After I left the RCA, I headed to Holland to join the experimental design shop Studio Dumbar in the Hague. It was so different from the conceptual first approach at the RCA – the best Dutch design started with form and bent it into thought.
I created many odd things there. But this brief from Theatre Zeebelt asked us to reduce their mailing list. The final design offered the recipient a binary choice:
Place a stamp on Yes ‘keep me on the list’ or No ‘remove me from the mailing list’. If they chose yes, the ‘franked’ return card cried with joy. If they chose no the ‘franked’ card cried with misery.
Inside there was a small poster publicising a show for the famous Zeebelt Theater in Den Haag. The show starred for Theo Jansen explaining his “Living network of learning vacuum cleaners'."
The poster folded into a six page booklet, which was modeled on a vacuum cleaner bag. For the image we cut the copy of the show description into small pieces, sucked it up through the vacuum cleaner, then opened its "brain" to see what it understood.
You can learn so much from doing deeply esoteric projects like this because you learn to let go and follow a process to its end without design judgement. Making is Thinking.
Team
Design Intern – Waltraud Wernecke