As part of the Milan design week 2012 in April, SPD Scuola Politecnica di Design presented the exhibition 'OUT NOW. Stories of Ideas and Matter'.

The exhibition brought together different ideas and views on the subject of design and production, and intersected these with the work of eleven international designers trained in the school in recent years.
How can we interpret the role of designers? The exhibition allowed us to follow the paths of a young generation of designers who have left the classroom and experienced the possibilities of the field as creative apprentices.

'Voi' design by Kostantia Manthou and Manuel Torres, modular storage container, prototype Poliform, 2011
A small architecture that grows in space as it transforms. Voi reinterprets a classic Poliform piece of the late eighties, the IO wardrobe by Paolo Piva.

'Tab' design by Isaac Piñeiro, Nadadora Studio, collection of stools and coffee tables, production Sancal, 2011
Family of stools and low tables inspired by the beehives made from hollow logs, called trobos, very typical of northern Spain. All the pieces are hand made from a bent sheet of natural chestnut veneer.

'Mariù' design by Luis Arrivillaga, suspension lamp, production Made a Mano, 2012
Ceramic lamp with cold enamel coating. It creates an interplay between positive and negative surfaces which is more evident when illuminated. Mariù interprets the space according to a principle of creative disorder generated by the disk of the diffuser.

'Wired' design by Alessandro Stabile with Alessandro Gnocchi, stackable chair with tubular metal frame, production Belca, 2012  
The product doesn’t require any investment in industrial equipment and uses accessible technologies.

'Lateira' design by Rui Pereira, decorated clayware, production Show Me, 2011
An homage to the nearly extinct canned fish industry via another traditional Portuguese handicraft: decorated pottery. The sardine can is transformed into a proud, ready for serving delicacy: a manifesto of the craftsman/designer dichotomy.

'Scooby Doo' design by Giorgio Bonaguro, table lamp, production La Lampe, 2012
The piece chooses a classic language and a minimalistic architecture in tubular metal that supports the glass diffuser. A study in contrasts between the rich material palette and the simplicity of its lightweight structure.
'Tweety' design by Giorgio Bonaguro, table lamp, self production, 2011
A simple and intuitive design made up of two parts, the lampholder and an ecofriendly polycarbonate sheet bent into a loop. Without using screws or joints for easy assembly, the bulb is suspended, like a bird in a cage.

In her latest book, Judith Gura, a specialist in the history of interiors and furnishings explains the important movements (Bauhaus, Postmodernism, High Tech, and Green Design), forms, and furnishings from the 1950s to the present. Design After Modernism captures the range of influences that have spurred new ideas in design and illustrates many of the most characteristic and most innovative objects in this diverse mix.

With the first decade of the twenty-first century behind us, it is time to reassess the concept of "modern," a term that dates to the Middle Ages, when it signified current or recent events. Not until the eighteenth century did it become a stylistic term; more recently it has generally referred to the aesthetic that evolved from the Bauhaus and flourished in the mid-twentieth century. Though proclaiming freedom from the limitations of style, it became as formulaic as most of its predecessors, as Modern architecture and furnishings conformed to prescribed specifications: geometric forms, industrially fabricated, unadorned, and studiously ahistorical. 

Curiosity Kitchen, Alexander Pelikan (Netherlands) 2010
Annie, Reestore (United Kingdom) 2001 Repurposed shopping cart

Those guidelines are no longer relevant. As Midcentury Modernism has receded into history, Modernism has been redefined, reenergized, and in the process transformed. Today it embraces a cornucopia of design in an almost limitless range of materials: design studios are laboratories for experimentation; design concepts can be as important as finished objects; and furniture has crossed barriers to become a new art form. Tools and technologies never before possible have provided new approaches to decoration, and may incorporate influences from the past. The design profession has broadened its horizons; interiors and furniture are being created by architects, interior designers, furniture makers, industrial designers, artisans, artists, and even fashion designers.

Nomos Dining Table, Norman Foster (United Kingdom) 1989
Lounge Chair, Fabio Lenci (Italy) 1970

Design After Modernism offers an overview of developments in design over the past four decades-some evolutionary, some expected, and some extraordinary. It identifies the diverse influences that have generated new directions in design and illustrates many of the most characteristic, most noteworthy, and most innovative objects in this rich and variegated mix. All are representative of their time, and many of the earlier designs have already gained iconic status. Of the more recent ones, whether or not they will be admired in decades to come is something that only time will tell.

Hanging Lamp, Model SP1, Verner Panton (Denmark) 1969
Sushi III Chair, Fernando and Humberto Campana (Brazil) 2002

Book: Design After Modernism: Furniture and Interiors 1970-2010
Author : Judith Gura
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

The City of Charleroi (Belgium), initiated "Label Charleroi" an encounter between companies from the city and Belgian designers.

So far, six collaborations were successful and the result is shown in an exhibition called « Quand Charleroi pointe la technique » hosted by the Museum of Glass on the site of a former coal mine "Le Bois du Cazier".

Caterpillar, the well-known construction company for civil engineering machines, applied its techniques of cutting and bending metal to build a very versatile lamp designed by Sylvain Busine + ADA.
This lamp can be placed in a multitude of positions that allow it to be used as a desk lamp, a table lamp, an ambiant lamp, or even a book-end lamp. It can also be hung on the wall to free the space of a desk or become a bed side table lamp, small shelf, etc.. The wooden lighting module clings to any edge of the lamp with two small but very strong magnets.

Following the inspiration of designer Damien Gernay, Plastiservice, a company working with plastics, has crushed and melted vinyl records to create a new material to be manufactured as a vase for the occasion.

During its collaboration with Trans'Form, a work training company specialised in the repair of appliances, ADA (Atelier Design Addict) focused on residual waste materials and turned them into useful objects. The lamps are build from washing machine and dishwasher parts. The candleholders are made from different types of gas burners.

Amazed by the possibility to "print" transparent 3D objects, Raphaël Charles, product designer, designed a bonbonniere that Sirris, an accredited collective center in thechnological industry, achieved through the stereolithography technique.

GVK, a company in the steel sector, and Atelier Blink, an interior and product design office, focused on the development of steel production in different countries in 1910, 1960 and 2010. They present the results of their research as a "three-dimensional mapping."

A chocolate bar in the shape of a tire called "Royal United" is the result of the meeting between the technical work of ceramist Hugo Meert and Belgian chocolate factory Bruyerre.

Exhibition: Label Charleroi
From October 1 to November 27 2011
Musée du Verre - Site du Bois du Cazier - Marcinelle - Belgium

Dieter Rams is one of the most influential product designers of the twentieth century. Even if you don’t immediately recognize his name, you have almost certainly used one of the radios, clocks, lighters, juicers, shelves or hundreds of other products he designed.

He is famous not only for this vast array of well-formed products, but for his remarkably prescient ideas about the correct function of design in the messy, out-of-control world we inhabit today.

These ideas are summed up in his ‘ten principles’ of good design: Good design is innovative, useful, and aesthetic. Good design should be make a product easily understood. Good design is unobtrusive, honest, durable, thorough, and concerned with the environment. Most of all, good design is as little design as possible.

Photographer Florian Böhm was invited to document the archive and Rams' house, providing a previously unseen look at the world of Dieter Rams.

Dieter Rams, Braun promotional material and image of the 606 shelving programme and prototypes for handles in the workshop, Rams House, Kronberg, Frankfurt, Germany

'It was exciting to browse through the densely preserved collection of Braun design history - which is mostly Dieter Rams',' enthuses Böhm. 'Larger objects in the archive stood out, corridors of TVs for example, but a lot of the archived products were concealed in boxes or in shelves, and often in closed storage units. Only a small amount was easily accessible with the camera, more or less by chance, when openly placed, in transition from one place to another or more visibly wrapped in clear plastic.'

PC 3 record player with spare parts for other hi-fi systems and face plate for hi-fi unit, Braun Archive, Kronberg, Frankfurt, Germany

Böhm continues: 'My interest was the condition of the archive, the site itself and the kind of mutated nature these objects seem to have developed within the archive arrangements and their new purpose in this context. I am fascinated with the reality of a physical archive and the analog logistics involved - the labelling, shelving, lighting, protection and accessibility. The preserved objects remain unused and seem to convert to pure information, as carriers of cultural identity.'

Dieter Rams seated in chair from 620 chair programme and with TG 550 reel-to-reel tape recorder, Rams House, Kronberg, Frankfurt, Germany

Rams' house - his only piece of architecture - is remarkable for the detail and the design principles applied to it. 'One idea was to follow Rams through the house while he was telling personal anecdotes about objects that are meaningful to him,' Böhm explains of his approach to photographing the house. 'A zoom into the higher resolution of the space, a macro view on the personal arrangement of things, beyond the ridged functional first impression of the space, for example, the workshop in the basement of his house, is full of interesting objects and traces of Rams.'

Dieter Rams, a prototype for a chair and and SK 4 record player, Rams House, Kronberg, Frankfurt, Germany

Book for sale on Amazon: Dieter Rams: As Little Design as Possible
By Sophie Lovell and Klaus Kemp - Foreword by Jonathan Ive
Edited by Phaidon Press

The Bouroullec brothers have presented some great new products in Milan this year.

Osso chair - Mattiazzi © studio Bouroullec
Working with Mattiazzi is comparable to working with an organic farm. While being a small, family-owned company that has been manufacturing chairs for others since about forty years, Mattiazzi decided to do less yet better. By using sophisticated CNC set of tools and at the same time a greatly refined manual know-how, Mattiazzi has a hybrid way to consider furniture production. We were particularly interested by the fact that all the equipment is powered by solar energy and that the wood is coming from the surrounding areas to be carefully selected without the use of any chemical treatments. They came back to the basics and this is precisely what piqued our interest and our fascination for the Mattiazzi family's endeavour. As designers, we feel involved in supporting such valiant microstructures that are always on the edge as they try to adjust to a constantly changing market. That said, the Osso chair had to be the illustration of what Mattiazzi is in its roots. We designed an object in plain wood but not in regular plain wood, the quality of the wood literally makes the object, like the best piece of meat would make the refinement of a dish. Our intention was to let the sensuality of the wood material - from oak to maple to ash - express itself. The Osso chair invites to be touched, even caressed as it is extremely sculpted and polished thanks to the use of highly sophisticated digital control equipment. The high-tech assembling system of geometrical wood panels allows a quite singular strength while preserving a design balance of the object.


Piani Lamp - Flos © flos
The Piani collection is made of a flat base and a flat top. The base is either a tray so that objects can be displayed in a triangular beam of light as if they were on stage or in its longer version, a shelve so that more objects can be supported by this hybrid design. Piani comes in plastic as well as in oak wood and basalt stone in the shelving versions so that different sensual experiences are suggested.


Aim Lamp - Flos © flos
The general idea behind the Aim design is to propose a lamp that would offer an infinite variety of adjustments to meet one's lighting needs. We came up with a proposal of a new typology of lamp that naturally positions itself in the space - like a plant would do - thanks to the long cables which facilitate the orientation and the height of the light freely. This object in ABS is the industrial version of the Lianes that we presented at the kreo Gallery, Paris in 2010.


Baguettes chair - Magis © studio Bouroullec
With Baguettes, our intention was to design a chair that would be brought down to its minimum, using the least quantity of material and assembling items. The ply wood seat and back parts of the chair are supported by four very thin sticks in solid wood which are maintained together by a structure in injected aluminium that is almost invisible. The back of the chair, like the blade of a knife, subtly comes into the main frame while guaranteeing high support resistance. As the Baguette table that we designed for Magis in 2010, we wanted this chair to be as light as possible, to almost float in the space as if it would stay on its feet by magic.


Oiseau - Vitra © studio Bouroullec