Alison Willoughby

Alison Willoughby is a textile designer whose work is found in both art galleries and fashion outlets.  Like many conventional craftspeople, her work is based on an intimate examination of form and materials. Alison chosen form is the skirt; she is fascinated with its basic geometry, where each pattern is derived from a partial or entire circle with its centre removed to form the waist. The skirt also provides her with a surface to which pattern, texture, fabric and a range of three dimensional objects are added.

Her installation for My World will reveal her twin fascination with the geometry of pattern cutting and the layering and combining of fabrics from many sources. Alongside ten of her skirts, Alison will make floor pieces based on her ‘doughnut’ shaped skirt patterns, stacked in hundreds of layers of  refined, industrial, upholstery and dressmaking fabrics.

www.alisonwilloughby.com

Wokmedia

WOKmedia is a design partnership between Michael Cross and Julie Matthias whose work encompasses product, furniture, film, graphic and new media design.

Much of their work is informed by the fear and anxiety provoked by everyday products. Their Flood lights, for example, consist simply of lightbulbs and electrical cables submerged in surgical jars of water, confronting both our fear of electrocution and our wonder at the apparently magical properties of electricity.

Their proposal for My World is a response to a design workshop they led in Lunuganga, Sri Lanka in September 2004. They were impressed by both the flooded, jungley environment and the way that craft and design are embedded in daily life and culture. Their piece is a shelf that resembles the partially submerged branches of trees in the flooded environment they worked in. It aims to mix the chaos they found in the natural abundance and the street culture of Sri Lanka with a European calmness and quiet they missed on their visit.

www.wokmedia.com

Neutral:Tapio Snellman

Neutral was founded in 1998 in Tokyo by architects Christian Grou and Tapio Snellman. The pair quickly established a reputation for their interdisciplinary approach to design.

They explore the realm of moving image and architecture through numerous collaborations with architects – such as Zaha Hadid and David Adjaye - self-commissioned conceptual films dealing with urbanity, as well as commercial moving image and interactive digital work for clients such as Lufthansa.

For My World they will make an interactive video animation, made from real and fake landscapes. They will explore how space is experienced and mood affected through a slow moving blending of images.

www.neutral.gs

Daniel Brown

Daniel Brown is an animator who was awarded the Designer of the Year prize by the Design Museum in 2004. His work employs complex programmed mathematics to create infinitely varied delicate animations that appear to grow and mutate organically.

His piece for My World is a domestic environment comprising furniture, table are and soft furnishings, whitewashed to create an aesthetically and stylistically neutral space. His generating designs will be projected onto the surfaces providing colour and pattern that change imperceptibly over time. At one moment the plates may appear to have a static Rococo pattern that will gradually mutate into a modernist geometric design. Over time the fundamental aesthetic of the room will change completely. The piece will also allow viewers to interact with the piece, painting directly onto the objects themselves.

Danny is fascinated with the notion of ‘magic value’, the difference between the price of a luxury branded product compared to its more utilitarian, non-branded equivalent. The magic or imaginary value is he hard capital value that a consumer ascribes to a brand and its aspirational qualities. His installation for My World will be a dynamic projection of such an imaginary value.

www.danielbrowns.com

Committee

Committee is a partnership between Clare Page and Harry Richardson whose work aims to move fluidly between art, design and craft. ‘Our interest is to inject dialogue and meaning into our designs, as well as caring about skill, craft and decoration. We like to explore the language of beauty in our pieces. We are interested in how these concerns can be addressed in useful everyday items as well as in art works’.

‘Kebab Lamps’ are floor-standing lamps made from a variety of discarded objects skewered onto a pole in a totem like composition. The lamps comment on the cycle of fashion, the nature of taste, the consumption of material goods and the inevitable waste this produces.

For My World they will explore the notion of beauty through two wallpapers, one derived from landfill and the other based on the cartouche. The landfill print will make a densely patterned, textured and coloured paper from imagery that is usually considered banal and ugly.

The second paper will be a counterpoint to the first, referring to the traditions of utopian and idealised everyday scenes in prints and wallpapers from the 18th to the 20th centuries.

www.gallop.co.uk

Doshi Levien

Doshi Levien is a London-based design partnership between Jonathan Levien and Nipa Doshi which brings together their distinct but complementary approaches to work: Jonathan is informed by his European training in cabinet-making and product design while Nipa’s work is strongly influenced by her Indian upbringing. Their designs explore the hybridisation of different cultures, creating objects which represent the richness and complexity of this fusion. In 2004 they won a commission to design installations for the windows of the Wellcome Trust building and in 2005 were voted Product Designers of the Year by Blueprint magazine.

Their My World installation is inspired by shops in Indian markets.  ‘The work is an environment which is very personal and precious, where everything is made beautifully with great personal care and attention. Our world will be a space containing a combination of real objects, painted illustrations, material samples and new prototypes. These will be part real, part fictional, expressing alternative solutions for living.

‘We would like to challenge the boundaries that exist between craft, design, art and industrial production. We want to turn daily chores into meaningful rituals; We hope through this work to provoke a respect for craft as a valuable form of production in parts of the world where the hand is the machine. Equally, we hope to illustrate the potential of the craft process to influence the mass produced object.’

www.doshilevien.com

Peter Traag

Peter Traag was born in the Netherlands. He studied 3D design in Arnhaem and design products at the Royal College of Art, graduating in 2003.

As well as being an accomplished designer in the formal sense – able to make a visually dramatic and arresting object, Traag’s approach is unusually cerebral. Clear and enlightening descriptions of his interest in industrial process come easily: “I think it’s interesting to think in chairs”, or “I think of upholstery as a design skin”. Traag’s declared interest is in how the rules of technical or industrial process can be changed to make products more interesting. The Sponge chair, moulded within a deliberately oversized upholstery “skin” that creases and compresses unpredictably – as much in the premium technical conditions of Edra’s manufacturing as in the workshops of the Royal College of Art – is a perfect example. His newer laminated series of chairs and footwear is likewise designed to admit accident and variety in both production and post-production wear and tear. Traag is explicitly committed to pushing mass production, and in doing so, to thwart the “generic” tenor of current industrial production.

His My World commission is a set of new inverted dome-shaped chairs made in brightly coloured industrial felts, compressed in a vacuum mould. The chairs deliberately draw attention to their process by retaining as a kind of frame the flat edging left by the moulding process that is usually cut away.

www.petertraag.com