It’s a strong roster of designers this year for the Design Museum’s Designers in Residence scheme; Simon Hasan, Hye-Yeon Park, Will Shannon and Jade Folawiyo.
Responding to the brief, ‘In Pursuit of Imperfection’ each have chosen a distinct approach:
Jade Folawiyo focuses on the imperfect surface, tarnishing and rusting metal to create patterns and patina. The decay of the material becomes its unique selling point, a solution that gives more with less.
Will Shannon re-evaluates a material, chipboard, which when mass produced is perfect but undervalued. By using a ‘mobile chipboard factory’ which looks to me : part ingenious mad professor part pioneering Victorian engineering, Shannon returns value to the material by producing new products from unwanted chipboard furniture.
Simon Hasan continues to work with a traditional leather process, exploring ideas of an imperfect aesthetic and process. By making something by hand rather than by machine it invites imperfection and so exploring links between the craft process by hand and volume production, made by machine.
Hye-Yeon Park’s Mr Clock question functional imperfection, which purposefully toys with us - a conventional clock sometimes, at other, it displays abstract configurations. The clock’s capricious nature is quickly forgotten for me as with its monochrome modernism it is so easy on the eye.
DESIGNERS IN RESIDENCE / DESIGN MUSEUM
24 AUGUST - 22 JANUARY 2011
