Bac! Festival (Barcelona’s Contemporary Art Fest) – This Year Dedicated to Female Artists.

I have been here a year and the amount of design and art activity has left me cold and  yearning for another city so I was happy to be invited to this. I have no review for it but here is how I experienced opening night..

The Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona site reads:

“Avoiding victimism as far as possible, the next Bac! Festival will present the work of key artists for a generation of women artists who are somehow involved in fighting for women’s role in art, in order to discover new paradigms of creation.”

Nice thought.  You can hardly say it wasn’t focused on gender though.

At the opening party, I forgot my camera so I had to use my crappy phone but somehow the low tones and spontaneity of bad-phone pics is very appealing to me. Hope you feel the same.

and some no matter how many times i rotated, some wound  up on their side again.

Image by Swedish Illustrator, Linn Olofsdotter

Some of you are curious about the foundation of what I do aside from my passion for innovation and writing about women who create. I’m an ethnographer. I was an ethnographer long before I even knew the term. I would get frustrated with highly regimented approaches to understanding consumers (people basically, consumers makes me think of lever pulling and manipulation which I am dead set against).

I have always approached insights and strategy/concept building with honest, open curiousity and interest – and I’d like to think a strong dose of savvy from weaving in and out of different social and cultural situations. I studied Cultural Studies and Semiotics in school and then attended the school of life where I set out to find the patterns and rhythms of New York City’s inhabitants.  Then I went deeper. And I went broader as I worked with diverse clients with subtle nuances and micro-cultures that required abandoning all preconceptions.  (and moved country. twice.)

The basic questions that make this work worthwhile are: What do people want and need?  How can we make manifest products and services that will make lives better/easier/more pleasant/more connected? How can we bring ideas and the narrative of business’ social role to life in ways that matter and are sustainable? How can we add instead of take away, drain, deplete? And how can we surprise?

I gave a one day workshop hosted by a consulting firm in Barcelona called Brain Ventures.  Antonio Monerris, the partner in the firm who approached me about the project, is just one of those people on this earth that keeps growing, evolving, learning, always with an open mind and an eye on the future. Among those present were representatives from Pan Rico (bread), Gallina Blanca (soups), and Chup Chups (candy).  Here’s the gist of the presentation part.

I’m not the first person to seek out Dieneke Ferguson for an interview. After all, when you think of people who help put fledgling designers and creators on the map, who are savvy and know the business, can combine profit and practicality with benevolence and a spirit of cooperation and support, she’s the godmother. Plus 60% of the membership of her association Hidden Art are women. We had lunch a few months ago in London and she filled me in on the rest.

Questions for Dieneke Ferguson

Start from the beginning.

My mother was a knitwear designer and my father a photographer. I have a BA in Spanish language (she is Dutch) and MAs in Cultural Studies and Economics.

Why or what were the series of events that brought you to create Hidden Art?

I was working in import/export with developing countries, mostly Latin American, for the Greater London Council and became interested in local (Hackney, East London) resources. East London wasn’t always desirable (laughs) like it is now but there was and is so much talent.

How did you go about funding?

Ours is a company “limited by guarantee”, a UK legal structure. We have charitable aims but are not a charity. A percentage of our capital comes from income that is reinvested and a percentage comes from grants that specifically support micro-businesses. Initially I opened as a sole trader and then a funding agent told me, become a Limited Liability company so you can get European funding.

I love to organize. I love to do budgets and make projections. And I’m good at raising money.

Were there a series of events that pushed you toward Hidden Art at the time? What was going on then in design?

If you sell globally, you have to look into all the details of the skills the artists might need which may differ in different areas. I wanted to focus on locally, on what we have here.

How do you think design and craftsmanship has changed since you started?

This is the toughest time I’ve seen since I started. I notice people don’t like the title ‘designer-maker.’ Many designers want the name recognition. They think (in terms of business). It takes a lot of commitment. In terms of technology, new machinery, flexible plastics. You can do things you could never have done in the past.

The trends?

Every year, the design trends change. Whatever is fashionable in design emerges at Salone del Mobile and the world follows. Right now I see a lot of bright colors. A Mondrian type of design aesthetic. Ecological design of course. Clever materials. Baroque is also back.

What are some of the biggest lessons you’ve learned / advice you want to give?

• Don’t rush it. You can say I’m setting up today and tomorrow you’ll be successful but the truth is it takes TIME and EFFORT.
• Collaborate with others if you can.
• Have something on the side, another job that you do that sustains you – and don’t be ashamed of it because everyone does it.
• Networking is important.
• Learn from others. See how others have done it.

Where, in what countries, do you see the most exciting design?

Here. London is multicultural. London is about ideas.

Who are your favorite female creators?

Anita Roddick, Body Shop founder, who died in 2007 . She was a pioneer in bringing social consciousness to business.

Zaha Hadid, 'Starchitect', "because she's tough"

-Chauncey Zalkin

When I was in the thick of my New York life and not taking many vacations out in the greenery, I was invited to go white water rafting.  My main occupation at the time was observing street style and finding order and meaning in all of that gritty gloriously imperfect urban beauty.  Mid-afternoon, we pulled our raft into a cove and sat in silence staring up at the stone walls covered in a vivid algae. The colors, the shapes, the water, the rock, the trees, it all took me by surprise.  It felt like the first time I’d ever seen such a thing, a beauty that doesn’t need any explanation. A perfection that is plain for everyone to see. Without nuance in the sense of a warbled connotation but at the same time bursting with subtlety.

Is it possible that somewhere along the lines we forgot to look to nature?  The ecosystems that spin, thread, swim, and fly around our planet, that make up life as we know it, are the ones that have fixed their bugs and adjusted their processes so that they could survive, sustain, and thrive. Nevermind the fact that we are hellbent on destroying them. What can we learn from them?

Dayna Baumeister

That’s exactly what Janine Benyus knew and evangelized in her book “A Biologist at the Design Table.”  Biologists, meet designers. Designers, meet biologists.  I found Dayna Baumeister her partner at the Biomimicry Guild (having not even heard of Janine) and set up call to find out more about these visionary women and how they use biomimicry to educate design leaders and find solutions for design questions.

First of all, from their site:

Janine Benyus

Looking at Janine Benyus ideas and talking to Danya, I found a few ideas worth repeating here. One is that we can learn an idea from an organism and apply it to design. Nature is perfect. Humans tend to put things into silos.  In nature, there is no lack of integration. There is no lack of information in the natural world.  We can redesign the human world by taking cues from the natural world. Right now we use ‘heat, beat, and treat’ to make things. We take a natural element and we heat it up (like metal) than we pound it into a shape, and treat it with chemicals. We should ask ourselves: How does life make things? How does life make the most of things? How does life make things disappear into systems?

And here are a few quick lessons from nature that you can look up to learn more

1 ) Self-assembly (shells are self-assembling)

Mercedes-Benz bionic car skeleton

2 ) CO2 as feedstock (plants do it)

3 ) Solar Transformation

4 ) Power of shape — to inform energy efficiency (whale fins beveled shape are now informing aviation wing design) to make objects self cleaning (the shape of a leaf makes it self-cleaning), to create color without pigment. (Playing with light to produce color instead)

5 ) Quenching thirst (drawing water out of air and fog)

6 ) Metals without mining (microbes do it)

7 ) Green Chemistry (use a smaller subset of the periodic table)

8 ) Timed Degradation (mussels in the ocean. Their threads dissolve after two years.)

and so on. Take a look at these ‘coolest cases.’ Now onto the interview.

When I ask about their partnership, Danya replies:

“Janine is the noun and I am the verb. I answer the question, how do you do it? I build content out of the raw material.  The easiest way to think of our approach is to think of function. We ask what do you want to do rather than what do you want to create.  We don’t start with words like ‘can opener’ or ‘knife’. We learn that you want a widget to open cans. Or a widget to cut. You don’t want to paint something red;  You want to communicate danger. We look at the function first and then examine how that’s done in nature.

How do you work with designers?

We ask a LOT of questions. (laughs). We have a speakers bureau. We go to conferences. We go speak at Universities and companies. We talk to business managers to create better communication systems. We consult from our area of expertise to inform process, product, and system design.

How did these two world come together?

Biophilia is affinity with nature.  Nobody looks at nature and says, ew that’s an ugly color. There are stories in nature we can adopt for our own needs. There are strategies used in nature that we can mimic.  I got a doctorate in biology but I minored in fine art. I wanted to design a wall that breathed like skin. I was looking into sick building syndrome. How can we build a wall that can get rid of its own contaminants, buildings that renew themselves the way plants do. That’s how I discovered Janine.

How can designers plug into your research? Is there ready access to what you know or do you have to go and present a seminar, work as a consultant in organizations?

We have a non-profit organization and a for-profit consultancy. We created a website called AskNature.org which makes biology more accessible. It is full of examples of how life does it. We have had 2 million unique visitors from 188 countries. Also, we suggest that designers just spend more time outside. Absorb it. Ask yourselves what is nature doing better?

Are there any dangers involved in imitating nature so precisely?

When you’re involved in nanotechnology, working on such a small scale, yes, possible, in that case tinkering at the cel level, we can mess with life.  You just have to be aware.  L’Oreal for example, became interested in structural color but is it safe to apply tiny objects to your eyelid? I’m not sure.

Talk about why this is relevant now.

We need to learn how to fit in again. In the past, life forms with maladapted strategies have become extinct; We have maladapted strategies. We need to recognize that we are interdependent. We have to find ways to fit into the larger system.  We need to stop speaking in terms of ‘us’ and ‘them’ and integrate with each other and back into nature again.

What are your thoughts on being women in a field on the verge.

There is a place at the table for everyone to be involved in biomimicry. An engineer may be inspired by the hinge of a dragonfly wing but it is part of a system. Designs are in context. They are in relationship which is very in line with a way a woman’s brain works. This is really an interesting opportunity to really resonate with women. We are entering a male dominated space (engineering particularly) but we can show our hearts in the matter and bring the hardcore science. We can show that it’s okay to be a woman in this field. Most of the people coming out of graduate programs now are female but mid and upper management is still predominantly male – but we give these men permission to get emotional about their work.

"office life in a qatar cactus"

There certainly is some ‘green washing’ but we vet that out. We are trying to merge innovation and sustainability and a lot of people are interested. People don’t want to go to a job every day that has no meaning. WalMart is doing a lot in this area, for example, and yeah its for the money probably, but they’re really doing it. It’s not just talk or for PR. They’re very active.

How do you imagine the world in 10, 20, 50 years if you have a say in it?

My ideal world would be absent of vibration, of mechanical noise. The way we take care of our needs would be silent. There’d be less drag. Wee’d have different fuel systems. Systems over all would supercede the people in them.

Who are three women you admire?

1. Janine. I feel graced to have worked with her for the past eleven years.
2. Sacajawea – the only woman on the Lewis and Clark expedition. She was also the only Native American. It was a two year expedition during which she had a baby and led them, all eleven men. She crossed gender, cultural, and ecological boundaries. She showed resilience and nurtured a child through it all.
3. The female octopus. They guard the nest. They are fluid and adaptable. Graceful.


Sacajawea

-Chauncey Zalkin

picture of Ma ke from Victoria & Albert collection

1

Eva Zeisel

Eva Zeisel turns 103.  Thank you to Haute*Nature for bringing this working woman’s birthday to our attention and for posting her TED Talk which I hadn’t seen.

Eva is a fully decorated *design revolutionary and **lifetime achiever (*New York Magazine, **Cooper Hewitt) and then some.

2

I had my students read this article about socially useless companies, a descriptor I like even better than ‘socially responsible’ which is already a buzz word that has been bandied into meaninglessness.  Instead of thinking about how you might,as a company ‘do your part’, the idea of social uselessness makes you consider whether you should be in business in the first place. I personally have a fantasy of wiping the corporate slate clean with all new business models instead of watching the old geezers limp along like the wounded brittle giants they are so the word ‘useless’ struck me as did Ma ke’s work, found on Design Boom:

Ma ke

This fashion designer from China, who spoke at the ICOGRADA Beijing World Design Congress 09, writes Design Boom, “confronted by the local clothing industry with its cheap, homogenizing mass-production and poorly paid workers… and by a fashion scene lacking local aesthetic influence and dominated by foreign labels… dedicated herself to developing her ‘useless’ (‘wu yong’ translates to ‘useless’) ideas.” (ideas of uselessness). The results are breathtaking. She’s doing what nobody I know of in China is doing, communicating the roots of Chinese design and tradition. I want more.

Here is a link to a review of a documentary, also called Useless about her work and Chinese factory conditions made by Jia Zhangke.

Photos by Zhou Mi.

-C Zalkin

“We Come From A Coat”

CEO Angela Ahrendts of Burberry hit the nail on the head with Art of the Trench, a socially networked site with user submitted street photos of the classic trench in action along with snaps from Sartorialist photographer Scott Schuman (for now, other collaborators to follow).  What this shows is that Burberry knows their roots and understands how to tap into their consumer’s best instincts as well as finding a natural link to social media’s major players.  Nothing is forced here – which is always the problem when brands jump on board the bandwagon to wince-worthy effect. The added bonus: a direct incentive to buy yourself a new trench knowing that if you’re out there wearing one, you might end up on www.artofthetrench.com. Keeps us wearing our trenches into late fall’s chilly rain. Genius.

-C Zalkin

Nobel Prize for Literature goes to German writer, Herta Mueller

“Herta Mueller, a member of Romania’s ethnic German minority who was persecuted for her critical depictions of life behind the Iron Curtain, won the 2009 Nobel Prize in literature Thursday in an award seen as a nod to the 20th anniversary of communism’s collapse.

Mueller, born in Romania’s Transylvania Banat region, was honored for work that ‘with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed,’ the Swedish Academy said.”  -NPR

Kazuyo Sejima to be next director of Venice Biennale Architecture Exhibition

“The president of the Venice Biennale, Paola Barrata, announced this morning that the director of the 12th International Architecture Exhibition will be Japanese architect Kazuyo Sejima of SANAA Architects.  Last week, we reported rumors that the next director was going to be a woman—a first for this most important of international contemporary architecture expositions. The names most frequently bandied about for this major job were Sejima and Liz Diller…In picking Sejima, the Biennale has chosen a practicing architect for the first time since Massimiliano Fuksas in 2000.” -blog.archpaper.com

Sejima is quoted as saying: “It might be argued that contemporary architecture is a rethinking and perhaps softening (borders between)…inside and outside, individual and public, form and function, physical and virtual, contemporary and classical, past and future, harmony and discord, structure partition, art and architecture, nature and man”

The “Woman Among Warlords” Comes to the U.S. to ask us to leave Afghanistan

“Malalai Joya, called the ‘bravest woman in Afghanistan,’ is finishing up a U.S. tour where she has pressed the Obama administration to pull the military out of her country. She says nothing could be worse for women than what she sees as the current civil war.

Joya gained international recognition in 2003 when she spoke out against warlords and drug traffickers at the Afghan constitutional assembly. Addressing the “felons” who controlled the country, she called them anti-woman, demanded they be put on trial in international court and declared that history would never forgive them. She was then pushed out of the assembly room in a sea of both threats and applause.

After speaking at Brown, Joya met with Women’s eNews and recounted with a smile another speech in which she compared members of parliament to animals, attacking their integrity and usefulness. That got her banned from parliament and stripped of her formal political role, but she has not stopped speaking.

Joya has little security at her speaking events, even though, as she told Women’s eNews, she faces threats from allies of Afghan warlords in this country.

Sometimes she is unable to sleep at night after she has seen pictures of the horrors, she said. It is loyalty to ‘my people’ that has brought her to the United States, where she has spoken to packed auditoriums and sold copies of her 2009 book, A Woman Among Warlords.

..Although government officials have demanded Joya’s apology for insulting them, she does not believe she is the one who should be sorry.

‘Someone had to do that and I did it . . . and I don’t regret it,’ she said.

Instead, she addresses President Obama:

‘Apologize to my people and end this.’”

-excerpts taken from article by Amy Littlefield for Woman’s ENews

Buy her book on Amazon.

Persephone Books is a female-run publishing house and London bookstore that publishes out of print 20th century female authors. It’s a quintessential example of the kind of business built of passion, intellect and saleability that inspired Girl on the street and What Women Make.

On my way from Brompton to Bloomsbury to interview Nicola Beauman, Persephone’s founder, I had to quickly change gears from innovation and novelty-seeking to the section of my brain that strikes even closer to my heart,  creative writing and its hopeful end product, publishing.

When I walked into the store, I further detached from the streamlined design arena and took in the intimate, cluttered and well-lighted store stacked sky high with books in gray and floral print covers.  There I was ushered toward the back to a room that was even more cluttered and more charming, filled with the smell of new paper from boxes of books.

I tripped down a step, a graceful entrance, and took a seat opposite Ms. Bauman and settled into a worn leather chair adjusting my bags and jacket around me.  When I looked up, she was smiling and unaffectedly curious, not a word or sneer of disapproval about my clumsiness.  An hour later, after her urging me to move to London, listing all of its charms and scholarly offerings, my blossoming crush on the city and it elegant restraint had cemented itself. Not to mention that the part of me that perennially wishes for the mentor / teacher / editor I never had had been piqued.  Here are outtakes from my conversation with the smart and funny-as-hell woman who started and runs Persephone Books. Without her, Miss Pettigrew would literally not have lived to see another day.

How did you get started?

I didn’t know that much about publishing but one can learn these things really.

Why mid-20th century women?

Nowadays, women who could be writing are doing a million and one other things but in the mid-20th century, women stayed home and took to writing.  Also, there isn’t the same sense of tragedy now because we don’t have the same moral conflicts do we? Today everything goes. These books have plot. They’re page turners. Now a novel like this would have to be set against a historical background.  This is a chance to see what really went on during that time.

When did you start Persephone Books?

1998.

How did you start your career?

I had children young. At 26, I secured a contract to write a book on female authors. A Very Great Profession: The Woman’s Novel 1914-39.  I was writing and reviewing books for the Observer in my twenties.

And your children?

They are about your age I’d say.  I have three sons and two daughters, all in the arts. My oldest son is a children’s book writer. Another son just wrote a cultural history of the pineapple.

Wishes, regrets?

I wish I was more techie.  I’m a little late getting to the party.  (She has an amazing blogging concept and a great website. For her blog, she sends out an image every day that is historically relevant to her titles. I’d say she’s got quite a handle on the medium..)

Can you touch type? (I answer in the affirmative.) Oh good! It’s very important to be able to touch type!

Wisdom?

I tell my son, find a stable of people who can help you. An electrician, a handyman, a type setter, people who you like who won’t be offended if you call up for a last minute request, people that you don’t have to explain yourself to.  I’ve had the same delivery man the whole time, the same accountant, the same bank but I do have a new printer. (She considers this.)

What are your plans for the future?

Well, we’ll just continue as we are! We put out 6 books a year. We have 3 new books coming out next month. 80% of our business is mail order. Ms. Pettigrew is our best seller. You know there are 30M women in this country. We have 20k on our mailing list. You know only 3% of London buys books?

I love these prints. I told a pattern designer I was meeting with you and she told me she had tried to reach you about using her designs in your books.

We are quite ruthless about requests. I just get so many requests and I can’t answer them all. Most of the books are gray though.  They have to have a uniform look you see because they are coming by mail and then they know what they are getting when they open the package.  The books we sell to stores have a print pattern because it catches the reader’s eye. They expect that. For those, we use prints from fabrics produced the year the book was written.

Who are some women you find inspiring, from any field?

Lucienne Day, fabric designer. She’s 95 years old. Marjorie Scardino who runs Pearsons which owns the Financial Times. She’s gone very far in a man’s world.  Sarah Waters who was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She’s a very very nice person. She just gets on with it. I admire her. Jane Brocket. She’s in the domestic arts and lives in Windsor. She bakes a lot. She writes about tapestry. She’s interesting without being annoying.

-Chauncey Zalkin

*See some Lucienne Day Converse sneakers here.

I always write my own posts but this Core77 post just needed lifting and gently spreading without much fuss or comment so here goes.

Re: Industrial Design graduate Yu-Ying Wu, Tatung University, Taiwan

“Taipei-based industrial designer Yu-Ying Wu’s Breathing Chair resembles a block of aerated tofu. Closer inspection reveals that the triangular voids vary in size, and their placement has been carefully calculated; the large triangles at the top-front-center “give” the most, creating a chair-like shape when compressed by a human body.

Wu’s chair, inspired by plant cells, took home a Red Dot Design Award in the home furniture design concept category earlier this year.”

via Core77 via cctv

(definitely tops my Muji memory foam pillow which is way too stiff. There is definitely no sinking in with that pillow.)

If I had to give a prize to a school, it would have to be Pratt. They are definitely an institution that is on the cutting edge of what needs to happen now with educational institutions in the world: solve problems, involve community.

I met with Deb Johnson the director of Director of the Center for Sustainable Design Studies there back in May and was duly impressed by her and her programs. In my inbox today, I was pleased to see two women among those awarded the inaugural 2010 Buckminster Fuller Graduate Fellowship award in conjunction with Pratt’s CSDS.

Ashley Thorfinnson with her Demerara Table:

The table, inspired by the fencing in Guyana, was made during a trip there as part of a Social Entrepreneurship venture.

Sahar Ghaheri’s Minor Differences Arabic/Hebrew necklace:

“Being of Arab descent and growing up mostly in the states with close Jewish friends, I have been aware of both sides of the long standing tension between Arab and Jewish cultures. My experience has also made me acutely aware that many aspects of these seemingly dissident cultures are more similar than many tend to acknowledge. I’ve created a piece of jewelry which allows the two languages to interact on one stage, using one Arabic word and one Hebrew word to form the phrase MINOR DIFFERENCES.” – Sahar’s description of the project.

Project H

The site says both are involved with Project H which has been on my radar since I started wwm. It’s a volunteer-run chartitable organization that uses industrial design to solve global problems on a local level.  Read about Project H and/or watch the video at right.

What is the Buckminster Fuller Challenge?

Getting into detail about Buckminster Fuller’s contribution to Design Science is too big a task and one I am not remotely equipped for. Instead, I pulled this from a website which at least gives you the conceptual anchor, and its a big one:

“‘Anticipatory Design Science’, or ‘Design Science’ for short, is a wide-ranging field of study, which focuses on the process of how to go about solving problems. It was pioneered in the early Twentieth Century by R. Buckminster Fuller, and has now expanded to include several generations of architects, planners, engineers, and designers. It is comprehensive because it seeks to find an underlying problem or issue, and solve for that general case, rather than for only one specific instance of a problem. For example, one of my primary interests is in understanding the causes of, and designing solutions for, the problems of homelessness on a global scale; Not simply why one person is homeless on the street in my town, or in yours, but why we have more than 400 million homeless people all around the world. It is Anticipatory because the Design Scientist seeks to understand not just the problem at hand, but how this problem, or similar ones, may manifest themselves over time. Also, to try and foresee what problems a proposed ‘solution’ might bring up, and to plan accordingly.” -Miquel.com go there to read more

-Chauncey Zalkin

A bit more on Buckminster Fuller added 10/29 via If It’s Hip, It’s Here and Dexigner.com:

"Methodically teaching himself structural engineering after failing college, Richard Buckminster Fuller believed that getting rid of what didn’t work was the first step forward. Studying networks such as beehives and fishing nets, Fuller created his geodesic dome, an inspiration for many structures around the world including Disney’s Epcot Center."

book by Gian Luca Amadei

Out of the ashes of a more austere and oppressive time comes a design landscape unfettered by a design past, one that is swiftly moving toward a vibrant future.

Gian Luca Amadei, product editor of Blueprint magazine, saw a spark in one designer from Poland who spoke with infectious enthusiasm about what she saw emerging on the home front. His curiousity led to an invitation to visit. When he got there, he was struck by the number of women leading the change. That discovery led to his book, Discovering Women in Polish Design.

I attended the launch during London Design Week but also had the pleasure of meeting Luca the previous evening where we talked heatedly about our mutual interest in the people behind the goods. After all, design is about people – the handiwork of the creator, human ingenuity, and the social ramifications of design in use. All too often design is presented as a faceless object. The book, which I read in full on the plane back to Barcelona, shines a light on the human factor, the people, the emotion, and the problem solving ability of design, in this case inside of a culture in transition.

Quotes from the panel discussion moderated by Blueprint editor, Vicky Richardson.

Women’s work

Ewa Golebiowska

‘(In the past in Poland), men were engineers and ran businesses. Women were in charge of decoration, family, nesting.  Women can see in 3D. We are good organizers. We are synchronizing from the time we get up to the time we go to sleep. That’s why we’re good for the future of design.’

‘To me the friction is happening on the border of male and female energies.  We used to live by “the Maria code”.  Poland, Spain, countries where Catholicism was strong. Women got a place on the train. You carried bags for the women. Men constructed. Women were aesthetic.’

An industry in transition

‘Students focus on the creative object more than mass production. They don’t know about operations. Up until now, Polish design has been mostly handmade. Recycled. Not expensive. Not sophisticated. It is seen as fresh and exciting but we need to focus.’

‘(In the past in Poland), our everyday life was uncomfortable. Our shoes. Our buses. Design is the quality of everyday life. Polish design is still underground We honor Italian and Scandinavian design. We need Polish design in Poland.’

‘Know-how is being brought back to Poland. In Holland, everything’s been designed and re-designed where in Poland everything has never been done. (That is exciting.).

Zuzanna Skalska

‘We have (no old habits to break) so we can implement design thinking in everything. We are developing marketing strategy for design. Design of objects that go hand in hand with marketing strategy. We can (employ) design thinking from beginning to end.’

‘Polish designers are returning to their country more and more out of choice to improve Polish design instead of staying in the already established design cities.’

‘Poland’s position is unique.  We have a system in Poland. The PPP, a private public partnership where the government partners with the private sector. The government acts as facilitator for the know-how that already exists in the private sector. There is money allocated specifically for design.  Design used to be part of the department of culture but is now in the department of economics. Anything that is a key driver for economic growth gets the money so there is plenty of money for design initiatives.  So for example, you have a private design school with 100% government money behind it. This is causing rapid change. We can move to new systems right away. We can take huge steps quickly. Design has become a tool to make Poland competitive.’ –trend expert, Zuzanna Skalska

(Indirect) Quotes from the book:

Beza Project’s Chestnut Stool

‘magazines should publish more challenging and avant-garde items and stories to push their readership to look harder, deeper.’

‘Iker (the design group) is not investing much in advertising, instead focusing on design’

–A Jacobsen-Cielecka, journalist and curator

‘you need a visionary designer and a visionary manager’

‘if I’d written a business plan, I wouldn’t have done what I have done’

– M Lubinska, Founder Moho Design

‘There are designers who are not just talking about sustainable design or eco or ergo design but thinking of people’s needs. I need these designers.’

– B Bochinska, President of the Board, Institute of Industrial Design in Warsaw

“(20 years ago, when you couldn’t buy tiles in Poland), all international calls were blocked so you’d have a special lady to say: ‘I want to have a connection with France.’  And she would say: ‘Okay, this will be a two hour wait.’  In Communist time, you couldn’t have direct contact with the west.”

– A Wojczynska, Interior Designer

‘One outcome of the Communist era, you learn how to make something from nothing.’

‘(when asked to present at schools) they usually want to know about marketing. They know how to design, they want to know the practicalities.’

– A Siedlecka

The book was published in loving support by Blueprint magazine.  To find out where to buy the book, go to the website or Amazon.co.uk.

Two great Polish design blogs I found through further research:

Zsah Blox and Design Girl

I particularly liked Aze Design’s philosophy and thoughtful ethnography design projects that merged new and old techniques realized by the BERDO craft womens group

Anna Wojczyska Ghost Sink, Logo Design

Pocket Wall by Maja Ganszyniec