The next-generation designers take a self-confident approach to new technologies and are more than willing to improvise when it comes to turning experimental ideas into prototypes. Many designers have come to terms with the idea of turning their product ideas into reality single-handedly, either as spectacular one-offs or in small editions. This has led to the development of an aesthetic language that is less indebted to industrial considerations and even less inclined to compromise. Humorous, unconventional, flamboyant, ambitious, visionary and sometimes just ingeniously simple – that is the face of young design today. The following example offer a foretaste of what the contest has in store.
It’s not the designer but gravity that determines the final shape of the stool developed by Dutchman Jolan van der Weil. He merely sets the parameters for the magnetic field in which plastic particles with metal cores arrange themselves into an object that you can actually sit on. Van der Wiel, who has just graduated from Amsterdam’s Gerrit Rietveld Academy, constructed the machine consisting of wooden frames and magnets and chose a soft, very malleable plastic for the manufacturing process he developed. The final shape assumed by the special plastic is random, organic and bizarre. The design makes the invisible visible by materialising the magnetic fields into a product.
