salone Satellite

The Dutch-based studio Truly Truly finds a comfortable niche oscillating between product design and experience, creating artful and engaging moments for the viewer that fall between familiarity and curiosity. Their latest work, presented at last week’s Salone Satellite, features projects that combine technical ingenuity with new aesthetics — their morphing Touch glass lights are cast using a dynamic mold that allows for more expressive surface qualities, while the Wove chair plays on the graphic interplay of two differently colored bent-wire frames. And of course we were instantly magnetized by the Daze table – folded, aluminum volumes with subtle corner slits, which allow flashes of hazy, powder-coated color to burst through.

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03.09.17

Up and Coming

An Up-And-Coming Dutch Duo On Why They Don’t Identify As “Designers”

In 2008, when Daphna Isaacs Burggraaf and Laurens Manders began collaborating, they kept their studios separate. It wasn’t until four years later that they officially founded their company, compounding ideas and names — the latter of which was deemed a challenge until the Internet threw up the solution. “We were looking to find out if images of our products had been published, and we found an image of our lamps with the name ‘Daphna Laurens’ written above it.” Upon reading this, they realized that it was exactly what they’d been looking for — an anonymous name that symbolized their way of working together; a new ego that has allowed them to playfully carve out a space for themselves as form-flexing experimenters.

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Emerging Norwegian designers Domaas Hogh

01.03.17

Up and Coming

An Emerging Norwegian Design Duo, Inspired by the Scandinavian Winter

While others may bemoan this season’s ever-wintery temperatures, young Norwegian design studio Domaas/Høgh look to the colder skies as an excuse to imbue their work with a bit of coziness. “This might sound like a cliché, but seasonal change is not something that passes us by without notice,” note the duo, when asked what’s been inspiring them of late. In truth, that awareness seems to be instinctive to Norwegian designers as a whole.

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11.02.16

Fair Report

Our Top Finds From Dutch Design Week 2016

It’s been fifteen years since the first-ever Dutch Design Week, and since then, Eindhoven’s 10-day celebration has seen both highs (international success and prestige) and lows (the slashing of arts funding as well as high-profile resignations from the esteemed Design Academy). What has stayed constant is the country’s ability to remain relevant in response to new challenges and issues and the city's reputation for churning out some of the next best design talents.

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10.05.16

Up and Coming

Meet the New Generation of Italian Design

“Learning something new in every project gives us energy and happiness, which are fundamental not only while designing, but also in everyday life,” says Marco Zavagno on the curiosity that drives his collaboration with co-founder, Enrica Cavarzan, in their Venetian-based design practice Zaven. It’s a malleable mindset that sees the understated duo flexing their design muscles across various disciplines, having created everything from lights and chairs for companies such as Atipico and Secondome to catalogs and logos for design brands and schools.

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07.27.16

Up and Coming

A Bauhaus-Inspired Artist Makes Color Her Primary Medium

The paintings and wall-based textiles of New York–based Senem Oezdogan are like a Venn diagram where Bauhaus and Suprematism meet — almost as if Anni Albers and Kazimir Malevich were to have a baby. Her fiber-based geometric studies — made by wrapping wood panels in natural rope, punctuated by cotton floss color blocks — are deft executions of straight lines and woven shapes that tease the eye yet retain the softness of a tapestry.

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06.28.16

Up and Coming

Six Talents to Watch from RCA’s 2016 Graduate Show

Martino Gamper, Tomás Alonso, Raw-Edges, Soft Baroque — these are just a few of the designers who came from abroad to study at London's Royal College of Art and ended up making a home in the UK. So it's no wonder a dampened mood filled the air at this year's graduate showcase, in the wake of the EU Referendum, with an underlying anxiety of how the political sphere might affect the influx — and future prospects — of applying students. Still, the show was as fruitful as ever at uncovering this year's next big thing designers — click through for six of our favorites!

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02.18.16

Studio Visit

Dutch Design Studio Os ∆ Oos Makes Work That’s Brainy But Beautiful

Four years ago, Sight Unseen featured the first product by what was then a brand-new studio on the scene: The Syzygy series by Dutch duo Os ∆ Oos consisted of three lamps whose intensity depended on the subtle rotation of three light-filtering discs placed in front of the bulb; it was inspired by the astronomical phenomenon of three celestial bodies aligning in space. As a design product, it was both conceptually driven and artistically minded, but it was, at the end of the day, a lamp. “We’re definitely not artists; we’re designers,” clarifies Oskar Peet, who with Sophie Mensen makes up the Eindhoven-based studio. “We like to make functional projects.”

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