Putting the Fun in Functional: at DMY 2010, Designers Make Art of the Everyday July 05, 2010

The second ever DMY Design Festival took place in the breezy, echoing halls of the defunct Tempelhof Airport in Berlin from June 9th - 13th. On a balmy Friday afternoon, the MINI Space Team dropped in to roam around, explore, and be inspired. We were initially sidetracked by an enormous alien space-cocoon made of packing tape (700 rolls, or 45 km, to be exact), created by Austrian-Croatian design team For Use / Numen. What from the outside looks like an ethereal, gauzy web, opens into an elastic yet surprisingly sturdy trampoline landscape for those who dare to venture inside. Finally, we climbed our way back onto solid ground and ventured into the repurposed hangar. First stop: the stage, where Head of MINI Design Gert Hildebrand spoke about how the iconic MINI design has evolved over the generations - and what design principles have stayed the same over all these years. It was aptly titled "From the Original to the Original". A focus of the presentation centered around the design of the brand new MINI Countryman the newest member of the MINI Family and four year process by the MINI Design Team. After the panel, we took a stroll with Gert Hildebrand through the halls of the fair and talked to him about some of his favorite pieces. For ‘Cinderella's Chair', designer Anna Ter Haar first cuts a portion of the leg off the chair, then creates a custom ‘prosthesis' by molding blown glass directly onto the wood. The finished piece looks delicate and fragile, yet is actually quite strong. Mr. Hildebrand summed up its elegant simplicity: "By cutting off the most important part of the chair - the leg - and adding a second, transparent material, this chair is abstracted to a piece of art, rather than simply a functional object. The colored glass adds a new dimension to this very simple, wooden chair." Our next stop was a beautiful display of hand-cut paper lanterns by Dutch product designer Paula Arntzen. An array of organic forms made of origami-like folds and brightly-colored paper fringe hung like a cluster of magical jellyfish in the air. Gert's take: "To turn a 2D object - paper - into a 3D shape just by folding and cutting - I think that's fantastic. It's simplicity meets function." Browse through the gallery below to explore more DMY designs with the MINI Space Team.   Related Links DMY Design Festival For Use / Numen Anna Ter Haar Paula Arntzen supershape