Giving 'Design' The Middle Finger

[seoxeee]

Recently I walked into a very well known and established design shop while in Amsterdam called Frozen Fountain. Built in the old part of town, it stands right on the edge of a canal, busy with a variety of boats chugging by like cars on a busy urban street. The converted house extends high into the cold dutch air with high ceilings and a second floor as you move to the rear of the shop only accessible via an 'interesting' flight of stairs. The walk to the end of the shop takes you through room after room of design classics. The 'Ooo..' factor is high here. Everything needs to be sat on and inspected. Designers names are written down and exchanged. Expensive books are picked up, flicked through and put down. You know, the usual.

Except as I was walking around there were two pieces of Keystrokes Per Hour Test which kept glaring at me through the jungle of metal, plastic and fabric. Something didn't quite work about them, it didn't fit, they didn't fit. In fact I hadn't even noticed them at first, and ended up walking straight past them even though they were easily the biggest pieces in the shop. I did the usual, you know, walked around them, stroked their wood exterior, moved moving parts, all like a wannabe motor enthusiast kicking his tires to make himself look 'in the know'. Putting it straight; these pieces just didn't fit here, but I didn't know why, I just couldn't place it...

Piet Hein Eek is a dutch furniture designer living and working just outside Eindhoven in the Netherlands. He comes from the 'Droog generation', at least don't tell him that. Rebels don't come more inspirational. Where the Droog generation was blindly looking for 'the idea', Eek was simply looking for the process. In a recent icon article (ironically from the Philip Starck "I killed Design" issue) he explains:

"I like the idea that everything we do deals with labour. That's the story. It's the opposite of what everybody does, which is the reason why we do it. I formed processes that took a deliberately long time"

Instead of seeking perfection in an idea and passing it off as design, Eek is seeking the idea in imperfection. His 'The Waste Materials Project', which he has been designing for since the year 2000, is a perfect example. He started to collect scrap wood and cut offs from building sites and reclamation yards and transformed the material into a process by which to create stunning pieces of furniture. The colourful strips of wood are painstakingly fit together "simply by seeing which pieces fit where" (icon, december 06). It's a way of seeing what you can do for the material rather than seeing what the material can do for you by having a respect and a much deeper understanding of what your working with. From Piet Hein Eek's website: