Raising the bar on design

Friend of former Indaba darling, Stephan Sagmeister, New York based Ji Lee, www.bubbleproject.com was born in Korea, raised in Brazil and has lived in New York for 14 years.

Fresh is the only word Lee knows. He has created a far out system of totally 3D letter forms, which create virtual worlds of legible form (I think he lives there - in alphabet land); has also developed his own counting system based on visual logic within a grid of 9 dots; a 3D chess set; and other concepts so multi-dimensional, it makes the rest of us feel like we're living in toon town.

Similarly, British Design protagonist Tom Dixon demonstrates the credentials that the best Indaba speakers bring to bear - in the uncompromisingly originality of their lifestyles and their thinking. Having pottered around as Creative Director for 6000 product lines at Habitat, tinkered with the various business models involved in making furniture, owning furniture manufacturing companies, licensing his name to other designers and owning a share in 70 year old Finnish furniture making company Artek, he doesn't let an underlying disillusionment with design or a lack of confidence in the future, prevent him from pushing the envelope. He cites the next big thing as making to order, as a counter to current inefficient manufacturing models and the logistic of ordering, shipping, distributing and retailing.

He currently has a factory forming chairs out of clumps of the extruded spaghetti-like waste that falls off plastic extrusion machines. He can make them in 40 colours by adding pigment, whereas if he had to order from Asia he would have to order a minimum of one ton of pigment, which would probably limit him to a one colour run. The model of bringing people to the factory, not only fulfills a new customer desire for customisation, but also avoids distribution costs. This is what the future of selling and making objects might look like, according to Tom Dixon.

In the same way as before you had to go down the road to get a photocopy, but can now do it at home, in the future we will all be able to make our own stuff.

And by the way, plastic is no longer disposal with oil at $65 a barrel, plastic is becoming a precious metal. The essence of Dixon's philosophy is that it doesn't matter if you adopt a high tech or a low tech model, i.e., whether something is made by robots or by hand, you can't just be interested in the form of things, you have to understand the material side as well, self-construction, grown textiles are the science of the futurist. Design is a process, a series of events that happens to make an object possible, understanding the big picture helps us do things better.

Terry Levin is a creative commentator, designer and special correspondent for Bizcommunity.com.