Concept

Not to create a story around a project, but to create a project out of a story.

To deal with a new project offers the opportunity to get in touch with new subjects, cultures, traditions, behaviors, materials, needs, functions etc…

To discover new territories makes the design process challenging and interesting. Even if the story is not visible anymore in the end product, it is the pleasure to experience it during the design.

There are many products which have a specific function. Functionality is often the primary aspect. Other qualities, e.g. the material, the shape etc., get less attention. Interesting points in the design process come from adding new value to an object by changing its use, or using its materials to discover nice new functions and effects.

Some more detailed explanations of my designs:

Flora I:
The flower vase was designed for the competition of Homogen Austria, a pressed wood manufacturer on the occasion of the company’s jubilee. Pressed wood has the image of a cheap, mostly covered material, used as a supporting material in the furniture industry.
The aim was to create a much more decorative object using the raw pressed wood.

Medusa:
Plastic bottles are very sophisticated industrial objects. They are designed with many factors in mind, such as stability, weight, stackability and storage. And they should also express the company’s brand image. They exist in a huge variety of shapes and colours, ever present but rarely recognized as Design objects.
The fascination with this highly industrial object was the starting point to creating the Medusa, to use this daily object of our time and to translate it into the aesthetics of old crystal and Roman glassware.

Display cases:
The design of the display cases started with three words, words to define the exhibition of an object and the sense of a displaycase:
To contain, to demarcate, to highlight.
Further research led to different stories involving jewels. From history, present politics and a fairy tale from “1001 night”. The stories gave background to the words.

To contain: A Hungarian prisoner of Ausschwitz was swallowing the diamonds which she got from her mother again and again to save them through the horror of the concentration camp. The diamonds had a very important emotional value as well as financial. (Steven Spielberg “the Shoa Foundation”)

To demarcate: The political and economic situation caused by diamond trading in e.g. Africa. The situation of the diamond workers, who desperately hope to find the stone, which may change their lives, even if they are at the very end of the profit line in the Diamond industry.

To highlight: The pearl in the story of “Hassan and the Princesses of the island Wak-Wak” is used as a symbol. In the dream of the king seven pearls appear. One of them is more beautiful than the others and symbolizes the daughter he is going to lose.

These stories were the basis to creating the final shape of the display cases. More organic shapes with different sizes, including a very small one where you only can expose one object at a time (to highlight).

LUV:
You want to write a letter to somebody. You start several times. You don’t know how to express yourself. Will he/she understand it?... The mountain of crumpled paper on the floor grows constantly. Finally you decide not to send the letter. The flower vases remember the shapes of  the crumpled paper. In the end you can give the person flowers “wrapped” in the non-existing letter in the form of a flower vase.
And if you dare you can write a text on it!