Design + Colour

Jeroen Wand (1985) studied product design at the Academy of fine Arts and Design in Maastricht (NL). In 2008 he graduated with an MA at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam (NL). Currently, Jeroen Wand lives and works in Eindhoven.

Studio Jeroen Wand creates products, objects and installations that challenge the established order. The studio explores the dynamic raw and unpolished part of design, stimulating the search for alternative forms of what is to be considered beautiful or agreeable. The designs of the studio are not conventional and compliant, but go beyond the predictable.

Studio Jeroen Wand alters, reinvents and modifies traditional combinations of materials and techniques, culminating into unconventional production processes, such as paper laminating or plaster rotation moulding. The works of the studio are the result of experiment and research where the method of production directly influences the form and function.

Jeroen Wand has always been curious about what he can do with everyday materials. This Paper Chair consists of compressed layers of paper. The white colour is created by bleaching the raw materials. The idea is that the chair gets a sort of ‘patina’ with use: the white surface will wear out, get dirty, and become dog-eared.

Very interesting how the design of this seat comes out of conventional and well-known shapes and materials, favoring instead bold shapes and a material that is certainly not thought of as a first choice to create a seat, indeed. Paper, one of the everyday materials par excellence, is a material apparently very delicate but, nevertheless, when used and coupled wisely it becomes a very strong and resistant material.

Also curious is the desire to realize it in white to show the kingdoms of time, the experience of the object.
Objects that can be inspired by this strand are for example:

lei + christoph + jovana di design innovoJeroen Wand

Recent design school graduates zhang lei, christoph john and jovana bogdanovic have collaborated to create ‘future traditions’, a series of organic and minimalistic objects that are modeled after techniques associated with traditional yuhang paper umbrellas. on show at salone satelitte at salone del mobile, the collection comes after an extensive investigation into the techniques and processes of the art form, which disappeared from society over fifty years ago. for two months, the trio lived and worked with four craftsmen who specialize in the production of the umbrella’s, using their techniques and learning from their experiences. resulting are, ‘piao’, ‘xuan’ and ‘wu’ three new designs that transfer the details, materials and function embedded in the traditional roots of the craft.

Mimicking the way the paper umbrella’s are made, ‘piao’, features a body made entirely from layers of glued paper. at once organic and textural, the chair combines square sheets of natural paper until it is strong enough to sit on. frayed edges created from the loose ends of paper contrast the otherwise smooth and contoured body and add an additional element of interest.

It is a chair composed out of paper and a grid of bamboo strips, following the traditional craft of chinese lantern making. Applying this technique allows the chair to be surprisingly strong and durable, yet also thin and light - a true paper chair.

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AT THE DESIGN MUSEUM

Dear Human studio: Jasna Sokolovic and Noel O’Connell

Montreal-based creative studio Dear Human has come up with a way to turn recycled paper into functional furniture, lighting, and tiles in a creative exploration called Paperscapes.

Founded by Jasna Sokolovic and Noel O’Connell, the studio prides itself on being able to take a second look at an everyday object in order to uncover its hidden potential and transform that potential into something tangible. This is what Paperscapes is about. Using recycled paper sourced from a local industry waste site, Sokolovic and O’Connell manipulate paper into a clay-like material, which they use to create stools, side tables, large dome lights, and tiles.

Paperscapes: From Recycled Paper to Functional Furniture
2016

Colours of Van Gogh Village - Earth Paint, Nuenen
2015

Atelier NL - Nadine Sterk and Lonny van Ryswyc

Atelier NL develops products that showcase the richness of the earth and the value of local raw materials. Each earthly element tells a different story and yields a different product. Atelier NL’s work is based on a passionate and unique research methodology that analyzes the hidden narratives of the earth and all that it produces.

Atelier NL speaks to the graceful subtleties of the natural world by reshaping raw earth elements into tangible, everyday objects.

On a deeper level, the work of Nadine Sterk and Lonny van Ryswyck calls for an expanded valuation of local sourcing and production. Their research-based projects aim to reveal and inspire while opening the eyes of the general public and industry specialists alike.

met Atelier NL, María Boto en Siegrid Demyttenaere

Atelier NL makes regional products that show how rich the earth is and how valuable local raw materials are. For example, they have created a palette of 270 colours, based on the different hues of the ground around Nuenen – the village in the Netherlands where Vincent van Gogh lived and worked for a while. He painted dozens of canvases here, including The Potato Eaters. Using an age-old method, Atelier NL made paint from rough clay and sand - a specific colour palette from Nuenen.

Red Mud Table Set
2019

"We’re a group of three designers with an interest in materials. We are recent graduates of the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London, where we completed our joint MA and MSc in Innovation Design Engineering.
Our work with overlooked materials involves moving between scientific research, industrial practices, and making. We hope that this approach results in a body of design work that is intellectually engaging, aesthetically rich, and ultimately accessible to wider audiences".

Red Mud or bauxite residue is a by-product of the aluminium industry. 150 million tonnes of it is produced every year. The crimson sludge is dumped in reservoirs, some of which are so big that they are visible from space. Studio ThusThat makes ceramics from this Red Mud and uses oxides from the mud for the glaze. The contrast between the fragile and refined ceramics and the gargantuan scale of the metal industry is extreme. Studio ThusThat uses this contrast to challenge our perceptions about industrial waste.

From a genuine concern for the Earth’s dwindling natural resources, Atelier NL developed a research methodology that reveals the hidden stories of the world around us. What can local raw materials teach us about a place? How can understanding the origins of these materials help us to use them more wisely?

Atelier NL’s approach is grounded in a thorough analysis of local resources like clay, sand, and wood — from the landscape as a whole down to the molecular level. Social and historical research contributes to the understanding of these resources, their use and significance. In close collaboration with local producers and communities, Atelier NL translates the result of their investigations into thoughtful designs and participatory projects.

There is a mysterious inland desert in the Netherlands in the province of Brabant where sand dunes roll, creating a magical and quiet landscape amid conifer trees. This third edition originates from the sand of Nationaal Park de Loonse en Drunense Duinen.

The plates we eat from and the cups we drink from: we use them every day, but hardly see them. And all while they are made of an ordinary material that we all walk over every day: clay. It is precisely this interest in material close to us that is what drives the designer duo Atelier NL. In a world where standardized materials have become the norm, they choose to explore the diversity of local materials. With the products that come from this, they want to make people aware of the materials from our own environment and also show the beauty of them.

Diversity in natural materials

From local and diverse to standard

That peculiarity of local clay used to be the trademark of a factory. For example, you knew that red clay came from Tegelen (Limburg) and yellow clay from Sopsum (Friesland). But with the largely disappearance of those industries, the need for diversity also disappeared. In fact, in the emerging consumer society, individuality and identity of local clay were seen as a problem. Industrially manufactured products had to look the same after the Second World War. Therefore, a standard grey clay became the norm. This also proved to be a lot more practical to use, because a uniform production method could be devised.

Color and properties visible

During this project we really learned to look. Here we learned that the more you zoom in, the more details unfold. You're going to see details you wouldn't see otherwise.

Nadine Strong

1) HOW DOES ATELIER NL USES STORYTELLING AS A TECHNIQUE WITHIN THEIR PRACTICE?

2) WHAT DOES STORYTELLING MEAN IN YOUR OWN PRACTICE?

3) WHAT ARE THE COMMON GROUNDS BETWEEN THE SHOWN PROJECTS IN THE LECTURE OF ATELIER NL?

4) WRITE DOWN 2 QUOTES FROM THE LECTURE THAT MAKE YOU WONDER, WRITE DOWN SOME REFLECTIONS ON IT.

SELECT 2 WORKS FROM THE EXHIBITION KLEUREYCK, WHY DO THEY INSPIRE YOU? REFLECT ON THEIR METHOD OF STORYTELLING, look at the practice of the designer/artist...
Think especially beyond the object:
What interests you, for example, the context in which someone works, the financial / revenue model, the ecology of the use of materials, the chosen form of collaboration, a social or societal change, etc etc ... which is proposed ..... etc.

MATERIAL CULTURE
LOCAL COMMUNITY RECONNECT
LOCAL RAW MATERIALS
OLD TECHNIQUES
STORYTELLING
GLOBAL THINKING - LOCAL DIGGING PHILOSOPHY
REVEAL HIDDEN COLORSSENSE OF PLACEIDENTITY

At Design Academy Eindhoven storytelling is used as a design and design research tool. It offers de-signers and design researchers the possibility to engage an audience in a way that is different than the showing of an object or offering of a service, enabling an audience to understand a message or way of thinking. Stories (narratives) can be used to provide insight, to entertain, to educate, to question, to commemorate, to explore new, yet to be discovered ways of being in the world, as well as to rediscover lost traditions and recall forgotten memories.

Narrative structures and storytelling can be used to investigate and express the designer’s own experiences and views, but these techniques also provide opportunities to convey other people’s lives, views, experiences, problems and solutions. Telling other people’s stories requires a willingness to listen carefully with a certain degree of empathy. Stories can manifest themselves in different guises, such as films, texts, performances and products. They can be exciting and revealing as well as consoling and confronting.

1) The Atelier NL uses storytelling as a technique within their practice like a way to design and to do research about it. They enable the audience to understand a message but also a way of thinking. They use narratives to create a link between them and the users but also to talk about the lost of identity given by the industrialization,
in fact we can also see it into the colors of the industrial clay tableware, that they are just white or colored but without a real motivation, or without a motivation given by the material itself and thus by the local raw material.
In fact, the studio, use local clay found into the different soils of the regions, and this allows the object to contain a very deep soul, because they have the possibility to talk about the region and also about farmers and their theatre: the ground. With this project the Atelier NL evoke the real poetry of the nature, and teach how also into
a region there are different colors, even if they come from the same place, the same soil. I think it is a beautiful message to give to the people, very actual and at the same time timeless.

2) Storytelling in my own practices is becoming more and more a central point. Since a couple of years, I have started to think firlmly that storytelling it is a very important part of design because trough it you can give at your projects the possibility to have a soul that permit them to talks about stories, narratives, and also to become more functional. I mean, it can be functional in two different ways: an immediate one and an more deeper. This is because if an object has an immediate function, with storytelling the project is able to work also in a deeper way, to touch the unconsciousness of the audience (in an explicit or unexplicit way of course) and make it to reflect about different themes, like the delicate ones, like globalization, ethnical issue or the global warmer and pollution.

3) The common grounds between the shown projects in the lecture of atelier NL are to rediscover the material culture, which one we have lost because of the globalization and the over production of goods; the rediscover also of the raw materials rounding a specific region and also the awareness that they are not less prestigious or important that the industrials ones, actually in my personal opinion they are more important than those, because they can tell something more, something about the place, the history of it which is intrinsic the soil and also they allow also to rediscover old techniques of productions, in some cases. In addition, they work also on the identity’s concept because like the sand also the soil is composed by not only one mineral or material, but a lot of different type of it, so it also can be a concept that it is possible to extend to the war to break down prejudices.

"A grain of sand is a combination of materials, minerals, and looking at the sand it is like looking at the people, like travel to the world, in the human being". - Nadine Strong

“ It is just about to look more close what we are/have and also look at it from another point of view, to see the very beauty and identity of what we have, and most of all, of what we are”. - Nadine Strong

"The sand library was a project to see the world in a grain of sand" - Nadine Strong

to see the sand library

1) HOW DO YOU REFLECT ON SUSTAINABILITY WITHIN YOUR PRACTICE? HOW CAN/IS YOUR DISCIPLINE INCORPORATE THIS FOCOUS?

2) WHICH POTENTIAL COULD LIVING COLORS HAVE IN THE FURURE FOR THE ARTS AND DESIGN DISCIPLINES?

3) WRITE DOWN 1 QUOTE FROM THE LECTURE THAT MAKES YOU WONDER, WRITE DOWN SOME REFLECTIONS ON IT. Find 2 extra references of bio art or bio design

1) In my practice I try to chose when is possible the more sustainability way, both in my projects but also in my private life. I believe that the choice of material is fundamental, you can choose of course the most ecofriendly but, depending of the object, you cand also chose the most durable if it is a product that probably you are going to change a lot if it is realized with non-durable material, and I mean not with this that the bio materials are less resistant than the other, but maybe sometimes maybe you can choose a bag made with recycled truck tarpaulins, compared to a canvas bag, because maybe the first one resists more and longer than that of canvas which is eco-sustainable but in any case you risk having to change it more often, compared to the first, in which, the material is not produced specifically but instead allows the tarpaulin to have a second life.

2) The use of microalgae for wastewater treatment has the potential to produce biomass in a more economic and sustainable way. In this sense, the extraction of pigments from the biomass, as by-products, could leverage the recovery of resources from wastewater, while becoming an alternative to synthetic pigments.
In the last decades, the need for clean surface water and the importance of drinking water have become clear. Specific consequences are the decentralization of wastewater treatment (e.g. companies cleaning their wastewater before reuse) and the paradigm shift towards nutrient recovery.

3) Political scientist Herbert Simon described design as the process of planning to change “existing situation into preferred ones”. Optimism, the belief in the best of all possible worlds, is intrinsic to the act of design: we design to make things better, and thus, to make better things. In the case of the plastic bottle, designers and engineers have dutifully solved a particular brief – a light, strong, shatterproof vessel – and made an object better by those measures. But the paradox of plastic bottled water’s hydrating yet toxic growth reminds us that the things we design we can’t be separated from the social, political, economic, and environmental context they operate in.

The plastic bottle is not an isolated design object: it exists, as we do, in the midst of a tangled network of organisms and spaces and values. It connects the landfill, our body, the fridge to the shop, the trucks and the shareholders, and a lot of other things. And, more we ignore them, more these nodes all connect back again to our bodies and the flesh of future generations as we ingest that bottle as microplastic fragments or eat other life from that ate them. All to quench our thirst better, we could drink from a tap and prioritize investment in public water infrastructure to resolve the plastic problem, or the most of it.

Better is not the same as good and “better never means better for everyone…it always means worse, for some” (warned Margaret Atwood)

If the aim of design is to make things better, then we should ask: What do we mean by better? Who is it better for? Who gets to decide? The questions may see obvious, but how often do we really stop to interrogate each thing we make or use? Where Progress has failed our shared environment, better does too: no single better can accommodate all humans present and future, as well as nonhumans, and the planet. So, what better world are designers making? Whose better shapes our common future?

Preferable futures are often designed for us by powerful actors and offered to us as citizens or consumers, where our limited agency permits us only a choice between them, rather than a chance to challenge them. Each time we choose to drink from a brand-new plastic bottle, we prioritize our short-term bettering, solving thirst, rather thana distant better future that connects our welfare to our environment, which we may also hold dear. This failure to use our long-term imagination as we make decisions is perhaps part of human nature. So too is the power of promises of better on our decision making: some philosophers see the proclivity for hope, the dream that things could somehow be better, as fundamental to the human condition.

In pursuit of a better world, modern Western societies have tried to avoid the unavoidable: what is better for humans is also better for nature. Our better future requires healthy biodiversity and ecosystems to support us. We have failed to see the wood for the tree, or rather, we’ve been too focused on the trees for wood.

The real problem for designers to solve is not to safe the short-term impulse, but to help humans value the long-term. Design operates in an intertangling of contexts, systems, and networks that includes humans and nonhumans, present and future.