A NEW FORM OF DESIGN COLLABORATION
One brief – three products • Three designers – two + one invited • A new challenge and a 100% open design process!
HONKEN, POPPE & MORRIS JR
What happens when three strong designers suddenly have to monitor each other's design process? Sit and examine every detail. Criticise and simultaneously be criticised. Do they fight? Or is all peaceful and calm?
Last year, some months before the Stockholm Furniture fair, Blå Station decided to ask two of their designers, Thomas Bernstrand and Stefan Borselius, to take part in a project called Experiment 2015. The design brief was to create three design classics for public environments in an entirely open design process where the designers should coach, debate and criticise each other. When the chosen designers accepted the challenge to each create a self-confident, audacious typical Blå Station product, they also took on the task of selecting a third designer, preferably a woman, a design team or a designer from another country. And after much head scratching rather they surprisingly concluded that it should be Blå Station’s own design manager, CEO and producer,Johan Lindau. In close cooperation they now present their three individual armchairs at the Stockholm Furniture fair 2015.
HONKEN
Thomas Bernstrand's Honken is an inviting armchair or an intimate, flirtatious two-seater sofa, constructed of robust sheet and expanded metal but with sensually turned legs.
– I love products sold at flea markets and auctions, says Thomas, which people buy even though they are terribly scruffy. Some pieces of furniture can be in very poor condition, but you buy them anyway, straighten them out, apply a new layer of varnish, make them a new cushion or polish them. The result may not always be perfect, but that's not important, because these layers create a beautiful patina of history.
POPPE
Stefan Borselius' Poppe is, with its exact sitting angles and the thinnest possible shell, exploring just how narrow an armchair can really be. Poppe is despite its minimal dimensions an elegant and comfortable creation that seems to be a distant relative of Oppo.
– This wasn't to be an armchair that you sit in or a stool that you sit on says Stefan, but rather an armchair that you sit with. A narrow style that provides mobility. I didn't want it to be merely easy to move around and furnish with, but also easier for the user to move with the chair.
MORRIS JR
Johan Lindau's Morris Jr is inspired by an old masterpiece called Morris, designed by Lindau & Lindekrantz, 50 years ago. Morris JR is a mobile, generous and easy to place arm-chair where the strict shape is softened by the backrest cushion as the cherry on top.
– I also wanted to work with mobility as a natural interplay with the user, says Johan. I'm one of those people who want to tidy up and make things look nice when I enter an attractive public space which the users have furnished according to their particular needs and functions. With wheels on the armchair, the furniture becomes both usable and easy to move without injury.
The result is three armchairs which have become even more individualistic than if the designers had worked on their own, and entirely in the spirit of Blå Station.
