This article was taken from the October 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.
Ron Arad's greatest legacy may well be as an educator. He founded the Royal College of Art's design products MA course in 1998 and, during the 11 years he led it and since, the programme has produced designers who have innovated in many disciplines. Some have re-invented craft and the idea of the designer-maker, others have explored technologies old, new and transformative. All of them have produced works that are odd, unsettling, theatrical, crowd-pleasing -- even useful -- that question the purpose of design. Should it make our lives easier, faster, fuller, ever more friction-free? Should it create wonder? Or should it redefine our relationship with the material world? Here are four early- to mid-career design practices and alumni of the Arad-era RCA, as well as two younger designers, who are asking those questions and more.
1. Hilda Hellstrom
The analytic craftswoman
Materiality is a buzzword in design and architecture, although it has different meanings according to who's using it. For the Gothenburg-born, London-based designer Hilda Hellström, 29, the term refers to the perceived qualities of the materials.
Hellström graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2012. For her final show, The Materiality of a Natural Disaster, she made food-storage jars out of radioactive earth from the Fukushima disaster area in Japan. Since then, she has been exploring these ideas with a process she calls sedimentation. Hellström casts layers of different coloured Jesmonite, a type of plaster, and experiments with the casting process -- sometimes the strata are clear and sharp, sometimes they swirl and tumble around each other.
The results suggest an alternative, fantastical geology.
Hellström is part of a new wave of designer-makers (she calls herself an "analytic craftswoman") determined to create new craft traditions. Sometimes she casts vases, other times monolithic or crystalline blocks and then creates the shape of a vase, or part of a vase, using a CNC milling machine. She is currently working on new pieces for a December show at the Gothenburg Museum of Art. Her creative process is changing in other ways: she recently returned to Stockholm to work from a studio with sea views.
The light doctor
Paul Cocksedge set up his studio with business partner Joana Pinho in 2004 and has built a reputation for designing innovative lighting while rethinking how designers can use light.
Like many of his contemporaries, he has embraced crowdfunding as a way to free himself from touting his ideas to manufacturers or waiting for a commission. Funded on Kickstarter in April and launched in July, the Vamp is a small red box that can connect via Bluetooth with any speaker to play music. "I've been collecting all these speakers left out on the street," says the 36-year-old. "They are amazing at producing sound. The Vamp means we can bring them back to life."
Another of his Kickstarter-funded projects is the Double O bicycle light, which launches in September. "Bike-light makers are lumen-obsessed," he says. "You cycle around London at night and you're blinded by other cyclists' lights. They don't need to be that bright to be effective." His solution? Twelve LEDs in a circle, with a hole in the middle. "You get a softer light."
Cocksedge has also been working with St. Thomas' Hospital to look at light design and the choice of materials in its A&E department. "At the beginning of my career I was interested in moments," he says. "Now I'm looking at creating something more permanent".
The embalmer
At his RCA graduation show in 2012, Alvarez presented the Thread Wrapping Machine, a sci-fi spinning wheel that cocoons and joins wood and metal in a colourful, gluey web. It made him a design star. "I invented a new craft," Alvarez says, "and I feel like
I really have to take it forward it now, not hand it down to my son or anything but to commit to it."
The machine is simple: a system of four thread-cones and thread-tensioners around which a glue container mounted on skateboard wheels whizzes, mummifying whatever passes through it.
This lets Alvarez create chairs, benches or abstract assemblages at a rate of one a day.
The machine is a culmination of a decade of grounding in fine arts, cabinet making and interior design, as well the RCA design product MA course. Like fellow Swede Hilda Hellström, Alvarez is part of a new wave of post-industrial makers interested in creating new, but often low-tech, processes, tools and crafts.
The next project may be bigger machines. Or maybe not. "I created it so no one can tell me what to do with it," Alvarez says.
The electric creators
Rosario Hurtado and Roberto Feo -- aka El Ultimo Grito -- are designers' designers. Mixing graphic design, art, cinema and other media, they are as interested in process as result.
Hurtado arrived in London from Madrid in 1989 and Feo followed a year later. Partners in life and work, they started producing rough and ready-made designs in their flat of functional installations and one-off objects. Imaginary Architecture (2010) is a series of futuristic blown-glass cityscapes (left); Free range (2011) is a cardboard and resin table; Designing an Echo (2012) is stories told in shadows, including that of the doomed Space Shuttle Challenger.
From this month until November, the pair present Burning Down the House at the Gwangju Biennale in South Korea. In it, a series of video images will cover the walls of the site. They have also been working on "mega-inflatable rotating structures" to be installed at London Design Week this month.
The pair are optimistic about the current craft and making revival. "It is exciting to see, but it has a long way to go."
Hurtado says. "It has the potential to generate new social and economic models, which is probably not the reason that everyone is so fascinated in it."
The reframers
RCA graduates Sarah van Gameren and Tim Simpson reframe the way things are made. The studio, founded in 2008, has built a reputation on what the pair call "time-based installations". In The Long Drop (2009), they formed a table by pouring a poly-concrete mix down a ten-metre wooden spiral structure. They use photosensitive porcelain, seaweed and UV light in their Silverware Vases. And for this year's Woven Song they created textile patterns by translating organ music punch cards. "In the past we researched how the moment that products come into being is perhaps more interesting than the end product," says Van Gameren. "The next step for us is to argue that we might not even need a tangible product."
As part of November's Interieur Biennale at the Kortrijk's Broel Museum in Belgium, Studio Glithero is reviving the Pepper's Ghost optical effect used in Victorian theatres. The pair are also developing optical tricks for their largest project to date, the 850m<sup>2</sup> façade of an office building in London due to open in 2018. They have developed a new marquetry technique using an optical film that will reveal or conceal parts of the building, depending on where it's viewed from.
The rainmakers
For five months from the end of 2012, almost 80,000 people travelled to the Barbican Centre in London with the aim of not getting rained on. rAndom International's Rain Room -- which took three years to develop -- enabled visitors to walk around a 100m2<sup> </sup> indoor downpour without getting wet. To achieve the effect, the installation used 3D mapping cameras, pressure regulators and a pixellated grid of sprinklers.
rAndom International, based in London and Berlin, was formed in 2002 by Hannes Koch, Florian Ortkrass and Stuart Wood. It gained immediate attention with the PixelRoller, a paint roller customised with print heads and rapid prototyped parts that allowed users to paint pixellated text or images on a wall. It was the first of a run that included Audience (2007), a clutch of motorised mirrors that swivel in sync to watch and reflect anyone who approaches; and Swarm (2010), a cluster of LEDs mounted on brass rods which create the effect of swooping birds and insects.
This month, the studio opens an installation at Lunds Konsthall in Sweden, with two more promised for next year.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
