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1RENS_Pode Rens 0318
12.17.18

Up and Coming

This Dutch Design Duo Ignores What’s “Right” in Their Quest to Make Something Perfect

Over the last few years, the Dutch studio RENS has been busy building a diverse portfolio of experimental yet resolved and alluring designs. Each project they undertake breathes new life into familiar processes and is approached from a purposefully uninformed standpoint. In fact, by knowing less about a production method and the way things “should be done,” they find the beauty and potential in rejects and mistakes.
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Studio Ilio_opener
12.03.18

Up and Coming

A Furniture Collection in London Made From 3D Printing’s Leftovers

Years ago, when London-based designers Seongil Choi and Fabio Hendry met as students at the Royal College of Art, they were asked to make a stool — which, at the time, they had very little interest in doing. Yet by channeling their common backgrounds in industrial design and their interest in finding uses for low-value, abundant resources, they inadvertently developed an innovative process — called Hot Wire Extensions — by which they have now made many, many a stool, and so much more.
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Marcin Rusak Manufacture
10.16.18

Sighted

Liquefied Metal, Applied Like Spray Paint, Creates Texture in a New Collection

The London-based, Polish-born designer Marcin Rusak first rose to prominence a few years ago exploring how natural materials — and, in many cases, live ones, like flowers and bacteria — could be harnessed and transformed into a wholly new aesthetic. Now, Rusak is developing a more industrial-based offshoot called MRM (or Marcin Rusak Manufacture), and the brand's first collection takes as its starting point a similar urge to recast commonly found natural elements as something otherworldly.
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Sigve-11
06.25.18

Studio Visit

Meet Sigve Knutson, The Rising Star of Norwegian Design

Sigve Knutson is part of a special cadre of designers who seem to emerge from art school fully formed and gallery ready, their degree projects often representing some ingenious made-up process that acts as a bellwether for where the design world is headed. His 2016 thesis project from the Design Academy Eindhoven was immediately snapped up and developed by Carwan Gallery; earlier this year, when we called out a certain lumpen aesthetic as one of the top design trends for 2018, Knutson's work was the primary reason why.
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Up and coming Swiss designer Dimitri Bähler
01.18.18

Up and Coming

This Swiss Designer Blends the Rational With the Emotional to Create Some of the Most Beautiful Objects We’ve Seen

"When I started at ECAL at age 18, I actually didn’t know much about design," admits Dimitri Bähler. "As a kid, I was more interested in music, fashion, and illustration, along with biology and chemistry. In fact, I've always combined those two poles of interests: the rational and the emotional." That seems as good a way as any to describe Bähler, a young Swiss designer whose work has always seemed the result of both meticulous planning and wild experimentation. In many of his pieces, a relatively strict basic form is married to a more complex and renegade surface treatment.
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Dutch Design Week 2017 - Hardcore Exhibition
10.25.17

Excerpt: Exhibition

At Dutch Design Week, 17 Designers Turning Everyday Materials into Sculptural Furniture

It’s Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven, and we'll be publishing a round-up of our favorites first thing next week. But for the second year in a row, one of the best exhibitions on view came from the young trend-forecasting and design firm Core Studio, who last year curated the colorful exhibition Popcore. This year, the theme was HARDCORE, and the curators asked participating designers to create works exploring "a counter-digital movement."
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NorwayxNewYork_opener1
05.22.17

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

We Paired Norwegian Studios with American Studios to Collaborate on New Works

In 2016, Sight Unseen’s editors created a cross-cultural exchange called Norway x New York, pairing 5 American studios with 5 Norwegian studios, who spent six months working together long-distance on objects that utilize an American workshop for fabrication. After a successful debut at Sight Unseen OFFSITE last year, Norway x New York has returned this week with an all-new collection of collaborative furniture, lighting, and accessories, pictured after the jump.
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VillaLena_Kon
10.21.16

Where They've Been

We Spent Two Months With 12 Artists in a Tuscan Paradise

When you tell people that you just got back from a two-month stay in a 19th-century Tuscan villa with three swimming pools where you had your own artist's studio and a gourmet chef cooking you dinner every night, the first thing they tend to do is giggle: It sounds like you're making it up. But the Villa Lena is no fairy tale, it's a very real place with a very real residency program that we participated in this summer, and documented here with the help of Berlin art director Sarah Illenberger.
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IG_721_MAINVIEW
09.27.16

Up and Coming

Beautiful Objects Built to Last, By a Tech Refugee Turned Furniture Designer

Not every designer considers UI when approaching a furniture collection, but then Zürich-based Isabell Gatzen isn’t every designer: A brief stint in Silicon Valley a few years back left her disillusioned with the short product lifecycle that seems to be a hallmark of so much tech industry innovation and eager to apply strategic thinking to a more traditional craft.
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Dropbox mural by New York graphic designers Aaron Robbs and Alex Proba
09.07.16

Eye Candy

A Tech-Office Mural is the Ultimate Canvas for These Graphic Designers

By now, the large-scale mural has become something of a familiar, de rigueur decoration for tech HQs — the past few years have seen everything from Trek Matthews for Dolby Labs, to Serena Mitnik-Miller for Facebook, Ian Ross for Lyft, Camille Walala (also for Facebook) and more. But this latest might be our favorite yet: Commissioned for Dropbox's 26,000-square-foot Flatiron office in New York, the mural we're featuring today is a collaboration between New York graphic designers and former Kickstarter co-workers Aaron Robbs and Alex Proba of Studio Proba.
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Dimitri Baehler (c) Raphaelle Muller - 01
06.30.16

Excerpt: Exhibition

Ceramic Experiments by a Swiss Designer, On View in the South of France

First on our list of talents to scout at this year's Design Parade at Villa Noailles: Swiss designer Dimitri Bähler, who we featured earlier this year for the beautiful limestone bench he showed with Nov Gallery in Milan. Bähler showed at Noailles a few years ago when his current project was in its infancy: Now called Volumes, Patterns, Textures & Colors, the collection, on view in the gymnasium at Villa Noailles, features a series of ceramic volumes that have been imprinted with various three-dimensional patterns by way of a textured latex foil.
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Jongjin Park layered ceramics
06.03.16

Eye Candy

You’ll Never Guess What These Ceramics Are Made From

When you first catch sight of the pieces in South Korean artist Jongjin Park's Artistic Stratum ceramic series, it's almost impossible to tell that they're ceramics at all; their textured, layered surfaces call to mind everything from sponges to unsanded wood. But the pieces were in fact made using a technique Park stumbled upon while researching his Master's thesis at Cardiff University in the UK: By painting clay slip onto pieces of paper towel, layering them, applying pigment and then firing them at 1280 degrees, Park creates a masslike trompe l'oeil.
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