SCOOTERKIT BY BEN WILSON FOR DESIGN CAMP
13th May – 19th June 2010

Designing, drawing, drilling
Engaging, enabling, engineering
Shaping, sawing, sharing
Inventing, individuals, involving
Gluing, giving, getting
Nailing, naming, nurturing
Creating, cutting, connecting
Assembling, adjusting, accelerating
Making, moving, mentoring
Plotting, painting, playing

That’s Scooterkit! a design and technology project by Ben Wilson and 12 enthusiastic teenagers all taking part in Design Camp 2009; a unique design learning experience, developed by architect turned school teacher, David Baker.

Ben Wilson, author of the Chairfix exhibition at The Aram Gallery in 2003, developed the Scooterkit project in response to an invitation by Baker, who saw him give an inspirational vocational lecture to hundreds of school children.

In Scooterkit, Wilson continues his work with open-source design and products that invite participation by the user. In addition, he builds on his interest in customising and personalising objects. Wilson’s scooters show an ambitious use of everyday technology and DIY materials. In the Summer of 2009 Wilson worked with pupils from schools in West London as part of Design Camp to design and make scooters from an entry-level kit of parts. This exhibition is a celebration of the result.

Design Camp is the brainchild of David Baker, an architect turned school teacher. Concerned by what he saw as the tendency of schools to ‘cripple individuality, spontaneity, creativity and collective action’ (to quote Ian Lister), he studied a wide range of informal educational settings in search of a solution.

Following a research tour to the USA in 2007 where he visited various innovative projects, he set up Design Camp as a collaboration between Latymer Upper School (where he teaches design & technology) and ReachOutRCA, the schools outreach programme of the Royal College of Art. The aim was to establish a summer holiday activity where pupils on the threshold of their GCSE choices could have a deep, motivational and authentic experience of what it is like to be a designer/maker. Ben’s Scooterkits was one of the four Design Camp 2009 workshops.

Design Camp is generously funded by the Education Departments of the London Boroughs of Hammersmith & Fulham, Kensington & Chelsea, and Westminster.

Ben Wilson is a product designer with a passion for human-powered transport, sometimes on four wheels, more usually on two. Ben has designed bikes, both custom-made and mass produced, for companies and organisations as diverse as Swarovski and Transport for London.

www.benwilsondesign.co.uk
www.designcamp.org.uk
www.rca.ac.uk/reachout

For press enquiries contact Anna Meyer at Origin Communications +44 (0)207 729 0007 anna@originuk.com

Prototypes and Experiments: Architectural Elements
1st July - 28th August 2010

51% studios
Ab Rogers Design
AOC
Ron Arad Architects
Carmordy Groarke
dRMM
ecoLogicStudio
Facit
Hawkins\Brown
Superfusionlab
Tobias Klein
Universaldesignstudio
Urban Salon
Walker & Martin

The Aram Gallery presents Prototypes and Experiments V: Architectural Elements, the latest instalment in its ongoing exhibition series exploring prototypical and experimental design. The new show focuses on architectural models and samples, each of which has been sourced from the studio of an established architecture practice, and allows trials and experiments of details of buildings, rather than models of whole projects, to take centre stage.

Prototypes and experiments are critical elements in the development process of any new design. The prototype, or in this case model, is the manifestation of the design idea on its way to production; experiments are more like steps on the way. The prototype, being part of a process, makes more real an idea that will lead to a final piece, and is not made with the intention of being shown outside the architect’s practice. Experiments are even less refined and sometimes constitute a partial sketch on the way to the prototype. These objects, however, can hold a rare charm, giving an insight into the architect’s imagination.

The Aram Gallery is interested in the way designers think and work. We have chosen to present these unique artefacts as part of an ongoing search for insight into the design process. Prototypes and Experiments will include selected drawings and models alongside the pieces taken from the architects’ physical or digital sketchbooks.

Gallery Director: Zeev Aram
Curator: Daniel Charny
Assistant Curator: Ellie Parke

For press enquiries please contact Anna Meyer at Origin Communications on +44 (0)20 7729 0007 or by email at anna@originuk.com.

Coming soon…

El Ultimo Grito - Dialogues
26th March - 1st May 2010

With the arrival of Abandon Architectures, El Ultimo Grito’s new book, The Aram Gallery is pleased to present three collections of work from 2009 and 2010, not yet seen in the UK.

Known for their engaging reinvention of objects, and large scale installations, El Ultimo Grito’s more recent work has included direct questioning of cultural and social preconceptions. This new direction is embodied in the selected works for this exhibition which include: a group of large blown glass installation pieces exploring architectural archetypes created with master glassblowers in Italy; a collection of lightweight cardboard and resin furniture, incorporating structural ingenuity with rich colouring and suggesting an alternative design and production method for a permanent dining table; and ‘Found objects: Dialogues’ a series of photographic re-appropriations of famous quotes.

Roberto Feo and Rosario Hurtado are the Post Disciplinary studio El Ultimo Grito. Their work “reflects upon their interest in how contemporary culture incorporates, re-uses and re-interprets the systems and structures that it has inherited. Within this context the challenge is to create new objects, which can be typologically disentangled from our conventional (learned) understanding of the world, and thus offer alternative ways to live, work and communicate.”

El Ultimo Grito’s work has been widely exhibited and is collected by leading International museums and galleries.

In 2008 the practice was renamed EUG Studio during a two year residency in Berlin. Now based back in London the studio’s work has expanded into a distinct critical practice along side Product design and Art Direction. Both partners teach at the Royal College of Art and Goldsmiths University, as well as being acting visiting Professors at HFBK, Hamburg University. The Aram Gallery thanks Kingston University Design Department where Rosario Hurtado and Roberto Feo are visiting senior research fellows, for supporting this exhibition.

For press enquiries contact Anna Meyer at Origin Communications 0207729 0007/ anna@originuk.com

Prototypes and Experiments IV
21st January - 6th March 2010

Tomás Alonso
Michael Antrobus
Arash & Kelly
Thomas Feichtner
Gitta Gschwendtner
Crispin Jones
Ronen Kadushin
Simon Maidment
Nucleo
Damien Poulain
Vladimir Rachev
Hiroko Shiratori
David Sutton
Nina Tolstrup
Vandasye
William Warren & Carl Clerkin
Joe Wentworth
Ben Wilson

The Aram Gallery is delighted to open the fourth in the ongoing series Prototypes and Experiments with a new batch of exhibits sourced from the studios of emerging and established designers. This time there are a significant number of objects exploring ideas in metal.

Prototypes and experiments are critical elements in the development process of any new design. The prototype is the manifestation of the design idea on its way to production; experiments are more like steps on the way. The prototype, being part of a process, makes more real an idea that will lead to a final piece, and is not made with the intention of being sold or shown outside the designer’s studio. Experiments are also unique artefacts but are even less refined and sometimes constitute a partial sketch on the way to the prototype.

These objects however, can hold a rare charm; there’s an increased closeness to the designer’s imagination, and a directness to the making that often changes when manufacturing and marketing forces are fully integrated. The objects might be characterised by a technical or material discrepancy, compared to the final product, due to a lack of access of the designer to technology at the process stage. It’s a stark contrast to the current wave of limited editions - which has made for the unique to be diluted by multiples and for the production piece to be restrained in order to increase the value of singular pieces.

The Aram Gallery is interested in the way designers think and work. We have chosen to present these unique artefacts as part of an ongoing search for insight into the design process. Prototypes and Experiments will include selected drawings alongside the pieces taken from the designers’ physical or digital sketchbooks.

Curator: Daniel Charny
Assistant Curator: Ellie Parke
Gallery Director: Zeev Aram

For press information please contact Anna Meyer at Origin Communications on 020 7278 0068 or email anna@originuk.com

More images on Flickr

Thinking: Objects
Contemporary Approaches to Product Design by Tim Parsons

11th December 2009 - 9th January 2010

The Aram Gallery hosts the launch of Thinking: Objects, a new book for students, graduates, practising designers and anyone with an interest in contemporary product design. The book looks at the many approaches designers take to their work and discusses their motivation. It highlights the ways in which products communicate value and meaning through form, giving designers tools with which to create their own designs. It also explores what the design process feels like in the mind and shows how drawing and model making aid decision-making.

The exhibition will illustrate a selection of the ideas explored in the book and will include products designed by Konstantin Grcic, Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni, Naoto Fukasawa and Daniel Weil among others.

About the author
Tim Parsons is a product designer, writer and lecturer on design. Mixing influences from craft and industrial design, his projects examine notions of familiarity, functionality and the quality of materials and processes.

Parsons has led teaching workshops in France, Italy, Sweden and Poland. He contributes regularly to the British design press reviewing exhibitions and writing features for Blueprint magazine and has written on design for Phaidon books. Parsons is currently a Senior Lecturer in Three Dimensional Design at Camberwell College of Arts, London.

Thinking Objects is published by AVA Publishing
Design by Studio EMMI

www.timparsons.info

Photography by Tim Parsons

GRASSWORKS
17th September to 28th November 2009

Made of bamboo, designed for flat-pack delivery, dry (no glue) self-assembly structures with space saving storage solutions are some of the worthy features in Jair Straschnow’s furniture collection Grassworks. This checklist is good, but the most exciting aspect of this collection is the integrity, in both the structural and the aesthetic sense, of the design.

Straschnow has a distinctive way of working – he launches into an intense immersive process driven by specific fascinations and usually with loyalty to a single material. The exhibits are the fruits of this method applied to Bamboo sheet laminates, and the manipulation of traditional interlocking woodworking techniques. It is a focused, hands-on, trial and error, design process. A good example of this fascination and perhaps most visible in Grassworks, is the reworking of the dovetail joint. The dovetail is a straightforward principle of slotting pieces of wood that have opposing sloped angles to wedge themselves against one another.
It is much used in western joinery and Japanese woodwork. Straschnow uses the Dovetail joint not only as a detail but more interestingly as a core structural principle, showing a mastery of design rather then craft.

The dovetail, like the other geometric locking principles applied in Grassworks, serves Straschnow as practical inspiration. Through various iterations and applications he generates objects that share a sense of utility. Combining the satisfaction of construction toys and the charm of interlocking treasure boxes, these furniture prototypes present an original and sparse elemental language, simple but not obvious. Added to the playful control evident in the details, and the shapes derived from the logic of the construction itself, reveals designs that are both experimental and new. Unlike many of the similarly shaped and like-minded computer generated designs we have been subjected to in recent years, Grassworks, like Jair Straschnow, are products of their own internal logic.

The exhibition includes recently developed production ready prototypes, exhibited internationally for the first time. Israeli born Straschnow studied industrial design at the Holon Institute of Technology. Following his postgraduate studies at the Applied Arts Department Sandberg Instituut he settled in the Netherlands where he works from his Amsterdam based studio. This is his first solo exhibition in the UK.

www.straschnow.com

Curator: Daniel Charny
Assistant Curator: Ellie Parke
Gallery Director: Zeev Aram
Graphic Design: Ayelet Yanai www.ayeletyanai.com

This exhibition is listed as part of the London Design Festival 2009

The exhibition is supported by:

Bambusa

Mondriaan Foundation

Significant Colour from 8th May to 27th June 2009

Significant Colour is an exhibition that will examine objects and artworks where colour is the first aspect that the viewer responds to, and the impact of colour, their most memorable feature.

Colour is a deeply emotive subject. For most of us it is also highly personal, we each have a unique response to colour that we develop internally through experience and association. How we feel about certain colours often has more to do with what our childhood bedroom walls were painted with than anything else. Experiences, good and bad, associated with certain colours affect our response. Josef Albers famously showed 100 people the exact same shade of iconic Coca Cola red and the resulting descriptions implied 100 different shades of that colour. We all see and relate to colour differently therefore making it an almost impossible subject to predict and define with any certainty. What can be said is that colour is ‘Significant’ for human beings. Our awareness in certain cultures of how significant is questionable but our desire to place colour in and around our environments, on our bodies and the outside of our dwellings is in strong evidence from the beginning of mankind’s journey into consciousness.

In western thinking of the 20th century Colour and its potential gravitas seems to have diminished, become secondary, decorative; deeming an object or artwork less serious or intellectual than it’s less chromatic counterparts. More recently there seems a desire to readdress this balance. Especially on the façade of buildings, a most visible renaissance is taking place where intelligent colour is being use to serve form and function and take pole position.

A more refined appreciation and understanding of colour as a tool is shaping how we use it. Recognising the importance of not just the ‘chroma’ (shade) of a colour, but its ‘saturation’ (depth and brightness) and ‘value’ (lightness or darkness) has enhanced its role within art and design. Scientific colour tests reveal that often it is the saturation of a colour that we respond to rather than the colour itself. A very intense and saturated blue can be much more energizing to the heart and mind than a dark, somber red, defying the common notion that blue calms and red stimulates. Colour is a powerful tool capable of affecting emotional wellbeing and intellectual motivation.

‘Significant Colour’ presents a diverse selection of objects and artworks; furniture, lighting, graphics, architecture, photography, textiles and jewellery each exploring these principals in a unique way. These works are not merely about being ‘colourful’ but engaging the viewer to think more deeply about why they employ the colours they do and the implications behind their nuances of tone, shade, material colour, surface and application. Some play with process and substance, others with scale and emotion but they all reveal and celebrate the significance of their colour.

Ptolemy Mann February 2009

SIGNIFICANT COLOUR @ ARAM

This multi-disciplinary exhibition will include furniture, photography, textiles, jewellery design, graphics, lighting design, architecture and fine art. Exhibiting are: dRMM, Ori Gersht, James Goggin, El Ultimo Grito, Sauerbruch Hutton, Ptolemy Mann, Olivier Droillard, Mah Rana, Sophie Smallhorn and Christian Zuzunaga.

The Aram Gallery is an independently curated space that encourages and promotes understanding of contemporary design, by presenting experimental and new work with a special interest in the work of designers and artists in their early careers.

Guest Curator Ptolemy Mann
Curator Daniel Charny
Assistant Curator Ellie Parke
Director Zeev Aram

Kindly supported by the Arts Council England

www.artscouncil.org.uk