Precious mineral and metal resources have hit all time highs in terms of raw material prices. We may be in a banking crisis but the need for raw material isn’t showing any signs of a slow down. Big investors see safety in moving money into precious metals. The price and demand for copper in the UK has seen the organised theft of millions of pounds of cabling and even the Tube has been stopped by audacious thefts. It doesn’t end with copper; oil and coal have huge values. They also have unlikely aesthetic appeal too.Numerous designers have used copper of the past couple of years and it will continue to be a  popular material if only for is beautiful unique colour and shiney properties. But there is also a beauty in raw natural states.

At the London Design Festival Faye Toogoode showed a range of pieces  at Phillips de Pury that examine iridescence using oil as a medium.

Trapped Sphere is a piece that suspends oil in a solid resin block allowing the viewer to examine its beautiful iridescence. Its a work that objectifies this precious material and imprisons it. Its a dangerous material in so many ways; a pollutant and the cause of so many wars. We all know it as a valuable commodity but we rarely see it in its natural state. Captured in the sphere its a reminder of how the world is still so reliant on it.

Element Table made of sheets of  steel with the iridescent patina of oil metal

Lex Pott allows the metal to take on its natural colours. His experiments are shown in the first image on this post “When an element like copper is found in nature it has
a green colour. Iron has an orange / brown  colour when being found inside the earth. Oxidized metal surfaces create colours that provide information about a material. The pallete is a reaction with the base material.
Therefore the coloured surfaces have an organic growth
of colour and not every colour is possible on every surface. Colouring metals requires accurate recipes. This project shows the results of a research on metals and their true colours; a direct relationship between colour, material and information.”

Lex created a series of panels showing this organic growth across different metals in his work True Colours

Lex has gone on to apply the same process in True Colours Shelf

Minimalux Ballpoint  is made of an almost indestructible solid brass. the unplated shell allows the metal to develop its own patina. “The basic ballpoint pen, or ‘Biro’ as it has become known, has been a useful accessory to our daily lives for many years. Its familiar, cheap plastic casing is synonymous with the product but also its disposability”.

Sort of Coal is  a product that acts as a water and air purifyer  but is actually White Charcoal so not coal! White Charcoal has a higher carbon content than Black Charcoal and has no dust or residue.  Made using the same techniques and processes that have been used for centuries. In this ancient Japanese method pieces of wood are baked in hand-built clay kilns, slowly at first and then at extremely high temperatures with restricted oxygen. This allows carbon to be captured in the wood, a process called pyrolysis.

Oddly enough for years I’ve had a large lump of Lancashire coal sitting on a shelf near to me. I found it in the cellar at home; we never had a coal fire so it must have been there for decades. It moved around with me as a reminder of home and because its surprisingly beautiful, with iridescent seams. I just thought it was pretty, now I’d like to think its been purifying the air around me too! (probably not)

Existence by Michele De Lucchi for De Castelli

Lancelot by Philippe Nigro for De Castelli

Corroded by Joost Van Bleiswijk Made from interlocked segments rather than being welded or screwed together they are left to the elements to work their magic on the steel. Pieces shown here are work in progress, shown at his open studio during Dutch Design Week.

Out House by Piet Hein Eek This house is at the entrance to Eek’s store in Eindhoven. Rather than Corton steel the metal used here is probably from the disused factory Piet Hein Eek has transformed into his workspace/ restaurant / gallery.

Studi’Eau is a living statue for purifying a glass of water. You and the plant have a symbiotic relationship.  You give the plant a glass of rainwater which it then cleans, the evaporated water collects inside the bowl and drips along the gutter into the drinking glass. The plant provides you with your own glass of purified water.

KasKast by Marije van der Parkis a cabinet for edible plants to grow. Made from scrap steel, glass from old greenhouses and a piece of used oak the cabinet displays the art of cultivation.

Rainforest by Patrick Nadeau has created an installation for Italian brand Boffi, consisting of hanging domes covered in a type of hanging Spanish moss called Tillandsias usneoïdes. The plants will survive from the moisture in the air, the steam generated in everyday cooking being a perfect source of water for them.

Personal Fresh Air by Julio Radesca de Carvalho shown at Dutch Design Week, Eindhoven 2010. In researching how plants can enhance the office environment Julio discovered that it takes twelve plants to filter the air indoors. With this in mind he created Personal Fresh Air’ a desk that holds the twelve plants in a hydroponic water system; white hydro stones replacing soil for easier maintenance. Not only do the plants filter the air but they act as a partition wall for privacy and a little noise reduction.

Everyday Growing by Juliette Warmenhoven invites you to explore the wonder of growth through a series of incubators. Growth can be examined quickly when seeds are sprouted and their rapidly develop over just a few days. Or the slow growth of a bonsai tree can be observed over a period of decades. The incubators allow you to observe the roots as well as the branches

Harvest by Asif Khan brings London’s flowering foliage into the home and uses them as raw material for furniture. Using the process of plastination to transform the fragile stems Gypsophila into a rigid and preserved usable material. Stems are woven onto the chair frame before being plastinated, all water is drawn out and replaced by a polymer. Plastination was pioneered by the eternally creepy Gunther von Hagens who created the process as a way of preserving bodies; displaying his work in the controversial Body Works exhibitions. Von Hagens holds the patent to the process and co-operated with this project. Khan’s use of plastination on plants creates a more poetic and functional end, although process is still in the conceptual stage – it is far too complex to be of commercial use as yet.

London designer Aimée Furnival of Another Studio for Design has created a series of greetings cards that fold out into miniature gardens, in which the recipient can grow cress.

Luci by Llot Llov is an aternative to the outdoor hanging basket of begonias. Four metal rings are knotted into a macramé net; a simple flowerpot is placed in the lower ring and the macramé loops provide a frame for the plant to grow through.

Hanging Air Pods by Michael McDowell The ceramic pods are designed specifically for Air plants which hate to have their roots in standing water.

Stacking Table by Mia Hamborg To create your own table you stack the lathe turned wooden pieces in your own way. And if you get tired of it and fancy a change you can re-configure it. I’m sure someone with a mathematical mind could say how many unique combinations there are, unfortunately I can’t!

Daisuke Motogi’s Lost in Sofa Invites you to put into the sofa all those little bits and pieces you’d usually loose. The sofa can be a rich source of lost items, loose change (other peoples/yours), tv remote, pens books etc, etc. so why not make them a part of the sofa. The sections of padding are pockets for you to store those troublesome items.

Growing Up Chair by Jenna Postma

I find it rather charming that the inspiration for this chair came from a messy teenagers bedroom; but then most of us do tend to dump our clothes at the end of the day. “Almost everyone has a chair in their bedroom to put their clothes on, but the more clothes there are – the more useless it gets as a chair. The Growing Up Chair is the other way around, it needs the mess to create the seating and to be functional.” I guess you could also use it as a place to stash old clothes of weave in some amazing fabric – the choice is yours.

Todd Laundry Stool by Llot Llov also reqiures you to finish the piece by dumping your laundry onto it to create the cushion.

Marijn Van Der Poll ’s  Do Hit Chair for Droog probably requires the maximum input and is the oldest of this collection. Created in 1999 the chair comes with a sledge hammer for you to provide maximum input. It could be quite theraputic bashing  a lump of metal into the right size for your rear. And at least you have somewhere to collapse into once you’ve finished!

Just to make my life a little easier here’s a series I’m going to start to do of 10 pictures all taken by me at trade and design shows. Starting here with Dutch Design Week

- on a camera that momentarily got left behind at Piet Hein Eeks restaurant! As I raced back to get it I had a funny feeling the good folk there would look after; and they did. If its a dull show next time may have to be 5!

One of the main stumbling blocks to buying any home product is the fear of getting it wrong.  After all, its so much easier to send back that hideous jumper that you thought looked fabulous, than it is to dispose of the sofa you special ordered 3 months ago. With this in mind Mydeco.com have looked into our buying habits and our fears of a interior faux pas. Their 3D planner allows you to build your room to the exact proportions and light sources and you can pretty much add in your existing furniture. From the huge database of  over 75,000 products you’re bound to find something that’s near as dammit to your current sofa or bed.  Its the kind of technology you’d expect to pay for but its completely free. The idea behind it is to encourage us to be a little more adventurous in our purchases, and to stop us making mistakes whether they be an aesthetic disaster or an issue with the proportions of your items.  You can then click through and purchase your items from a vast range of suppliers and (perhaps the area I like the most) a range of independent designer makers through their boutique

Another company to embrace the use of 3D technology is Established & Sons. Launched at the Salone Internazionale Del Mobile in Milan this year, they presented their new own label collection Estd through an interactive 3D screen created by Yoox.com. Four items were presented in an interactive way (Dip Soft Grid, Plan,Butt)that allowed the viewer to discover them, play, move turn and even throw them via a touch-screen. Although this technology isn’t available online yet, you can just imagine them tinkering away to create an Ipad App for it.

In a bid to get in touch with the consumer and take the work  directly to them Tom Dixon has come up with his Flash Factory . Appearing in many locations over the next year products will be assembled according to the customers need and demand. Its an interesting experiment on the inefficiency of our current means of production and delivery whereby products take months to be shipped across the world to the end user. The Flash Factory kicked off in Milan with members of Toms London team creating the Etch light for customers. The Factory then moved to New York for ICFF where willing volunteers created the products, there payment being other Tom Dixon products. In a quote from the man himself “Flash Factory demonstrates Future Industry and the new found power of the designer, able to service world markets with the latest products in greatly reduced time scales.”  Its an interesting concept and people visiting the Factory do enjoy engaging, and chatting and buying the work. Yes I did buy and Etch light – it was only 30 Euros for a bit of design history!

Friend and contemporary of Tom, Piet Hein Eek is also keen to engage the consumer in the process of production, although his factory is in no way portable! Its real and its huge. The concept is to rennovate an old Phillips factory to create a space where products will be made and sold. Its interactive but in the traditional sense, people can meet, talk, watch, create, shop and eat under one roof. Visitors can wander round without losing site of the workplace and offices; and workspaces will be rented to like minded creatives to create a community of production in a space that was once for mass production. Its a wonderfully idealistic response to an economic crisis and I can’t wait to visit it when it opens in October, in time for Dutch Design week.

Drawn from Clay by Atelier NL is a fascinating delve into the process of converting soil into usable pottery. As students Nadine Sterk & Lonny van Rijswijck, the pair behind Atelier NL, visited traditional workshops in Peru and Brazil where they saw artisans create vases from the earth around them. Taking this idea back home, they travelled around the Netherlands collecting natural clay and producing cups in  a variety of different colours and textures unique to the deposits. This work led the pair to being invited to continue their study by Jurgen Bey and Rianne Makkink on their farm in Noordoostpolder.

Working with local farmers they collected stories and buckets of clay from the parcels of land. “A bucket of soil is anonymous, but stories told by the farmer who works the soil gives the ground identity”

The result of their work is a range of tableware, a homage to the vegetables that were once cultivated in the earth from which they were produced.

Further work with Royal Tichelaar Makkum  has produced a  range of plates and bowls are available in six different types of local clay. Again the colour variations of the product are result of the chemical components of the clays used.

Baked by Formafantasma – Andrea Trimarchi, Simone Farresin. The collection is not strictly speaking from the earth, but the materials used certainly are. Commissioned for an exhibition during Dutch Design Week  on the theme “Getting Lost” the duo went back to their Italian roots for inspiration.

“To get lost during a design process is a beautiful luxury – it means you can follow your intuition and curiosity without aiming for a clear result. For this project we looked back at our design “memorabilia”: ideas, pictures and techniques we left behind.”

The Sicilian folk festival Salemi features architectural decorations created from flour based material. Baked expands on this, using  natural ingredients; flour, coffee, cocoa and spinach combined with salt, shellac and spices. A complex mix they experimented with to create durable pieces.

On a more commercial tip JIA international have produced a range which also seeks to connect the the clay with the end use of the products. The range has been named after the clay that has been used. ”Zisha”, also known as purple clay, is natural clay unique to China, found around Taihu in Jiangsu during the Northern Song Dynasty (1000-1200 A.D.). When fired, the purple clay assumes a fine and sandy texture that retains the temperature of the tea held inside longer than ordinary ceramics. Microscopic pores of Zisha absorb the fragrance of tea, keeping the tea’s freshness from spoiling. Since the Ming and Qing Dynasties, tea connoisseurs have considered Zisha teapots indispensable.

For all things ceramics Slipcast -The Ceramics Blog is an excellent read.