Oskar Zięta and Jakub Szczęsny, promo images
Two of the most innovative designers of today's generation share their talent and expertise at the India Design Forum, the nation's premier trade event
Poland's Oskar Zięta and Jakub Szczęsny are featured speakers at the second edition of the IDF, presenting the tools and even the secrets of their trades to an international audience of design insiders. Aimed at promoting talents and progress on the Indian market, while spurring international cooperation and collaborative design, it is considered India's premier event for the international design community. Over two days, the world's top architects, interior designers, product designers and craftsmen give lectures to a targeted audience on their talent and their techniques, collectively examining "how design informs our world and changes our lives, every day", according to forum organisers.The Financial Times has called the event "a platform to disseminate and propound new and exciting ideas".
Oskar Zięta (born 1975) presents his talk Breathing Metal on the 15th of March, giving insights into his unique method of treating metal in a way that results in the most whimsical shapes - either puffed-up like ballon animals or squashed like cardboard boxes. He takes a novel approach to the sturdiness of metal, undermining its strength and playing with perception. Oftentimes, the glossy surface of his metal objects and the reflections that play upon them are more important than the objects themselves, such as the Reflections collection he exhibited at Design Week Vienna 2011. Vienna exhibition curator Maria Cristina Didero likened the experience of Zięta's objects to " entering the world of alice in wonderland [...] in which both - objects and materials - are never what they look like" and compares the objects themselves to a "kaleidoscope that has the ability to enlarge our possibilities of looking at objects while exposing the mystery of vision and understanding".
His most recognisable designs are the Plopp stools - playful metal stools whose shape mimics that of malleable helium balloons or even the poodles of Jeff Koons. Via his company Zieta Prozessdesign, he produces his designs and also researches innovative techniques for creating unexpected forms in unusual formats. He has developed a special FiDU (Freie-Innen-Druck-Umformung - InnerPressure Forming) technology that inflates two sheets of metal and inflates them into a 3D objects that is at once "deformed", yet highly stable and durable. Such technology has been used to make everything from his Plopp stools to a custom Ballantine's bar of "melting ice cubes".
As Zięta himself says of his work in the context of creating the eye-catching trophy for Poland's Deasign Alive Awards,
I design processes for manufacturing customised construction. Process-design triggered the creation of the trophy which is a part fo a larger construction and some bigger scale entity. In the paradigm of its own role as a reward for creative thinking, the trophy attains a symbolic meaning. Thinking is a process. Like each realized idea is a part of large and still growing concept that support our everyday life.
Jakub Szczęsny (born 1973) presents Designing the World's Narrowest House, also on the 15th of March. His talk trails the story of how the designer and his team at the Centrala Design Cooperative conceived and constructed Keret House in Warsaw, known as the "world's smallest house". Created by Szczęsny for Israeli writer Etgar Keret, it spans two storeys and measures 122 cm in its widest and 72 cm in its narrowest point. Keret is a patron of the space and its primary, symbolic resident.
Szczęsny explains the main ideas behind the concept as a sort of seaming together of different "architectural tissues" of two different eras - fitting the novel and innovative concept of a narrow residential space between two existing buildings - unremarkable blocks of Warsaw of the mid-20th century. He also pays heed to the symbolic meaning of the location, as "the site of the House marks the border between two Ghettos, a large and a small one". The project fits in with the designer's approach to architecture and design, in which he meshes these realms together with urban criticism and art, as well as social activism and education (namely, as a lecturer at the Warsaw Institute of Technology, Faculty of Architecture and Warsaw School of Fine Arts Faculty of Design). Szczęsny's Keret House is in the running this year for the international Architizer + Award in the + Living Small category.
India Design Forum 2013 takes place at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Mumbai between the 15th-16th of March 2013. The IDF takes place just after India Design Week - a programme of exhibitions, workshops and other events open to the public. The Design Forum, on the other hand, is a private, registration-only event that hosts acclaimed experts from India and all over the world. It was conceived and organised by the Coimbatore Centre for Contemporary Arts (CoCCA).
For more information on India Design Forum, see: www.indiadesignforum.com
Author: Agnieszka Le Nart
Source: India Design Forum, www.zieta.pl, centrala.net.pl