The Real Feel
The Kadamba Gate by Ini Archibong for Connected, 2020. Archibong is the recent winner of London Design Biennale 2021 Best Design Medal for the Pavillion of the African Diaspora (image: AHEC).
“I like concept design, the kind which is so clear you do not need to draw it,” the designer Vico Magistretti is reported to have said. “I have passed on plenty of my projects over the phone.”
It’s a thought so crucial to Magistretti’s work that it inspired an exhibition, Projects over the Phone, at the Fondazione studio museo Vico Magistretti in 2011. Magistretti believed his skills as a draughtsman came second to the importance of discussion in his design process. I’d like to imagine that were Magistretti still alive in 2021, his favoured sentiment of “design is a conversation” would have put him in good stead for the last year. While many in the design industry were distractedly clobbering together work-from-home stations and trying to take ourselves off mute, Magistretti would have been yammering away, serenely confident in his knowledge that a design is only as good as the conversation and collaboration it inspires.
It’s a thought that came to mind when I was introduced to Connected, a design project and exhibition launched by the American Hardwood Export Council (AHEC) during the raft of lockdowns in spring 2020. Connected invited nine international (although, truthfully, mostly European) designers to create a table and chairs for their home office, asking them to pick from a choice of three American hardwoods. Their pieces would then be developed with the British furniture manufacturer Benchmark through remote working, before Connected culminated as a physical and online exhibition at the London Design Museum in September.
AHEC is a trade association that works on behalf of US timber growers and foresters, promoting the use of American hardwood timber to international markets. As one strand of this, the group regularly commissions projects to showcase its timber, creating striking installations such as dRMM’s Endless Stair (2013), Alison Brooks’s The Smile (2016) and Waugh Thistleton’s Multiply (2018) – large-scale structures that were all presented at the London Design Festival (LDF) to promote the use of hardwood cross-laminated timber using American tulipwood. Like the rest of the industry, however, AHEC watched on in early 2020 as trade fairs across design and architecture – events which it had planned to commission work for – were first delayed and then cancelled.
“I like to imagine that were Magistretti still alive in 2021, his favoured sentiment of ‘design is a conversation’ would have put him in good stead for the last year – a design is only as good as the conversation it inspires.”
Not to be deterred, it changed tack. “We thought, Hang on a minute,” says David Venables, AHEC’s European lead, “we’ve got material that’s been donated ready to go; we’ve got a budget we can’t use for trade shows; and we’ve got the attention of some of the best designers in Europe because they’re all wondering what’s going to happen now. And so we put the whole lot together.”
Putting the whole lot together, however, required a different format to a typical designer collaboration. “This connectedness of the project focused on the idea of digital,” says Justin McGuirk, chief curator at the Design Museum, who was involved in the early stages of Connected. “[The designers] were not going to be able to attend the craft workshop, they weren’t going to be able to see their prototypes, they weren’t going to be able to touch them, and they would have to work remotely with craftspeople to get the results that they wanted. It was an experiment in that.” Indeed, “experiment” is a word that Connected’s creators have continually used to describe the project in interviews, as well as appearing in the second line of text on the exhibition’s website. If you visit the exhibition online you’ll see nine wildly different table and seating systems. Some are inspired by nature, such as Ini Archibong’s jewel coloured, geometric Kadamba Gate, or Studiopepe’s graphic high-backed seats in Pink Moon. Others are more restrained, such as the monastic Arco from Maria Jeglinska-Adamczewska. Making up the rest of the nine designers are Thomas Heatherwick, Maria Bruun, Jaime Hayon, Sabine Marcelis, Studio Swine and Sebastian Herkner. Connected’s end results are good-looking pieces of furniture, but if their creation was an experiment, what were its findings?
The Humble Administrator’s Table and Chair by Studio Swine features a leg and armrest made from a single piece of steam bent timber (image: AHEC).
In some ways, Venables tells me, the definitiveness of lockdown streamlined the familiar design process. “Right from the beginning we knew this form of [digital] communication was the way forward,” he says. “Handheld devices meant that the designers didn’t have to wait until their next visit to the workshop. [Benchmark] could just get on FaceTime [to the designers] and say ‘I need to show you something.’” While the core of the design process revolved heavily around remote conversations between AHEC, Benchmark and the designers, the sharing of physical samples at key stages remained crucial. Maria Bruun’s Nordic Pioneer design, for instance, features a hinged leaf that runs the length of the desk. “They would make a small section [of the hinge] and send it to me to adjust or approve,” explains Bruun. “I would give my feedback or send extra videos of what I wanted for the hinge and how it should look.”
“What was really new was not being able to experience the physicality of the material. We received samples, but it’s still a flat surface. Those elements of being in the workshop were missing.”
These techniques are not necessarily new for designers and manufacturers. “We’ve done quite a lot of it before Covid, because we work with designers from around the world,” says Sean Sutcliffe, head and co-founder of Benchmark. “We did a long project with Space Copenhagen [the Gleda collection, launched in 2017], who came to us maybe three times, but 80 per cent of the work was done using Skype from the workshop.” It’s a point that Maria Jeglinska-Adamczewska echoes, albeit with an important caveat. “I don’t think it differs much from the way we usually work as designers with foreign companies,” she says. “What was really new was not being able to experience the physicality of the material. We received samples, but that’s still a flat surface.
You work on a 3D program and have all the digital ways to map projects, but those elements of being in the workshop talking to people and experiencing the physicality of the material were missing.”
While online platforms may enable you to “get a sense of the shape and the detailing,” says Sutcliffe, “you cannot get a sense of the textures.” Colour, he adds, throws up further complexities: “Everyone’s screens show them differently.” Sutcliffe also identifies the same issue as Jeglinska- Adamczewska. “There’s another element, which is really important to designers, which is what the physical presence of something feels like in relation to our body,” he says. “How does it stand or sit next to our body? We judge everything in relation to the length of our arms, the real feel of it, and that is completely missing.” In remote working, craftspeople have to become the arms and bodies of the designer: seeing, feeling, sitting and advising about what interacting with their furniture is like. Go to Connected’s website and you’ll see videos of Benchmark team members holding phones aloft with the designers peering through the screen at a craftsperson getting up and down from their chair. Speaking to those involved in Connected, “trust” came up almost every time. “It’s crucial that I really understood what the designers are trying to create and why they are trying to create,” says Sutcliffe. “Understanding why they are making that decision, and respecting that wish, even if you have to change something else. That leap of faith the designer has to put in a craftsperson when you’re working at distance is a pretty big one.”
Working with an established brand such as Benchmark lends this experiment a degree of safety. Bruun’s Nordic Pioneer features details such as turned curved feet and pillowy maple stool seats – technical details which demand and celebrate the craftsperson’s skills. “It was important to me for the piece to communicate very complicated, challenging craft processes,” says Bruun. “As a user, you should not only ask, ‘How should I use it?’ You should also ask, ‘How has this been made for me?’” This ambition led her to challenge the workshop to make the hinge for her leaf from wood rather than the easier to handle brass. It’s a choice that seems to demonstrate the general opinion from both Benchmark and AHEC that decisions over Connected’s pieces were made due to the wishes and ambitions of the designers, not because they were easier to explain over Zoom, through CAD or in a sketch.
Candy Cubicle by Sabine Marcelis includes her signature use of resin it its wheels (image: AHEC).
It’s the kind of relationship that has always existed in design and manufacture. “[Magistretti] believed in the close collaboration between designer and industry,” the manufacturer Enrico Schiffini told curator Anniina Koivu in 2018, as part of Vico Magistretti: Stories Of Objects, edited by Koivu. “Magistretti likes the dialectical confrontation with the manufacturers.” Even if Magistretti vaunted conversation and the telephone as design tools, these were placed in the service of interrogating physical manufacturing processes. An illustrative case of this in Connected is Studio Swine’s Humble Administrator’s chair, which involved a tricky steam bend. “We steam bent [the chairs’ arms] in one big swoop,” explains Alexander Groves of Studio Swine. “It’s one of those things that you can easily take for granted: we see these big sweeps in furniture but they’re often jointed. [Benchmark] kept on saying, ‘It might work, we’ve never done it before.’ But they made a jig and managed to do it. They had a lot of failed attempts before they got the right wood and conditions just right.”
One of the key differences between Connected’s design process and that of Magistretti, for instance, is the relative stasis of the designers in lockdown. Asked by Designboom in 2000 where he worked, Magistretti responded: “everywhere, in bed, on a plane, in my office. I always have something to write down ideas in, I sketch on newspapers or magazines in airplanes.” Even with the clarity of his concepts, Magistretti still had the promise of seeing his work in person, the energising experience of travel, and the degree of spontaneity and inspiration that comes from this. “Usually when you go and visit a workshop you go there with certain ideas,” Jeglinska- Adamczewska explains, “but once you
go in, someone can show you something they’ve been trying to do and it can completely divert the course of the project. It may be something unknown that you wouldn’t think of in the first place.
“The leap of faith the designer has to put in a craftsperson when you’re working at distance is a pretty big one.”
That element I missed.” Explaining a design remotely is not the problem, but the way in which ideas are generated is different. “In normal times the project would have looked quite different,” laughs Jeglinska-Adamczewska, “or not, I don’t know!”
This shift in relationship between the designers and their objects during the making process finds parallels in a wider readjustment of our connection to furniture typologies seen over the course of the pandemic. For at least some portion of the fluctuating global lockdowns, many home spaces have been repurposed into gyms, virtual cafés, and for those lucky enough, workplaces. “In a period when many people are working from home and looking at the home in a new light, working in a new way, inter-screen, it was actually interesting to think about how people work in their home environments,” says McGuirk. “The brief was to design your perfect work station. For some [of the pieces] you can see it really is a work station and for others you can see it’s a work station/dining room/meeting table – it’s a multi-functional piece of furniture.” As workplaces increasingly shift to the home, the personal demands that we place onto our home furniture have also shifted.
Such changing demands can be seen in Sabine Marcelis’s Candy Cubicle. Sick of her partner’s monitor dominating their dining room table, Marcelis wanted to create a workspace that allowed for control over this clutter. Candy Cubicle initially appears as an anonymous block of maple, “but when you open it it’s like Ta-dah!” she tells me, referring to the way in which the design cracks open to reveal an L-shaped cubicle with a highly lacquered yellow interior. “Then you close it again and all that working from home is hidden away.” Marcelis mounted her box on wheels made in her signature material, cast resin, to ensure flexibility. The ability to hide and move the workplace around her open-plan loft was a key requirement for her.
Lockdowns seem to have highlighted and exacerbated preexisting challenges around constructing private spaces within open-plan homes. “I looked at my family and the way we were living in open structures, and wondered why we knocked all those walls down,” says Bruun. “It’s a way we’ve been living now for a long time – knocking down walls till it’s one big space – because we needed to have as much space as possible to be together.
Then, during this lockdown, having our own personal space became much more relevant. We weren’t able to go to an office or close the door and just have time to ourselves. That’s what I tried to create – a small space only for me.” For Bruun, this means Nordic Pioneer has to define a space for her in the midst of open-plan living. And it’s large.
Nordic Pioneer in Maple by Maria Bruun (image: AHEC).
In fact, all of the Connected pieces are large. An observation that was made by everyone I’ve interviewed for this review is that the pieces all came out big, and perhaps bigger than intended. Furthermore, with the exception of Marcelis’s Candy Cubicle, which contains a set of shelves and storage pedestal, all of the pieces take after a dining room or kitchen table more than they do a traditional office or writing desk.
A cursory glance at the current Ikea catalogue, for instance, lists around 60 different desk models, with most falling under 150cm in length – only six scaling any bigger than this. Compare this with the Connected tables, which average out at a bit over 2m in length.
Ikea produces flatpack work stations for the mass market, whereas Connected’s pieces are bespoke, installation pieces. The difference in size is perhaps to be expected, but the designers acknowledge the shift in scale as being particular to
the project’s wider social background. “In that context of home/work combined in one place, the table becomes crucial,” says Jeglinska-Adamczewska. “It’s the meeting point of all these uses. That’s why I didn’t want to add extra functions, but to make it really large so it could allow all these uses in one place. I saw
it as being more like a background for this, rather than a landscape.” Sutcliffe agrees. “I think part of that was because people were thinking, OK, it’s got to be so multifunctional,” he says. “Maybe it’s also because they think, ‘Well in my studio I take up this much space,’ and then [they’re surprised] because our homes are generally a lot smaller.”
This changing relationship with furniture in our home, and the demands we put on it, goes some way to explain why wood lends itself well to home office furniture. In a situation in which we are removed from each other, wood, Jeglinska-Adamczewska points out, “brings so much comfort with its tactile aspects, especially now that you’re not allowed to touch anything outside.” These aspects in her work, Arco, are distilled in its intersecting arching forms, which carve out a definite personal space for the sitter. This restrained architectural motif, repeated in the chair and table, was chosen to help set off the complexity of the American cherry’s warm woodgrain. A similar interest in texture and touch can be seen in Ini Archibong’s Kadamba Gate. The table and bench set features a highly glossed wooden seat and tabletop, with brass insets which rise from geometric stacked legs of red oak and cherry offcuts. These offcuts would otherwise go to waste, a nod to Archibong’s interest in the sustainability of the source materials. In an interview with Grant Gibson for LDF, Archibong describes how the legs were designed “in a way that would be fun [for my daughter] – she loves to play with blocks. [I wanted to] create a table where I could have my area to work while she’s building her little micro architecture.”
Connected’s home working stations have been planned with multiple uses: they are designed to be playful, to be touched, opened up, moved around, extended or otherwise explored – Thomas Heatherwick’s Stem even doubles up as a set of planters. The kitchen table has always hosted multiple activities – working, eating, chores, a site for children to start off finger-painting and eventually graduate to homework – but lockdown has intensified our experience of the home, especially when isolated from one another. We perhaps now also look to these pieces of furniture to provide a degree of comfort and familiarity through their feel and texture, as much of daily life moves into the more alienating realm of digital space. If the lockdowns of winter 2020/21 bleed into spring, then Connected’s pieces will certainly need to be hardwearing.
“To just put it on display before having seen it was quite uncomfortable, but when I saw it I was pleasantly surprised. I immediately crawled under the table to study the details.”
We will have to wait to see how Connected’s designs fare in their final use – their eventual homes will be with their creators, but at the time of writing not
all have been reunited (or united?). Some did, however, manage to visit the physical exhibition where their pieces had already been installed for public view. “To just put it on display before having seen it was quite uncomfortable,” says Bruun, “but when I saw it I was pleasantly surprised. I immediately crawled under the table to study the details. I couldn’t have predicted that the stool would work that well or that the drop leaf would move without a sound.” It’s this interaction or reciprocity that is missed in the remote designing process, something which
you cannot experience until you are in the presence of a piece. “I sat on the armchair and it really embraces you,” Jeglinska-Adamczewska tells me. “It was something I hadn’t really thought of. That it embraces you as much as you embrace it. It’s kind of a nice feeling.”
Connected demonstrates that if you prepare and match the right expertise, designing remotely is certainly possible. Indeed, most of Connected’s participants agreed that in future projects they could sacrifice one to two workshop visits quite easily. Ultimately, however, the reactions of the designers who actually experienced their pieces in the flesh best captures the sentiment of Connected. Humans are bodily creatures. We need to be around one another to understand each other more easily, to interact with objects, and to allow for moments of serendipity and spontaneity which don’t seem to arise on a video call but do in a workshop. We can reduce our flying, our number of meetings, but we should also acknowledge our longing to return to a future where we can hear the soundlessness of a drop leaf table.
Words by Evi Hall
This article was originally published in Disegno #28. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.
You can see the virtual exhibition online by visiting connectedbydesign.online.
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