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01.15.24

Up and Coming

Born in Philly and Based in London, Andrew Pierce Scott Has a Knack for Turning Discards Into Drama

Metamorphosis is at the heart of what Andrew Pierce Scott does. The London-based American designer has a talent for taking leftovers and discards and turning them into sculptural metal furniture and objects or an evocative textile still-life. In Scott’s hands, recycled sheet steel becomes a lamp with a darkened yet almost iridescent finish; fabric scraps become a plate of oysters and glasses of wine that make you immediately wish for the pleasures of good company and a good meal.
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02.22.19

Eye Candy

You’ll Never Believe How These Ombré Ceramics Are Made

We've seen designers do a lot of crazy things with ceramic in our career, but Philipp Schenk-Mischke's incredibly bizarre process might be our favorite yet — he uses a body vibration plate, co-opted from the fitness industry, to gently jiggle his way to a unique, slumped ceramic form.
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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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07.12.18

Up and Coming

Seven Designers to Watch from RCA’s Ceramics & Glass Program

Is the Royal College of Art London's most important ceramics incubator? When we look back on years of covering the design school's graduation show, our favorites have invariably come from that school's department of Ceramics and Glass. So this year, we cut right to the chase, and are featuring our favorite projects from the program.
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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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07.21.15

Eye Candy

3D Objects Made of Everything From Cement to Jell-O

Plenty of designers who work primarily in two dimensions translate their patterns and images to textiles, but up-and-coming London designer Lucy Hardcastle's oeuvre is particularly diverse — a former textiles student, she creates three-dimensional objects, sets, and artworks made of everything from cement to Jell-O, then draws on those creations to make prints for clients like Nike and Alexander Wang.
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09.15.14

Sighted

Charcolor Furniture, by Louie Rigano and Avantika Agarwal

Our first introduction to Louie Rigano, a New Jersey-born, RISD-educated designer who's now studying in the Design Products program at RCA, was a piece he'd made for the American Design Club's Trophy Show, back in 2013. Called Glittering Urn, it was a neo-classical form made slightly punk-rock by virtue of its material: a resin that had been almost entirely suffused with glitter. So it came as no surprise when we received an email last week from the designer — who describes his process as a "search for moments of unexpected accord between the spectacular and the practical" — of a new furniture collection he'd created in collaboration with fellow student Avantika Agarwal, which paired relatively simple wooden forms with an audacious coloring process. To create Charcolor Furniture's seared rainbow effect, CMYK pigments are literally burned onto the wood.
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08.13.14

Up and Coming

Marine Duroselle, graphic designer

For the young, French graphic designer and Royal College of Arts grad Marine Duroselle, a relationship to pattern and shape is both instinctive and intuitive, owing in large part to the vast array of objects she was exposed to as a child. Growing up in Peru, her mother an anthropologist specializing in pre-Colombian textiles, Duroselle was continually surrounded by rich fabrics, threads and other types of South American crafts; a period of post-adolescence spent living in New York, on an exchange program at the School of Visual Arts, only further emphasized her interest in textiles and color.
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09.03.13

Up and Coming

James Shaw, Furniture Designer

I recently wrote an article for a forthcoming issue of Architectural Digest on the London talent Anton Alvarez, whose Thread-Wrapping Machine has captivated the design world as of late, and in it, his gallerist Libby Sellers makes the point that what's so of the moment about his work is that he isn't just making objects, he's making the object that makes the objects. And it's so true: Many of the more interesting young designers we've come across in the past few years have been the ones shifting their focus towards developing their own weird and wonderful production processes, like Silo Studio for instance. There's just something about this unexpected inventiveness that captures people's curiosity, which explains why the latest project by newcomer James Shaw — a series of homemade "guns" that spray or extrude materials into or onto furnishings — went viral on the design blogs shortly after he presented it at his RCA graduation show. In work like his, it's about the journey, not just the destination. So Sight Unseen, right?
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02.08.13

Up and Coming

Ya Wen Chou, Textile and Product Designer

Ahh, design school — where navel-gazing and the pretentions of identity art are not only tolerated, but encouraged (on days when the lesson plan doesn't focus on sustainability or people with disabilities, of course). It's easy for lesser talents to get sucked too far into these themes and end up with over-baked work that either borders on kitsch or is completely irrelevant to the wider world, but when done right, the results can be both beautiful and culturally illuminating — as in the case of Ya Wen Chou, who used her time in the RCA's textile department to dig into the traditions of her grandmother and her home country of Taiwan. "My grandmother’s house was always full of handicrafts made by Taiwanese artisans," she told the Arts Thread blog last year, explaining a main source of her inspiration. And her Precious Objects project — which first caught our eye on Pinterest — explores her culture's traditional reverence for nature's role in everyday life, which does feel rather universal, having a lot in common with everything from Icelandic elf mythology to Native American spirituality. Read more about Chou's point of view in our interview after the jump.
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01.11.13

Studio Visit

Silo Studio, Furniture Designers

Oscar Wanless and Attua Aparicio certainly aren’t the first design students to have clashed with an industrial manufacturer, showing up the so-called experts by proving a seemingly impossible process quite possible after all. But the RCA grads—who now collaborate as Silo Studio—are certainly the first we’ve heard of whose triumph so impressed said manufacturer that they were asked to move into the factory. At an industrial park 45 minutes outside the center of London, Silo operates out of a small warehouse room on the premises of Jablite, the U.K.'s largest maker of styrofoam insulation panels. “They’ve got steam, which is how we produce what we produce,” explains Wanless, that being lumpy polystyrene furnishings once compared to “stage scenery for a production of Hansel and Gretel on acid.”
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