Bouba | Heidi Rey
Speculative objects challenging, questioning and embodying what it means to be present.
In a world designed for the individual experience, what responsibility does design hold in how we engage together, the emotional connections we build, and the memories we make?
This project was awarded the Van Gogh Designs Furniture + Wood Design Graduation Award
Bouba is a multi-medium dining experience critiquing the ways in which objects frame how we exist, how we engage, and the connections we make through acts of presence.
What would a reality look like that is designed for togetherness, the collective experience rather than the individual?
Bouba is designed to host six participants
I feel that the reality of our new global circumstance has changed us forever. It is one where a grocery run puts us and those closest to us in unprecedented danger. One where safety, if we’re amongst the lucky, is only felt within the confines of our homes. It has left most of us grieving the normalcy and ease that we were very recently accustomed to, craving it, missing it and dreaming of the scenarios in which we may again engage through public and private spheres without paranoia or fear.
It has lead us to reminisce of the beauty and value in the simplicities that our past freedoms evoked – dinners with friends, afternoons at cafés, class, a hug. Within the immensity of unknowns that we currently face lies a trying and beautiful clarity – we now have the ability to recognize what we value in the reality we had before, similar in many ways to the epiphanies that are realized following the loss of a loved one.
This is the very essence of what Bouba is trying to provoke, the value that lies in presence, and the power our memories hold.
Form
The Circle
It was my goal to create a place of togetherness, where participation and presence is provoked without instruction or guidance. I wanted the physicality of the object itself to speak to a greater meaning, one hinted at through mere observation.
The continuous form offered by the meeting of the benches is motivated by the many implications that the circle offers – equality, cyclicality, balance. I found much guidance by the significance and meaning held by the aboriginal talking circle – a space of equality where individuals share and are listened to through openness and presence. I hoped to create a space within place that binds people together in a moment, where the form itself offers a feeling of enclosure and warmth, where memories are made.
With no head of the table, I intended on designing a hierarchy- less space with a lack of dominance, enabling each participant to take on their natural role.
The all-encompassing back rest is designed as a sensory approach of spacial development, to hold the participants physically together within intimate space - to unify.
The freedoms of form
Bouba’s seating is designed to be multi-functional and playful – a physical representation of the different ways to be together.
Speculative stoneware
how does the vessel impact the experience?
Motivated by the ways in which form impacts how we engage, what shifts could be made to traditional stoneware to motivate presence, ritual, and community?
Round Bottom Cups
By shifting the drinking vessel ever so slightly, I explored the many ways in which round bottom cups impact how we engage in a family style dining experience. The one rule is that the cups were not permitted to be propped up against anything, however asking a fellow diner to hold your cup in times of need was encouraged.
The use of these cups immediately imply that one of our two hands is taken, how do our priorities, awareness, and our perspectives shift in reflection of this? How does it change how we behave with and assist one another? What distractions does it steer us away from? How does it impact our need to express vulnerabilities and ask for help?
Through practice, the round vessels proved a re-introduction of lost rituals. Participants were lead to consider the needs of others, as well as gain comfort in expressing a need for help. Guests served one another, ignored digi-tech, and a follow up questionnaire expressed that participants felt a closer bond to one another following the experience.
If we designed our objects to imply these practices, rather than the individualistic experience, what would our world look like?
The crawl-glaze used on these vessels was introduced as a multi-sensory approach to assist the user in adjusting to these new parameters of engagement.
Materials
Solid Aspen Wood
Aspen, a soft hardwood, was selected for its locality and abundance, its minimal grain line, and the softness it provokes.
I wanted to ensure that the visual aesthetic spoke to the poetics of the designs intention; soft, welcoming, community driven.
All joinery is invisible, leading to an air of wonder.
Chartreuse Melton Wool
Melton wool was selected for being a natural fibre, its airbrushed finish, and its visual and physical softness.
It is symbolic of the playfulness that Bouba intends, the natural world, and safety.
Design rooted from an emotional space.
I have found that there is an existing institutional perspective that implies that industrial design should not be personal. I would argue that industrial design is entirely personal as our designed world literally frames our existence, our realities, how we carry ourselves and how we interact.
Perhaps if we universally taught design to be personally rooted, not purely constructed, and included more of ourselves and our communities into the things we bring into this world, we would actively consider their implications and the consequence of their existence.
Bouba came to exist as the physical interpretation of the epiphanies and realizations that followed my sisters suicide and the cancer diagnosis of one of my closest companions.
It is in many ways a cry for presence, for support, for community and for the acknowledgement of the little things that make this life worth living. It is plea to pull away from the distractions and submerge ourselves in the moments we share, for once they have passed their memory is all that lasts.
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Heidi Rey is a Swiss-Canadian designer with a passion for woodworking and soft goods. She is fascinated by the object condition, social engagement, and the ecological perspective within design. She hopes to design with purpose, criticality, playfulness and to challenge the status-quo.
Om for Home | Moni El Batrik
Currently, Moni is further developing the Om for home product and a community sculpture version.
Your curiosity and connection is always welcome.
www.monielbatrik.com
Raw Furniture | Shayna Pollock
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Raw Furniture was Shayna’s grad project. She used this project as a way to explore alternative production methods for upholstered furniture in relation to the current ways of mass production which tend to be highly petro-chemical based.
Designer / Photographic Artist
About Shayna Pollock
Bachelor of Design, Emily Carr University Grad of 2020 with a background in Industrial Design. She is a multidisciplinary artist and designer who enjoys creating visually contextual photographic work and earth friendly, people friendly product design options. To her, photography is a way to speak, express, explore, engage, and understand. It is a way to experience. As an industrial designer she finds herself pulling away from mass production methods and the use of plastics within her practice, offering up a different view due to her multiple chemical sensitivity to create objects of substance for the public sector. From a small town in Manitoba and descendant of Cuthbert Grant a Metis leader, she feels very strongly linked to the plains land she is from.
Contact Info
Shayna Pollock
Selkirk, MB
s.econd@hotmail.com
https://spollock18299.wixsite.com/redirect
Cloud. 2020 | April Tian
Cloud provides a tea making surface for users to have a spiritual engagement with what you are making and what you are experiencing. Both wet and dry tea making process can be done on the same surface. Respecting the tea making tradition, tea waste can be fully recycled and reused.
Design Story
Tea has played an important cultural role in Asian history. Tea is not about just drinking, it can not only calm people’s body and spirit, but also be used in many social occasions. As the inheritor of Chinese culture, I hope that through my works, more people will understand the tea ceremony, find the calming moment in peace and live in the moment.
Design Concept
Under the pressure of this fast paced world, espeically in China, people are hardly to get gathering together share time with friends and families, also in finding the balance between physical and spiritual. There are a lot of distractions stuffed around us, and the traditional tea making is still where keeps the peacefulness. Retriving from Taoism and Buddhism, the tea ceremony does a very good job on helping people find the inner peace. Tea leads a bridge from nature to human, from individual to groups. Magnifying this process and seeing the water flows can lead people to another stage of balance, and providing an opportunity to communicate.
柿柿如意
SHISHIRUYI
SPECIAL THANKS TO:
SHI QI, HONGYU LIU, CHRISTIAN BLYT, RAINY HUANG, TREVOR OSBORN, MARTIN MCLENNAN, SCOTT STANILAND, SOPHIE GAUR, KEITH DOYLE, IAN RHODES, HELEN HAI, ANDY SONG, EVE SUEN, KYLE SHEN, ALAN LI, WEIWEI LI, DYLAN XU, CYNTHIA YANG, CLORIS SITU, LALA QIAN, CHENCHEN WU
About Designer
Designer : April Tian
Contact : +1 7782882837
Wechat : onedirection0420
Email : apriltian97@gmail.com
Emily Carr University of Art and Design
Industrial design
Love to learn and explore new adventures.
Chew | Yimeng Liu & Shiyu Liu
a speculative dining scenario
CHEWrevealing the hidden aspects of food
Creating a dining experience that stretches our imaginations around the dialogue of reflective eating. It will be situated in a restaurant setting that houses a set of furniture and implements. Through the unique, playful dining experience, our goal is to reveal aspects of food that are unknown, neglected, or missed where participant interactions are needed to complete the design.
Yimeng (Maggie) Liu
I am curious about the construction of our world and looking at food both as a topic and as a material to design with. I want to use design's storytelling capabilities to create thought-provoking work that support the imagining of possible realities.
Shiyu (Rain) Liu
To me, design is a narrative practice. Using visualization and materialization I wish to present not only the end result but everything else that is involved in the design process.
