With this years Prima being my first, I didn’t know quite what to expect. I hoped the exhibition would resemble a TV studio that specialised in office based programs, imagining all these different sets in one place, with furniture and purposefully positioned stationary all arranged with the intention of putting their product in context inside the vast space of the Business Design Centre. I wasn’t disappointed.
Making ourselves comfortable on Pledge’s vivacious office chairs, I got chatting with Mike Arding, Design and Development Manager and Colin Mc Nair, Sales Manager of Pledge Office Chairs. Most engaging about Mike and Colin is their sound knowledge of the manufacturing process in relation to his design role. Mike himself is based at the factory in Leighton Buzzard and invited Working Title to visit.
What do the Model T Ford, 1956 Eames lounge chair and Concorde have in common? Aside from being historically monolithic design classics they were all upholstered using leather from Scottish leather company Bridge of Weir. With a heritage going back as far as 1758, their client list includes The Orient Express, The Lusitania, British Airways, the British Houses of Parliament, Gucci, the Burj Al Arab 7 star hotel in Dubai, Vertu phones and Jaguar to name but a few.
If you have ever been unfortunate enough to experience the biting pain of a stinging nettle, you will know never to allow it to touch your skin. However, the textile company Camira, in association with De Monford University have produced an upholstery fabric out of the nasty weed, encouraging you to sit on the stuff.
From a land where the traffic warden comes the second Tuesday of every month and there’s only one traffic light, the business design centre in London must have been quite the change for the staff of Bute Fabrics.
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These little gems, by Olivia Lee, graced three issues of the working title, along with a host of content from a variety of guest authors and interviewee’s. A big thank you goes out to all those that took part. Read on to see the full list of credits and the other two cartoons…
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Dear Editor, I’m writing a rapping shout-out to you
For issues “one”, “four”, ”three”, and especially “two”.
We love the writing that spills from your collective mind,
You’re like a fountain of voices all hyped up on design.
Pop Solid presented their ‘Recession design’ project this week at their studio near Garibaldi. Dubious name – interesting stuff. Whether or not the title seems a little bit on the literal side is debatable but until we arrive at the show it seems almost too muddy. A big statement, for what I feel didn’t deal with recession, as such, but simply applied the concerning theme of our current economic climate, to design. Their attempt at portraying, what is essentially a wholesome process towards design-objects seems somewhat over shadowed by this dark cloud. Confined by its theme.
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You’d have to be crazy to try ham and pineapple ice cream, and even crazier to make it. Well, we found someone just crazy enough to do it and do it well, and that’s Crazy Ice. Their ice cream is produced using the finest ingredients obsessively researched and sourced from specific parts of Italy, and in the case of ham and pineapple, pre-cooked to get the flavour from the meat. It tasted exactly like the pizza topping, even the texture remained, resulting in confusion as to what that stringy thing was you had stuck in your teeth. Wow.
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Zona Tortona saturated my mind with design, unfortunately of the prosaic and uninspiring variety. Given that design and innovation has changed, shaped and improved the world for billions of people, why do our current generation of designers feel the need to design for consumption rather than for change and progression?
Seeing table after table followed by chair after chair I do, at times, end up questioning the validity of the designer in modern society.
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