Nendo: 10/10

"Tiago : It’s our role as designers to be curious by nature. We need to be in constant search of different ways of expressing ourselves through our products, creating expressions that will be valid for users. Users’ tastes, like fashion, are in constant flux. Materials are in constant flux. Our role should be constant evolution, constantly adapting to everyone’s needs. If you stop being curious, if you start saying, ‘I know how to make these chairs really well, I’ll just do them in different colors’—whether it’s chairs, phones, computers, whatever—if you keep going back to the same recipe over and over, you’re losing that curiosity. Without an overarching sense of curiosity about the way things work, it’s hard to commit to exploring, being different, allowing for natural evolution. To my mind that’s a sure road to becoming obsolete and irrelevant. “Playfulness can bridge ages, and bridge artistry with technical knowledge” The curiosity evident in Nendo’s work is in how this studio combines materials that have been used before in separate contexts. Take the transparent chair, a wooden chair which appears to be floating in mid air as the legs seem to disappear as they reach the floor. Nendo used wood craftsmanship following a Japanese tradition. In addition, though, the studio used resin and epoxy, a material that’s been in use since the seventies, in a really startling way, juxtaposing the organic with the inorganic, the apparently immaterial. It’s the combination of the two elements in a way that’s very subtle, and clever. We can’t help asking ourselves, how is possible? A floating chair? It creates curiosity from the user’s perspective. We do a double take, sit on it and question our own surroundings, even our own senses as we interact with this otherwise mundane object. That curiosity as designers keeps you relevant and generates curiosity in your users. Curiosity in turn generates delight. Katia : As designers, we are trained to look at everything with analytic eyes. We’ll go for a walk and look for little somethings everywhere—the way a car door closes, the undulation in the pavement, a doorknob, something someone’s wearing. You get curious and start thinking, how can I carry that form or idea into something else, into another concept, another design? It may be a playful moment. I can easily imagine a child saying, ‘I want to eat my dinner from a flying chair.’ Why should we stop at a chair that appears to float, when we can imagine one that flies? The designer (in this case maybe a mother or father as well) finds themselves wondering, How can I make this happen?’ These little moments carry joy and playfulness into the design process. The source material is inexhaustible. Design can make dreams come true! Of course some of the simplest and cutest ideas may be some of the most difficult to produce—getting resin to work with wood in a way that is stable and functional and attractive, this is no easy task! There are many inherent challenges here. Did it pay off? Maybe you have a happy child eating dinner in a flying chair. Equally, you may also have an adult who’s mesmerised by this vision. Playfulness can bridge ages, and bridge artistry with technical knowledge. Design can bridge two seemingly incompatible materials. There are so many dialogues going on in one seemingly simple product. Katia : As designers we need to have a process. Some of the designers in these books had the freedom to really explore and play with materials to an extent that was new in their day. We don’t always have that same freedom now—there are restrictions around sustainability, codes around production. Designers have to accept these challenges, and incorporate them into their process. We really want to become the next generation exploring materials, perhaps the same materials as these examples, only in different combinations, with different tools. This material intelligence is critical for us to step up as designers and create something lasting. Tiago : Just like Nendo combining materials that were well known—woodworking with new perspectives—other designers have taken a similar approach. Shiro Kuramata is another example of transparent expressions in furniture. We may not be discovering new materials, but applying new expressions to materials that are already familiar, to make them appear unfamiliar or surprising. If you go back a century ago, or even to the time of Kaj Franck or Tapio Wirkkala, there were materials being discovered or invented, and alongside this the machinery to utilize them was being developed. Glass has existed since at least Roman times, but it was the novelty of being machined by these Scandinavian designers that created a completely new language in glassware. And here is the challenge for designers—to explore how we can get new expressions out of materials we already know. In the twenty first century, what is the likelihood that we will discover new raw materials? Everything has been drilled and dug up. But how do existing materials come together? And how could they come together? That’s where the creativity lies."