out and about :: in the making (pt 2) - confessions of a design geek

This article was published 12 years

A few weeks ago, I left you half way around In The Making at the Design Museum, an exhibition curated by Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby, so I thought it was about time to pick up where we left off. We were just looking at a lightbulb, weren’t we? Next up is a B&B Italia sofa.

Jay: We are working with B&B Italia on a collection of objects at the moment – we have a couple of things in production with them already, but one of the most eye opening experiences we’ve had with them was their huge production factory where they produce upholstery. We’d always imagined that upholstery was made in quite a traditional way with a wooden frame and webbing and building up comfort from there, but at B&B’s factory, they have machines like huge heated waffle makers that produce upholstery. You have a wooden frame and this giant mould. Closing the lid, they inject liquid polyurethane and out comes a sofa! When it comes out of the mould, it’s still quite hot and then they put on feathers, extra upholstery and all the things you’d expect, but the basic structure is this foam, so this piece is about the industrialisation of something that was really quite an archetype?

Ed: Before it would have been a wooden frame and horse hair and something very basic, and now we’ve got to this stage… B&B are absolutely pioneering in this area.

Ed: What’s interesting is you go from the sofa, where manufacturing 60 – 70 years ago and today has been radically changed, and then you go to this piece – the horn from a French horn. They are still made in the same way, they’re still handcrafted and there’s something so beautiful about a handcrafted object.

Jay: This object is already describing what it does in the end. The beauty of it comes from its form, which is required to make that sound. That parabolic curve at the end immediately tells us that it either makes sound, or you use it to listen to sound, so it’s fascinating that even at this embryonic stage, this has to be the best case of form following function in the most beautiful way.

Ed: This next object is beautiful glass, Swarovski crystal glass and this is before any of the manufacturing or finishing. It’s going to become an optic lens. I think it’s so interesting to see that from this random rough looking object comes this perfect visually perfect piece of glass.

Jay: This is a piece of English Willow which will be… well sadly won’t be anymore… a cricket bat. We suspended it at this point, because we felt it had the potential, the visible potential to be something we all know, which means quite a lot to our culture, but in this really raw state, it’s quite alluring, quite intriguing. It tells you just enough that it’s going to be the back of a cricket bat. It could only really be one material. It could only really be one size, so it does start to tell you things about its future.

Ed: The next piece is the £2 coin and these are blanks. The two pound coin is made from two different metals – there’s a gold ring and a silver inner. When we designed the coin we went to the Royal Mint and neither of us had any idea how these two metals were bonded together, so we were really interested to learn that the inner disk is slightly deeper and slightly smaller than the ring on the outside. The way they are fixed together is in the pressing, when the impression is stamped into the surface, the inner disk spreads out and grabs the outer ring – there are no adhesives or fixings, it’s merely done by the metal stretching out. This is the ring from the coin we did to celebrate 150 years of the Underground, and it’s yet to have the main image stamped into it.

Jay: This one is the Tip Ton chair that we designed for Vitra. There are only two moulded things in the exhibition. Plastic injection moulding is quite binary – it’s either on or it’s off, you’ve either got an empty mould or you’ve got a chair. It’s very difficult to interrupt the process. We have done that with this chair, so this is literally a couple of minutes into the moulding process. You’ve got a 20 tonne mould with seven moving parts, and you’re heating ready to make a chair. It comes together and the plastic is injection moulded at a high temperature and under heaps of pressure. Normally what happens is the mould is full of solid plastic. They introduce high pressure hot air into the mould, which displaces some of the plastic, making the legs hollow and making the chair lighter. In this case we stopped the process half way through. The plastic is coming in from two directions and it hasn’t got the chance to meet at the seat yet, so you’re left with this kind of ‘bikini bottom’ shape captured on the seat. You can also see that the chair looks a bit sad, because the air hasn’t been put in to force the plastic to the extremities.

Ed: And the other thing actually that you can see is the different colouration on the seat. This chair is produced in seven different colours and there’s only one mould, so when they change from one colour to another there are a series of five or six chairs which have a bit of yellow and a bit of blue, or a bit of blue and a bit of orange as the previous colour is worked through the mould. They sacrificed this chair, but it would have been one of those unsellable chairs anyway, because it’s got a bit of blue from the previous chair.

Jay: This was given to us by Lock hatters. It’s the beginning of a ladies’ trilby and it’s a very old process of felting. At this point we thought it looked like a 1920s cloche, or some sort of policeman’s helmet, or almost something mediaeval. But this shape is the basis for many different styles. We decided to keep it at this stage, because it already tells you that it’s a hat, but it’s none-the-less an intriguing form and an interesting shape.

Jay: When we were kids, we remember that drinks cans had a ring pull you could flick and there was a seam down the side, where they had been rolled and sealed. And again talking about aluminium, this starts life shaped like a DVD or CD and is drawn into this shape. It’s so incredible, it moves like liquid. This whole thing is made in one go and there’s no seam.

Ed: In its current state without the top on it, it’s completely paper-like and very fragile. The minute the top is put on it becomes very strong.

Jay: Which is exactly the same principle behind the Olympic Torch, which had to be strong and yet light, so we used a similar kind of construction, where we made a wall which was quite wobbly and then fixed it to give it rigidity.

Jay: The next item is the upper of a Nike football boot. We liked this because of its graphic quality – it’s clearly ambiguous – it looks like a wrestling mask or something.

Ed: But it’s interesting because you have no clue what that could be in the end, and that’s the fascination for us – you wouldn’t relate that to a football boot.

Jay: I can’t remember if it’s laser cut or die-cut, they use both processes. There are lots of similarities between the ways that things are made in flat form, that goes across plastics and metals and paper.

Ed: This is a pair of taps, produced in Germany by Hans Grohe, and I think the thing that fascinated us about this is that they produce the taps in pairs because that’s the most efficient way to produce them. And also to see the material that’s wasted, of course it’s recycled, but the amount of material that’s required to get the flow exactly right.

Jay: It’s the same process that would be used to make any form of brass or bronze sculpture – there’s a conversation to be had about whether in this form it is a sculpture, or whether it’s just a step towards cleaning your teeth in the morning. The other thing about these is that they’re hollow on the inside, so they have sand cores that are knocked out afterwards.

Ed: At this stage in the process, it’s really quite crude and quite rough – there are scratches and dents, and when you look at the finished tap, by the time it’s been finished, and polished, and chromed, it’s one of the most precise objects that you’ll ever see in your life – and it starts off like this.

Jay: The next item will be a silver plated fork. It clearly says it’s a fork, but there’s one imperative thing that is yet to happen and that’s that the cross bar at the top of the tines needs to be cut off. The process is hundreds of years old. We liked the idea that the object is telling you what it is, but it’s not there yet.

Ed: The fork starts off as a flat sheet of metal, and through a series of stampings and I think about seven or eight different processes, it becomes a fork and it’s all done through that stamping process, bit by bit.

Jay: We weren’t actually allowed to have real money from the printers that print money, but this is their in-house money, so this is what they use to show what they can do – the technology that goes into the banknotes, the strips and the holograms.

Ed: In the same way that the Royal Mint make coins for 65 different countries, they also make bank notes for all over the world. So this is the sheet that they send out to banks in different countries to say, this is the quality of the note we produce. It uses all the same technology that you’ll find in a UK bank note, but it’s worthless.

Jay: The funny thing is that at this point, it has the value of wallpaper, but in a couple of minutes’ time you’ll have thousands and thousands of pounds stacking up. Money is an abstract concept anyway, but at this point it it one more step removed from the ‘promise to pay’ and quite interesting. There’s so much detail – it’s just amazing.

Jay: I think this is probably one of the most amazing finds for us. It’s a lump of clay. It’s still wet, but this demonstrates how household bricks are made, they are made through extrusion, so vast amounts of clay are pushed through into this form and then they’re cut into house bricks.

Ed: This has been with us for a number of months and it’s been tended to by various people, it’s been watered and sprayed to it wouldn’t crack and then as soon as it was moved here, it’s cracked! There’s something really quite beautiful about that massive quantity of clay.

Jay: London was built from the clay from London. As they dug the clay pits, they fired the clay into bricks to build with.