In times of re-questioning the design field, studio
Minale-Maeda is pursuing an examination of established
industrial production methods with photographic precision.
Taking inspiration from what lies behind the scenes of a mass consumption
society, Mario Minale and Kuniko Maeda give
attention to the production process of common goods, and
propose an alternative to the place these everyday products have
in the complex system of a material economy. In response to the
hermetic nature of the factory, their designs attempt to expose the
origins of their making and question the design field in general.
With their Inside Out Furniture series, Minale-Maeda are on
their way to redefining the design field and opening it up to the
consumer. Inside Out Furniture proposes an alternative solution
to making and buying affordable, good-looking chairs, tables and
benches outside of mass production.
The Inside Out Furniture pieces are easy assemblies of standard
wooden beams and sheets, put together with the simple
logic of placing one part on top of the other, and kept together
with plastic connections that show off the beauty of these
simple geometries. As a design project, apart from the clever
aesthetics of joinery, Inside Out Furniture is best understood
as an effort to redesign a production system, and not as new
furniture design. The series proposes to rethink the logistics
of the material resources, manufacturing, transport, storage
and demand involved in mass production. A key element in
the vision of Minale-Maeda is that the designs of their pieces
are downloadable and the furniture is produced locally, using
readily available wooden parts and 3D-printed joints. As the
parts needed to make an Inside Out chair are resources that can
be found almost anywhere, at any time, the chair's availability
does not depend on whether it will be made or not. From this
perspective, the project not only proposes the production of
an affordable, easy-to-like piece of furniture, but also gives the
consumer the opportunity to ask, "Do I want this chair?" before it
has even been made.
Minale-Maeda: Inside Out Furniture
In Rotterdam, Mario Minale and Kuniko Maeda continue to examine the production process of everyday objects in their attempt to redefine it according to new parameters: the logistics of materials, construction, transport and storage.
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- Elise van Mourik
- 16 July 2012
- Rotterdam
As downloadable design, Inside Out Furniture is produced on demand and can exist in endless digital variations, without any investment in its possible production. The designer is as free to change his collection as the consumer is free to choose what suits him. Such a relationship between market and production goes beyond the conventional supply and demand model. Since the supply does not need to anticipate a demand, there is no pressure for designs to be produced in mass quantities to compensate for large financial investments in material resources, production, transport and storage. This new relationship between design, production and consumption simply deletes the existing model of mass production. It is not the furniture that is turned inside out, but the factory that is put in complete reverse.
This consideration highlights the revolution brought about
with projects such as Minale-Maeda's Inside Out Furniture.
The design field is changed into a virtual platform for possible
products and solutions, where design thinking can progress
without any hindrance from the industrial establishment that
created the designer's job in the first place. In this way, design
becomes a reaction to cultural tendencies and is not there to
adjust to what we ask from it, but becomes itself the articulation
of this question.
In a fashionable statement-like manner, Minale-Maeda capture
ideas concerned with consumerist behaviour. Using 3D-printing
technology as the virtual counterpart to the laborious and
exhaustive factory, their work provides us with footage of
photographic quality, such as the white synthetic plants from
the Virtual Florist series, in which we can instantly recognise a
preference for paradoxical commentary and a clever application
of questioning design.
In a fashionable statement-like manner, Minale-Maeda capture ideas concerned with consumerist behaviour
Vanity Charms, designed by the duo in 2011, further exemplifies how the designers seek to comprehend the relationship between what we need and what we make. The collection of miniature replicas of luxury goods humorously understates material needs in a society of abundance, carefully understanding the virtual qualities of 3D-printing technology as a means to materialise the purely symbolic value of desirable products.
With a playful concern for technological possibilities, Minale- Maeda comment on both production and perception, delivering designs that illustrate design thinking. Toying with their knowledge of production, their work essentially exhibits what goes on behind the scenes of industry and is generally not presented visibly in a product. Inspired by banknote patterns, the Notgeld household fabrics exhibit the complex graphics that were used to protect paper money from counterfeiting, pointing to the double agenda of these aesthetics. While nowadays banknotes are equipped with invisible elements concealed in the paper, Minale-Maeda use the visible patterns that remain from earlier protection mechanisms as a design for textiles. The Notgeld fabrics interweave the use value and the exchange value of common domestic products.
In their earlier works such as Chroma Key, the designers showed their interest in unveiling the true nature of a product. Inspired by the blue screen used in photography and cinematography, the Chroma Key furnishings place the attention on this concealing technique, using it to partially obscure their classic upholstery and half-finished archetypical shapes.
Their latest project Slideshow Mirror clearly embodies the duo's design spirit. By showing a series of mirrors that reflect different colour spectra compared to the common silver mirror, Minale-Maeda touch upon a product that itself is a tool of perception, and in this case it not only shows our mirror image, but also mirrors our understanding of common things. The pastel-coloured world of Minale-Maeda revolves around issues of materiality and value in our society of overconsumption, which with their illustrative commentary become questions we would like to ask ourselves. Elise van Mourik, design curator and writer