Image Credit : Illustrations: Dean Ovens
Photos: © Brolly
Project Overview
“Creativity is intelligence having fun.” - Albert Einstein
Faced with the relentless consumption of insightful information left behind at the end of the day at cafe's, we wanted to respond to its digestion with humour. Brolly Design presents the Press Stool: where the pages of yesterday support the reading of today, and then some...
Project Commissioner
Project Creator
Team
Brolly Design is lead by Martin Heide (2012 winner of the MDA2012 Urban Design Award) and Megg Evans, together their alter-design-ego Metin developed the concept and its outcomes for the Press Stool. Joining Metin is Dean Ovens who helped refine the production of the stool.
Project Brief
Flipboard Café(opening Sept. 2013) requested Brolly to design and manufacture stools for its new space which would speak to their philosophy of community minded, ecologically sensitive, life-cycle conscious design and meaningful experiences. They requested it be compact and elegant but also quirky and memorable.
Project Need
It seems every serious design agency needs to someday tackle the commonwealth of horizontal surfaces for the ass. The more practical innovation of the project lies in its site specific repeatability. Cafes have long provided patrons with access to newspapers, independent broadsheets and street mags, and they’re usually thrown out at the end of the day to be recycled. With the Flipboard Press Stool you can sip coffee and read assured that today’s press will be tomorrows stool (or at least next month’s). The upcycling of the stool that limits the need for more bin space also provides the café use of the stool as a marketing device – gifted to loyal customers, or sold as a piece of interesting time and site-sensitive merchandise.
“It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.”
- Albert Einstein
Design Challenge
Ironically, sourcing second hand newspapers is not that easy – there’s certainly no shop for them as they tend to be returned for recycling or retained for archival purposes. So we engaged social media and asked people to give us papers or printed materials they no longer wanted – the response was wonderful. Closet hoarder friends brought us their 27 year old National Geographic collection, or the stack of street mags that had been occupying their toilet, or the telephone books they had forgotten to recycle… They were all happily and thankfully gifted to the project.
Sustainability
The Press Stool is an obvious contribution to the upcycling cause. It sources local materials, reduces waste (remember newspaper can only be recycled 5-7 times), and retains our cultural memories. It does not degrade the material but rather puts it in stasis whilst it is employed as a stool, and produces art along the way because in each stool we have pressed something somewhere between the pages for someone to find in the future.
Product Design - Furniture
This award celebrates creative and innovative design for either a component or overall product.. Consideration given to aspects that relate to human usage, aesthetics, selection of components and materials, and the resolution of assembly, manufacturing and the overall function.
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