Phillipe Starck please take a seat

I watched the first episode of a programme on BBC2 this week- ‘Design for life” with Phillipe Starck. As with any ‘reality’ TV series there were elements which grated and had clearly been fluffed up by the producers in order to make a good TV show. If you cut through the chaff however, one theme which seemed to come through was the idea that product design shouldn’t just consider ‘the product’, but should also think around the issue of why the product exists – factoring in a social, sustainable or ecological benefit. Starck’s eccentricities aside, this for me was the most interesting issue raised in the show.

This morning, something popped up in my Google reader which again got me thinking about the theme that good design should have both a tangible benefit to the end user and ‘exist’ for a reason beyond just the core product. Studio Mama, based in London, is run by product designer Nina Tolstrup. The studio have developed a great piece of design which repurposes an average pallet in to a pretty cool looking chair. Instead of just selling the chairs online, Studio Mama are instead selling the instructions so people can build the chair themselves for just £10. This has been a catalyst for The ‘Pallet Chair’ charity project in Buenos Aires where unemployed locals make the chairs to sell and raise money to help improve their lives. In addition, a number of high profile artists are now customising pallette chairs which will be auctioned off online in order to help raise money for the area.

For me, this is the type of design which ticks all the right boxes. As well as allowing the designer to still rightly make a profit from the original idea, it facilitates something far bigger in terms of teaching people to make something new from materials which are readily available. Sharing the instructions rather than just producing the chairs is for me the most exciting part of the project. I suspect this would have shot Nina to the top of the class on Starck’s ‘Design for life’, and rightly so.