With a great statement this book opens: “The best things happen during the journey. “

“Most designers in this book will agree. As well as the ultimate destination, whether it is a tangible product or simply the beginning of a more comprehensive project, their practices are usually all about the route they take to get there. The research, the process that precedes the products – it provides the most spectacular views and the best ideas. The intuitive use of a particular colour, for instance, produces unexpected information about the past, the choice for a particular material can send you down a completely different path and change the direction of the entire project. If you are open to it, you are already a step ahead of all the other road users, who only use the asphalt to get to the finishing line as quickly as possible”, says Merel Bem in the essay Inga Powilleit Tatjana Quax.

The designers portraited in the book are: Scholten & Baijings, Chris Kabel, Mae, Engelgeer, Joris Laarman, Formafantasma , Pieke Bergmans, Valentin Loellmann
Christien Meindertsma, Dirk van der Kooij, Atelier NL, Maarten Kolk & Guus Kusters, rENs, Lex Pott, Pepe Heykoop and Daan Roosegaarde.
 
René Pingen, director Stedelijk Museum ’s-Hertogenbosch writes in his foreword that in the early days of conceptual art, Douglas Huebler came to the conclusion that the object could be replaced by text or that it could take on a more or less immaterial shape in the form of graphics, photos or geographical maps. In actual fact it was a quest for an adequate form of communicating information, in order to identify the perception that lies at the foundation of the production and experience of art.
 
“Fifteen studios reflect just as many ways of working. They are filled with the latest 3D-printers, with clay, seaweed and dried flax, with colour experiments, sand research, wooden planks, old plastic, textiles, leather remnants, a thousand and one ideas or the future, and atmosphere. Inga Powilleit and Tatjana Quax wanted to capture all of this in this book, so that they can show people who know nothing about all the authentic processes and optimistic toiling behind the products: see how special and beautiful this is. And how necessary in our time in which cultural institutes for children are being forced to close their doors, libraries are disappearing and schools are steadily focusing more and more on reaching the finishing line as quickly as possible and less and less on reaching the result in a roundabout way.”
 
And indeed “This book is bursting with roundabout ways.” With wonderful photos on the designers, their studios and works we get full insight in the different processes, materials, samples, sketches and possibilities and products.
 
For instance on the pages of Mae Engelgeer one sees the process with which she worked for a long time with the TextielLab, part of the Textile Museum in Tilburg, where she experiments with methods and machines and the development of material.
“Knitting, sewing, weaving, researching how one piece of fabric can consist of various levels – she does it all. She stops only when it appears that a chosen technique is useful yet does not actually produce the desired effect and that concessions have to be made. ‘I never surrender on quality’, she says. Nor on aesthetic.”
 
Or the process of Formafantasma, whose pages are filled with fish skins, sponge, clay, volcanic rock, shellac…
“Sicilian province that is home to the volcano Etna, and there you collect chunks of solidified lava. You then heat these chunks in an oven until the material melts. Molten basalt looks like molten glass, with the difference that the chemical composition of basalt allows you to draw it into strands upon heating. Now you sew these strands together, creating a kind of sheet that looks similar to skin or textile, but is actually very different. You then place the different layers on top of each other like sheets of lasagne, put the whole thing in a ceramic oven and heat it again to just below its melting point. This makes it more consistent in structure, like earthenware. You can use the resulting material to make things. Luckily we have Andrea Trimarchi (1983) and Simone Farresin (1980) for this. Designers, chemists, historians, alchemists, artists [….]  But Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin are also archaeologists. Layer by layer they peel off their ideas, searching for the underlying meanings, for as long as it takes them to reach the red-hot core. And then it can all start to flow.”
 
From Christien Meindertsma we see textiles as for her Flax Project, “which started in 2009 she produced a variety of results including the tea towel, she repeatedly took a step back in the design process, for as long as it took until she reached the base material of the end product. The ultimate consequence was that the designer observed the sowing process of a flax farmer in the Flevopolder, purchased his flax and thus followed the entire process. Harvesting, retting, pressing, scutching, hackling, drawing, weaving, spinning – all these processes are absorbed by the textile products that emerge from them. The tea towels, rope lamps, a pouf: they carry in their essence the history of their production.”
 
Also very interesting is the process of rENs Rows “filing cabinets in their Eindhoven studio, situated in the same area where Piet Hein Eek has established his industrial buildings as workplace, shop and exhibition space, contain both physical experiments as well as the outcome of minutes, hours, days and weeks of research. It’s a question of waiting to see what happens. In one of the boxes are the hundreds of textile samples that rENs once requested from various manufacturers. Remaining of a previous project – dyeing second-hand clothing – were a large pan full of red dye and a burning desire to hang the samples in it – for a long time, a short time and all the timeframes in between in order to see how the textile would react to the dye. Almost two years later the experiment resulted in Re-vive: a series of rugs for Desso, made from remnants that were provided by the carpet manufacturer and dyed in various tints of red by rENs.”
 
A book with 15 stories, with good lay out and full-page photos, all should study to understand that the process is as important as the outcome, a must-have for all schools, teachers, collectors and all who are interested in design.
Angela van der Burght
 
Exposition How We Work at Stedelijk Museum ‘s-Hertogenbosch>