Each year some fifteen whales get stranded on the coasts of Iceland. A whole local tradition is being kept alive around the bones of these gentle giants, often used in their raw state but rarely worked on by designers. In January 2013, 17 ECAL Product Design Master students went to the Iceland Academy of the Arts in Reykjavik to attend a workshop led by Icelandic designer Brynjar Sigurðarson. According to him “the idea was to collect various types of bones on the beach, but also shark skin or teeth, or even bits of plastic waste. From this starting point, the ECAL students who had come from all corners of the earth were supposed to draw on the atmosphere of this particular environment to create objects”.
From the skull of a Minke whale repainted like a car body to cutters using shark’s teeth, via ship models whose centreboard is made from whale vertebrae, masks put together using the remains of marine animals and contemporary materials, and including a geometric decorative object made of bone and placed on a pedestal, this surprisingly poetic selection is the fruit of a reflection on contrasts between the old and the new and the meeting of the primitive and the progressive.
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MA PRODUCT DESIGN
by Adam Friedrich
Airy is a research project that explores the use of air as a primary resource. It uses inflatable structures to protect valuable devices during travel. The design employs contemporary materials and pays particular attention to detail to offer relevant, everyday solutions for safeguarding increasingly fragile and valuable electronic devices.
MA PRODUCT DESIGN
by Alicia Stricker
Folly approaches the craft of beaded embroidery from a product design perspective. It explores the value of tactility above the visual aspects that the technique is traditionally valued for. Consequently, the project manifested as something that is experienced by the body - a sofa. Scaling up the traditionally small beads and applying principles of beaded embroidery in the development of a textile sofa cover allowed for the sofa to transcend its classic typology, creating a three-dimensional surface with a biological sculptural presence - an object that breaks the mould of what we expect of something as familiar as a sofa and begs to be experienced through touch.
MA PRODUCT DESIGN
by Brice Tempier
Due to limited housing capacity in urban areas, more people are living in small dwellings. At the same time, renting has become a common form of housing in many countries, including among adults. These conditions, sometimes marked by instability, frequent moves, and a feeling of not truly belonging to the place where one lives, led the designer to reflect on our relationship with domestic space, its temporary nature, and the difficulty of making it one’s own. This project takes the form of a small, mobile structure, the size of a bed, conceived as a personal spatial frame within a room. Péninsule is a dense and flexible living space, a micro-architecture open to appropriation.
MA PRODUCT DESIGN
by Carl Johan Jacobsen
In the U.K new court ruling threatens trans-people while the US government is doing a full assault on trans and female bodies. Hardwear is a collection of wearable objects offering a sense of protection in urban environments, as a response to a growing tendency of hostility towards the body. Hard surfaces become flexible armor, protective shields transform into high heels. Whether to preserve personal space on public transport or to create cognitive distance Hardwear aims to create a sense of security. By using hard materials, the feeling of being safe inside a car is transformed to the outside resulting in a line of wearable objects made for for everyday resistance. Drawn on protection typologies from sportswear, Hardwear is made of 100% recycled plastic with 3D printed elements.
MA PRODUCT DESIGN
by Cedric Zimmerman
DUCTUS is investigating how tangential fans can be reinterpreted in combination with spiral ducts, which are normally used in industrial HVAC systems, in a modular, energy-efficient ceiling ventilation system. The galvanised sheet metal is perforated locally using a specially developed laser manufacturing process and then processed into spiral ducts in an industrial standard procedure with almost no material loss. These ducts serve both as air ducts and as a supporting structure for the fan unit. The system, manufactured in collaboration with the Lausanne-based company Air Ventil, generates a wide, quiet air flow while also adding architectural accents.