Mattias Rask and Tor Palm of Glimpt travelled to the village of Yungay in Peru to research the techniques used by woodworkers at a workshop run by voluntary organisation, Artesanos Don Bosco.

They designed a range of contemporary tables that make use of the facilities provided to artisans, who are taught furniture-making skills to encourage them to stay and work locally, rather than moving to the cities.

The bases are made from local timber, including a hard white wood called Lengha, and a type of cedar. The wood is turned on a lathe before the faceted decoration is chiselled by hand and painted.

Explaining how the project came about, Rask told Dezeen: "We sent an email to a Swedish guy in Lima and asked him about crafts organisations in Peru; he basically said that Artesanos Don Bosco are the best artisans in Peru, so we sent them an email!"

Prehistoric Aliens will continue to be produced in Yungay and was presented by Italian furniture brand Cappellini as part of its Cappellini NEXT collection in Milan earlier this year.

Glimpt collaborates with artisans around the world and previously created a range of stools made from seagrass in Vietnam, and ceramic lights painted to look like strawberries produced by craftsmen in South Africa.

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Still life photography is by Daniel Thrue.

Here's some more information from the designers:

Glimpt of Peru - Prehistoric Aliens

We spent the autumn of 2012 in Peru working and learning from the Crafts Cooperative, Artesanos Don Bosco, a continuation of our work with craftsmen and women from different countries.

Before our trip we had not fully appreciated how extensive this organisation was. Artesanos Don Bosco is part of a large Italian voluntary organisation called Operazione Mato Grosso. This organisation was founded in the 1960s by Father Hugo, a Catholic missionary priest who saw there was a need to help poor farmers in the Andes. Now, some fifty years later, Operazione Mato Grosso has roughly 2000 Italian volunteers and employs about twice as many Peruvians.

The work involves educating and training people in the remote villages in the Andes, and then creating employment opportunities for them there. The idea is to encourage people to stay and work in these isolated areas rather than move to a very uncertain future in Lima, something that many Peruvians otherwise are tempted to do.

Operazione Mato Grosso promotes the virtues of a simple, unhurried life, living and working in cooperation with one another. They have started schools, orphanages, hospitals and even power stations that provide electric power in the mountains. All this is free of charge for the poor.

One part of this organisation, called Artesanos Don Bosco, provides craftsmanship training. After five years training with ADB most of the artisans then work in the organisation’s cooperative. The courses they give are mainly related to different ways of working with wood. This includes furniture making, decorations, carving pictures and the construction of housing. They also teach stone masonry, how to make glass, different ways of working with textiles and even metal work.

We decided we wanted to help them develop a more modern series of furniture. After having visited several villages and different cooperatives in the Andes we finally settled on Yungay as the village where we would set to work. In Yungay there was a little cooperative that worked with furniture making. During our visits we were impressed by their very high standards of craftsmanship and above all by the skill of the people who carved pictures in wood.

So day after day of soup followed by fried guinea-pigs and washed down with Inca Cola finally lead to the production of a series of coffee tables called Prehistoric Aliens. Our main difficulty was not a shortage of good ideas but rather the language barrier. Neither of us spoke any Spanish but we were faced with a situation where this was the only possible language for communication.

The first few weeks we had been helped by our American friend Nick, but after a while we had to manage by ourselves. After keen language practice on the computer every evening, and getting a lot of hands on experience every day in the workshops, we finally managed to make some Spanish sounding words and were rewarded with the nicknames Gordo and Chato (Chubby and Shorty) by our fellow workers.

Marcial, Barosso, Aristares and Messias taught us alot and we hope we have taught them something as well. It has been a good experience living and working with them. Hopefully our collaboration will provide them with more work so that they can keep on developing their skills and supporting their families, as well as contributing to the great work of Artesanos Don Bosco and Operazione Mato Grosso.

The name, Prehistoric Aliens, was inspired by Peru’s fantastic cultural heritage which often seems very mystical and ancient to our western eyes.

The small coffee tables are almost like small spaceships that have just landed, with their leader, The Robot.

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by Glimpt appeared first on Dezeen.

The group of furniture is entitled the Permanents and is designed to evoke the habits and rituals of an imaginary human community.

Folded sheets of felt create structures that envelop the body and form hoods overhead.

Each piece is given a unique purpose - as a place to lie down, sit or come together - and some incorporate objects including a chair and a wooden bell.

Orange mats or chair coverings inside the felt structures highlight functions and represent the warmth of the body, while the grey shell emphasises its protective quality.

The furniture is being shown at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac together with a film directed by Matali Crasset and Paris and Berlin-based artist Juli Susin, which shows people wearing coloured versions of the hoods performing a series of rituals on an imagined journey to a mystical mountain.

Crasset says: "I think of the exhibition as a space for introspection. I'm interested in presenting elements of a moving and developing line of thought by using formalizations far removed from my usual practice with the 'exhibition' object."

"I question my own practice as much as I question design in all its entrenchments, by thinking of it as an autonomous activity, detached from any basic premise," she adds. "Thinking, and suggesting hypotheses, is what excites me in this context."

The exhibition continues until 20 July.

Matali Crasset designed a sofa system comprising two removable upholstered chairs and pebble-like cushions that was launched in Milan earlier this year and she has also created a range of products and furniture made from concrete – see all projects by Matali Crasset.

A chair with armrests that extend to form a protective loop around the sitter was popular on Dezeen this week – see all furniture design.

Here's some more information about the exhibition from Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac:

Matali Crasset, Voyage to Uchronia, Pantin

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac is delighted to be hosting matali crasset’s project Voyage en Uchronie ('Voyage to Uchronia') in our Pantin gallery. Following the exhibition of the blobterre at the Centre Pompidou in 2012, Voyage to Uchronia, crasset’s fifth exhibition at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, continues her reflection on experimental environments.

Voyage to Uchronia is a fiction that takes place in a separate time. This exhibition questions notions of utopia and rituals, which are central elements in matali crasset’s practice.

The exhibition is made up of a series of furniture pieces, the Permanents, built around the same structure and a film directed with Juli Susin of the Royal Book Lodge, titled Voyage to Uchronia, salvatico è colui che si salva.

The Permanents

Voyage to Uchronia brings together a group of furniture, the Permanents, that evoke a group of humans and their rituals.

The Permanents are built around a unique form that envelops the body and is present through its various activities. The module partially surrounds the body whilst standing, seated or laying down. The folded form protects the head, inviting us to meditate. The exterior grey color accentuates it’s protective side, the interior has orange areas highlighting an invitation to read, to sit, to lay down, to see, to remember, to listen…

These structures are in their simplest forms, closest to the human being. We recognize in the different elements in this scheme that evoke a primitive life: a chair, a cabinet of curiosities, a portrait gallery, a wooden bell, a puppet, one to lay down in, one used for thinking, for concentrating in and a module to meet others, composed of several Permanents. The pieces are made in felt, a material evoking protection and the unchanging.

Voyage to Uchronia: salvatico è colui che si salva

This film was born out of a collaboration between matali crasset and Juli Susin realized through his collaborative platform: the Royal Book Lodge. It is their first film together and includes Julia Rublow’s participation.

In the forest where the mystical mathematician Pythagoras lived and died, a tribe carries out imaginary rituals. Against the backdrop of water, air and sun, Uchronia’s universe unfolds, a world born out of a collision of figures and colors.

Do other worlds appear and disappear on the way to ours? What remains? Were the numbers at the origin of forms and colors there before us? This transformation of the Pythagorean question where the origin of our civilization crosses path with the future, is a temporal transgression and colorful introspection that gives birth to the film with a pulsating and hypnotic rhythm.
At the end of the film a herd of wild boar gathered around an airplane evoke Leonardo da Vinci’s metaphor "Salvatico è colui che si salva," which means "Wild he who saves himself."

Flee into the air? Flee in a dream? Flee in space? Flee human beings?

The artist will always remain an enigma.

About Uchronia

In 1936, Régis Messac offered this definition of Uchronia in Primaires, the review he edited: "An unknown country, discovered by the philosopher Renouvier, located at a remove from time or outside time, to which, like old moons, events that might have happened but did not are relegated".

The word was invented by Charles Renouvier, who used it in the title of his 1876 novel Uchronie, l’utopie dans l’histoire, ('Utopia in History').

Uchronia is a 19th century neologism constructed on the pattern of 'Utopia', which Thomas More coined in 1516 as the title of his famous book Utopia. Where the Greek elements 'u-topia' suggested 'no-place' (ou – topos), 'u-chronia' suggests 'no-time' (ou-chronos in Greek). Etymologically, therefore, the word designates non-existent time.

This project is part of the Designer's Days 2013 program.

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at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac appeared first on Dezeen.

The set of doll's house furniture is called Huset and features the Klippan sofa, Lack table, Expedit shelving unit and Vago chair.

It will be available from the beginning of August, when Ikea launches its 2014 catalogue, and will be priced at £12.

Packaging for the petite products features illustrations of interior items such as clocks and picture frames that can be cut out and used as a backdrop.

Ikea's children's business leader Carol McSeveney told the Evening Telegraph that research shows "lots of kids want to create doll's houses for their toys that reflect their own homes – furnished in a more modern style, with plenty of space to store all the accessories, of course."

Last week, Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad resigned from the company's board, saying that Ikea was undergoing a "generational shift" – see all stories about Ikea.

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Called Public Office Landscape, the modular design by Fuseproject for Herman Miller aims to encourage spontaneous conversations and continuous collaboration between employees.

Rather than design desks for individuals interspersed with pockets of collaborative meeting areas, Behar wanted to spread collaboration evenly throughout the office.

The designers came up with three main concepts: social desks for individuals to work in configurations that encourage interaction, group spaces for focussed collaboration and spaces in between that facilitate casual interactions and community.

The resulting modular system features seating elements that flow into desks and soft fabrics that flow into hard surfaces.

Fuseproject used the prototypes at their own office in San Francisco, testing and evolving the various elements in-situ over the course of 18 months.

Neocon continues until 12 June.

Yves Behar previously designed the Sayl office chair based on suspension bridges for Herman Miller. Other recent product launches by Behar include a lock with no keys and a remote control with no butons.

Herman Miller recently acquired New York-based textile manufacturer Maharam in a deal worth about £101 million and will also present work by Industrial Facility this week, who the brand previously worked with on the Enchord two-tier work desk in 2008.

In a recent Opinion column on Dezeen Sam Jacob called for an end to the "tyranny of fun" in office design, while Jean Nouvel told us than "apartments make better places to work than offices" in an interview about his office design installation at the Salone Internazionale del Mobile.

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The statement below is from Yves Behar:

Public Office Landscape brings fluidity, variety, ergonomics to social seating in order to help people feel engaged, focused, and collaborative

I began thinking about the need for casual, collaborative office seating three years ago, when I was in Cologne for the Orgatec furniture show. I was walking with Don Goeman — Herman Miller’s Executive Vice President of Research, Development, and Design — when he stopped to point out a couch with sectionals made from large blocks of foam. It seemed like the designer of the couch had thought to himself, “big chunks of foam say comfort!”.

A year later, when Herman Miller asked me and my team at fuseproject to develop a more effective office environment for collaboration, I saw an opportunity to go beyond the superficial approach to social seating design I had observed a year earlier. I wanted to create a design that would support a more flexible, fluid way of working while addressing the very human need for interaction.

With research showing that 70 percent of collaboration happens at a workstation, I saw a clear need for desks that support interaction. This led to our concept for Social Desking for individuals, Group spaces to allow collaboration in proximity, and Interstitial spaces which are solutions which convert spaces in between into community space for casual interactions — a set of ideas that would ultimately become Public Office Landscape.

This system of shared surfaces would be inviting to guests, have no implied hierarchy, and offer collaborative zones spread evenly throughout the floor plan. The idea of integrated spaces for casual meetings went against the traditional thinking that individual and social work habits need to be separated. We believe collaboration doesn't just happen in conference rooms— it happens everywhere. Public proposes collaborative areas in close proximity to individual workstations and addresses this disconnect and encourages the type of productive interaction that drives organizations forward.

As we worked with Herman Miller to bring our vision for Public Office Landscape to life, we were able to test our ideas and prototypes at our new office in San Francisco. We injected ourselves into the design process and inhabited evolving versions of the furniture for 18 months — literally growing every part of the vast system, while researching and evaluating variations, and refining the design.

The result of our work is a system that achieves an ideal state of flow in the office. Public Office Landscape encourages fluid interactions and spontaneous conversations with seating elements that flow into desks, and with soft fabrics that flow into hard surfaces. These designs culminate in a choice of focused and collaborative places to work. All of this variety helps people feel engaged, focused, and free to move between tasks without interruption. With the support of elements like the Social Chair — the first of its kind to introduce ergonomics into collaborative seating — people can feel good while doing some of their best work.

There is no technical reason why offices are needed today. In theory, we could all be working from home, remotely checking in when needed. The reason why people still want to go to an office, is to collaborate with others. Public Office Landscape offers a better way of working together with solutions that we believe will be increasingly relevant. Public addresses collaboration not in moments, but as movement. It is designed with collaboration spread evenly throughout the space, while the system’s modular components can evolve with the needs of groups and individuals. And with a variety of ergonomic and collaborative elements to enhance fluidity in the workplace, the system will continue to support the ways people want to work.

Herman Miller’s Living Office

Living Office is a different approach to managing people and their work, the tools and products that enable that work, and the places where people come together to do it. Together with Yves Behar’s fuseproject, Sam Hecht and Kim Colin, and Studio 7.5, Herman Miller is expanding its offering of human-centered elements to create a total work experience that is more natural and desirable, and within it the opportunity for individuals and organisations to achieve a new dynamic of shared prosperity. Built on what is fundamental to all humans, Living Office will help both people and their organizations to update their places, tools, and the management of the workplace, to uniquely express and enable shared character and purpose.

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for Herman Miller appeared first on Dezeen.

Extended armrests create a continuous loop to reduce ambient noise and visual distractions in hotel lobbies, airports or residential environments, while still allowing users to look between them and the backrest.

Dutch designer Maaike Evers and American Mike Simonian say the idea was to create the feeling of a "room-within-a-room" by introducing elements that invoke walls and a ceiling.

The chair was designed for contract furniture brand Haworth Collection and launched today at the NeoCon trade fair in Chicago.

An open top version and ottoman are also part of the collection and are made from steel frames covered in moulded foam and upholstered in a natural wool fabric.

In Milan earlier this year, Italian brand Moroso launched a chair by Patricia Urquiola with a hood that partially wraps around the sitter, while British designer Freya Sewell's felt pods can be closed to create a completely secluded cocoon-like space.

Mike and Maaike previously designed a bookshelf with slots cuts specifically to house important tomes about power and society and a space divider made from a grid of overlapping batons.

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Here's some more information from the designers:

Suitable for both public and private spaces, the Windowseat is designed as a comfortable refuge from the hustle and bustle of lobbies, airports or busy home environments. By taking architectural elements (walls and ceiling) and applying them to a chair, we are exploring the idea of sub-architectural space, creating a room-within-a-room complete with its own unique perspective.

As office spaces shift toward the open plan, it is important to have a place to escape, to think, to make a call, or relax. While sitting in the Windowseat, the ambient noise is actually muffled and a new visual perspective is created, making the chair a multisensory experience.

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for Haworth Collection appeared first on Dezeen.