Design-Reaktor Berlin
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It is not the most unusual thing in the world for craftsmen and designers to work together, but it is interesting when you find out that they start working on joint projects before the up-and-coming designers have actually finished their studies. This is in fact the case on the Design-Reaktor Berlin project at the Hochschule der Künste Berlin/UdK (Berlin's University of the Arts). The students do not just serve as errand boys for qualified designers in the production plants of prospective employers, but work on a par with everyone else in their own production units and right from the start in the very first development stages of a future product. A temporary university project This at least was the original aim of the Design-Reaktor Berlin project when it got off the ground in 2007. The idea was to shake up, mix and then merge the skills and traditions the craftsmen had acquired over decades with the “criminal energies” of the students - until “something completely new came out in the end,” says Axel Kufus, professor of design, initiator and leader of the Design-Reaktor Berlin project. It was under his management a year ago that about 50 Berlin builders and trade contractors were brought together with students from six creative fields; their talks gave way to some interesting joint prototype designs. The results were amazing, ranging from a pendant lamp with LED inner workings to a pantyhose made of reflecting material, from a cooling eye-mask filled with Mozzarella cheese to an ashtray made of pressed sand and even to a tea-bag that lets you know when the tea has brewed. Hundreds of ideas The craftsmen came from all kinds of sectors: cheese dairies, knitwear factories, saddlers, sweetmakers and metal-processors. The university was represented by 81 design students, but it was not long before a lot more interested people jumped on the Design Reaktor Berlin bandwagon, just as the initiator, Kufus, and his two comrades-in-arms, Marc Piesbergen, Judith Seng and Joachim Schirrmacher, had hoped would happen. The whole undertaking became even more interdisciplinary last year when research contacts were established with the Frauenhofer Institut and the Technische Universität - this really got the Design-Reaktor Berlin ball rolling. Of the many hundreds of ideas that were brainstormed in the cluster of workshops 57 were finally settled on as being viable and by the year 2008 they had at least gone into the prototype stage. Some of them in fact now seem to be coming onto the market - although the way they got there varies indeed.Take Lars Dinter's LED pendant lamp, for example, that combines a candle-like light with a clear design and was chosen by lamp manufacturer, ANTA, to be part of its quality range of products. It still however has not yet been decided, whether the Berlin craft enterprise which worked with Dinter on the lamp, Bräuer Metallwaren, will be allowed to manufacture the lamp in large quantities - three other companies have also submitted tenders for the job. “But that was clear right from the start,” says Kufus, “as soon as big industry moves in, different structures move in, too. And every manufacturer of course has his own ancillary suppliers.” The fact that the project enabled students to gather experience like this is very important for him. It means that when they later come into contact for the first time with marketing and sales whizzkids, they won't be completely stymied. Untroubled by the dictates of the market Kufus however makes it quite clear that the idea behind Design-Reaktor Berlin is not to make his students “fit for the market”. He rejects this purely economic approach as one of the basic principles for Design-Reaktor Berlin, even if the actual aim is in fact to improve networking between business and university. The students, coming from the six specialist backgrounds, most of the time were able to skilfully avoid giving the impression their designs were pandering to market demands - many of their ideas were much too unusual and most definitely untroubled by the dictates of the market. Nevertheless two of their romantically conceived prototypes are now on the road to success: The Music Drop by Noa Lerner is a drop-shaped earpiece that contains a single song that can be played just the once, making it the perfect gesture when giving presents. The MP3 player was awarded second prize in the category of most promising innovations on the world market at the Midem trade fair in Cannes - even managing to hit the media headlines in Asia. At the moment it is being showcased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York on their website for the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition. Then there are the “Voice-Knitters”, Magdalena Kohler and Hanna Wiesener, who are just about to finish production on a collection of clothes with a “knitted-in voice message” under the Trikoton label. This entails the client recording his or her voice via Internet on a computer that then carries out an analysis of the voice, transforming it into impulses that are then transferred to the reels of thread in a knitting machine in a factory. What is then produced is a pullover or a T-shirt that bears the pattern of the wearer's voice. Sounding out future production processes The idea that has already received quite a few awards has brought forth a few new questions concerning production. Production is to be located in Germany's eastern state of Saxony and is to nevertheless remain affordable - this is in fact one of the main issues these days in Germany's textile production sector. “The question of how we in Germany can manufacture small series of goods for a reasonable price is becoming more important all the time for our future and here the scenario is being illustrated in microcosm,” says Joachim Schirmacher who is in charge of the design management division at Design-Reaktor and who sees Trikoton as a trailblazer when it comes to sounding out future production processes for post-industrial Germany.
New Vistas There is also a third simple project spawned by the Design-Reaktor project that has managed to remained untouched by all this theoretical superstructuring and still be a hit - the Dune ashtray made of pressed sand. It is already selling well in Berlin's museum shops, like the Guggenheim-Shop. The products of course are still being worked on at Design Reaktor Berlin, but what is more interesting is the fact that new vistas are also opening up for the project itself. After being invited by the German Federal Chancellor to take part in an Open Day event with the focus on “Innovation in Germany”, Design Reaktor was inundated with so many contacts and invitations that the Reaktor's neutrons really started jumping. In concrete terms a project workshop has come into being called “Bionics and Design” between Berlin's University of the Arts and the Technische Universität. Furthermore work is also underway on a platform for invention, development and application. The Chamber of Trade is also interested in some form of cooperation - so that even more craftsmen “come up against” design students |
Iris Braun
is a free-lance journalist and author. She is always out and about on the design scene, keeping her eyes and ears open for Berlin's “What's On” city magazine.
Copyright: Goethe-Institut e.V., Online-Redaktion
May 2008
Any questions about this article?
Please write to us!
online-redaktion@goethe.de
is a free-lance journalist and author. She is always out and about on the design scene, keeping her eyes and ears open for Berlin's “What's On” city magazine.
Copyright: Goethe-Institut e.V., Online-Redaktion
May 2008
Any questions about this article?
Please write to us!
online-redaktion@goethe.de
