Material ideas

Starting with a very open project brief will help to demystify the creative process, says London-based designer Philippe Malouin. Indeed, experimenting with everyday materials, and with a minimum of intervention, design is not difficult: 'everyone can do it'. If you want to generate ideas, he continues, start making things out of any available material and try to experiment with as many concepts as you can. It's a very good start. Having lots of ideas, then, the next step is to evaluate from a functional point of view what could be actually interesting to put into production. And so, for example, on the theme of sustainability, and based on his salvaging practice, Malouin looks at the waste streams and modify them in order to make a new product, In this way, Malouin has created 68 works from junk steel.* In a reversal of the usual design process, function would follow form, the designer try not to use any additional external materials. That is, Malouin proposes an instinctive approach to design, that is, not to think too much in front of a computer and just let the function and the materials influence the creative process. https://philippemalouin.com/