Day 4 at the Victoria and Albert Museum #LDF14 #LDFredesign

It's been the 4th day, and I am excited as we are back to my key piece for the week, which we hope to have complete before our talk on Wednesday at 4pm in Seminar Room 3, just a few steps down the hallway from our open workshop at Level 3 of the Learning Centre of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Galapagos Designs' Charlie with his staple gun, ensuring the tension is good along the back, before we add the final backing, a beautiful blue corduroy that I have died myself, like all the other corduroy on this chair, as I couldn't find the colours I wanted anywhere.

Above you can see how my design mirrors itself for each side of this 'love seat', and the  yellow and coral corduroy on the sides.

And below my favourite bit to finish the whole sofa off: the wonderful work of Kaja Kippenberg, who is part of my company, for PR and communications - and in her words "knits to relax!" In this case she has been a whiz with her crochet needles and her maths to ensure this 'leg warmer' fits like a glove ...

.. and wait until tomorrow when we show you the final final finishing touch!

Or, if you happen to be in London this week, do pass by at our live workshop at the Victoria and Albert Museum's Learning Centre on Level 3. We'll be there all week, showing, telling, making ... 

You can read up on our event at the London Design Festival events web page and our hashtags for the week are: 
#LDF14 #LDFredesign

Ella

x

Day 1 #LDF14 #LDFredesign

 

We opened our live 'workshop' yesterday in the Learning Centre on Level 3 of the Victoria and Albert museum. It was just as busy as we were expecting it to be, with lots of interesting nice people passing by and talking to us!

Below are two of the posters that we put up in our make shift workshop. The Great Recovery made them to illustrate some facts about our waste.

F A C T ! !

 

Below is the waste material that Charlie took off our first chair. We will sort  between recyclable textiles and waste that's destined for the bin. (Oops, looks like the picture is the wrong way up, but you still get the idea...)Charlie told us all this is natural material, the brownish fabric is called Hessian, and it's made from hemp fibre. The ginger coloured fibres that peep through are in fact coir fibre, from the husk of the coconut The cream coloured over padding, which was the final layer underneath the red vinyl that covered the chair for about sixty years, is cotton felt. All of these materials can be composted. 

And this is our first chair underway ...

 

The tension springs on the back and the coil springs underneath the seat are the originals. They just needed a bit of tweaking. The back springs are probably good for another sixty years as they are under very little tension when nobody sits on the chair and only minimal when somebody does. The seat springs have to work harder and therefore have a shorter life expectancy. They won't probably last for more than another 10 to 20 years.

Below, Galapagos's Charlie with his scissors, cutting the Wood Grain Blue fabric that Ella designed specifically for the installation. This fabric will go onto our first chair and we will show you more pictures as we go along.

Here's one of how it looked this morning, with fabric on the inside back and the first layer of padding on the seat, and two of our first visitors this morning taking a look at it.

This new padding is made from shredded recycled fabric, and Charlie calls it 'a very Galapagos material'. He likes to work with it as it is similarly long-lasting than the original materials that were on the chair.

Have a lovely day - and do stop by at our workshop @ the Victoria and Albert Museum if you can.

Hashtags for the week: #LDF14 #LDFredesign #elladoranvamldf14

Bye for now!

x

Putting the circular economy into action with 'haute-design' refurbished upholstered chairs at the V&A during the London Design Festival 2014

 

We are drawing very close to my collaborative event at the Victoria and Albert Museum with Lucy Mortimer of Galapagos Designs and the Great Recovery (RSA)for the London Design Festival 2014 (13th to 21st September).

It all started with me, as a fellow of the RSA (Royal Society of Arts), wanting to raise awareness of the valuable work that the Great Recovery do. So I invited Galapagos Designs, with whom I first collaborated in 2013 on a range of vintage chairs, to join me, and over the recent months we then developed our event in conversation with the Great Recovery. 

My part is to demonstrate through real design 'practice' the kind of thinking that the 'circular economy' demands of a designer if we want to stop mindlessly filling up our land with waste that could be recycled, reused, remade or even avoided in the first place.

In a nutshell, it's going to be a live installation, in which we will display vintage and refurbished upholstered chairs in the Learning Centre Foyer (level 3) of the V&A. Every day we'll take one of the vintage chairs into the Design Studio, immediately adjacent to the exhibition. Galapagos Design's upholsterer, Charlie, will refurbish it right there and then, except for one chair, which we're already doing now. We'll collect all the old materials and sort them through in terms of what can still be done with them, and you're invited to come and look and talk to us about all of it. In addition, on Wednesday 17th at 4pm to 5.45pm, all us collaborators will give a panel talk about the whole project and its background in Seminar Room 3, just a few metres away from the Design Studio. The talk is free, but places are limited, so get there early.

Just to give you a taster, some pictures from our preparation process ....

Above, Charlie's handsome tools that will be in action in the Design Studio.

Below, Charlie and I, discussing the chairs with Lucy at Galapagos Designs' workshop.

My grandmother's chair (she always used to sit on the right hand side and we grand children would sit on the left ...)

As you can imagine, this chair holds much sentimental value for me and yet, the way it looked before we took off the last cover, I would not have wanted it in my house.

So it made an ideal starting point for our event, with me wondering how I could reupholster it and tell a story both with my designs and the work involved to deconstruct and make good the seat and legs, and recycle what I did not like, and make it into a chair that I would love to have in my home. Naturally, this came to be the chair that we are refurbishing now so it will open the show on the 13th September. 

This is how it looks from behind.

Below, a few 'sneak peeks'. My designs are all new work inspired by my recent trip to Iceland. They have been printed here in England and I have also produced a range of everyday products with them. We are launching them to the trade as you read this, and they will be available on my website from the end of September.

As this was such a great opportunity for exploration, I decided to collaborate with two designers on experimental fabrics. I'll tell you more about this during the LDF - the plan is to blog a post every day about the chair we've done that day. 

For now, here's one picture from my meeting with Kyla McCallum of Foldability, taken as we were planning the shape we shall use. She will fold my print fabric and assist Charlie in applying it to one of our chairs at the V&A on Sunday the 14th.

The other designer, Avantika Agarwald, has developed a process called 're-weaving', which is based on a traditional Indian weaving technique. It produces beautiful abstract furnishing fabric from an image being digitally printed onto a string of cotton (or other material) that is stretched horizontally across a frame (the warp). The string is then unraveled and re-woven on a warp of white cotton. 

Below, my figurative design 'Rekki in Reykjavik', in the process of being unraveled. The finished fabric, which has turned out amazing, will go onto the chair we'll upholster on Thursday 18th and Avantika will be present on the day.

Lastly, an image of the V&A's Learning Centre foyer, where the installation will be. The closed door behind the grand arch leads into the Design Studio. All easy to find and close together.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

Ella x

The London Design Festival 2013 - Part I - The Moleskine-Sketch-Relay at the V&A 14th - 22nd September

 

Moleskine and the London Design Festival have invited over 70 London-based designers to participate in the Moleskine Sketch Relay 2013 (exhibited at the V&A Museum from 14th - 22nd September) that is part of the Moleskine Detour Project. I am proud to be one of them and in this post I want to give you a taster of my contribution and the inspiration behind it, which I hope will entice you to come along to the exhibition to see it all.

Online luxury gift retailer Amara explains the idea behind the Moleskine Sketch Relay so nicely at www.amara.com/luxpad/review/Moleskine-Sketch-Relay (including a lovely youTube video of a previous contribution by fashion illustrator Jason Brooks)that I won't go into detail here. 

Just this much: This year the title of the London Design Festival's campaign is 'Design is Here, There and Everywhere' and we, the designers, have been asked to create illustrations around three questions that relate to the campaign.

I have approached the brief using pencil, collage, photographs and prints, inspired by the twentieth century's Pop art movement, which I was researching at the time, as I was also working on my new collection 'Pop Art goes Design' that is launching this week at trade show Maison et Objet in Paris.

The first question was

"...what objects, items, systems, and details could you not live without in your private space or in the public domain?" 

My response to it:

I have left a few pages out, including my response to the second question,"what you feel needs improving within your personal or professional life ...", so you will have to visit to see the rest ;-)

... in response to the third question

"what would you like to design that you haven't had the opportunity to design before?"

I reflected on how I could express that I would love to collaborate with architects and designers on the whole space, beyond the everyday items that fill a space, on the 'fabric' that makes up a space ... and came up with this collage,  

 

wanting to suggest an empty interior that I could imagine designing and filling with colour and light, hinting vaguely at objects, personality, print and pattern that are already present and can be included or replaced. I wasn't aware of it at the time, but later realised how strongly my image was inspired by Richard Hamilton's "Interior II":

I read up on Richard's inspiration for this artwork and found that he was inspired by a still (photograph) from the film Shockproof. The still became the generator of a series of works based around the interior - as a set - a space to explore beyond the normal perspective and assumed reality of things. In his words, courtesy of the Tate,

"It was a film set, not a real room, so wall surfaces were not explicitly conjoined; and the lighting came from several different sources. Since the scale of the room had not become unreasonably enlarged, as one might expect from the use of a wide angle lens, it could be assumed that false perspective had been introduced to counteract its effect yet the foreground remained emphatically close and the recession extreme."

And if - as I hope - this post has got your creative juices flowing, I am happy to say that on Saturday the 14th at Midday, the Victoria and Albert Museum is holding a free public 'Sketchathon' where you can 'drop in and populate the pages of Moleskine notebooks with your sketches, thoughts and doodles, taking design in London as your source of inspiration'.

More on my participation in the London Design Festival to come, so watch this space.