Carole Baijings
Inside the design mind of the Dutch designer
Semi Permanent Aotea Centre, Auckland August 9–11
How did you get started in design? We met, fell in love, and have been working together 24/7 for 18 years.
What’s in the studio right now and what’s coming up? Our studio is situated in a 1925 pump station, right next to the Rijksmuseum. The complex consists of a 3D-printing workshop, a workshop, guesthouse, our studio including a dining room and meeting room, and a 650-squaremetre garden designed by the most famous landscape designer in the Netherlands, Piet Oudolf. Our ‘Lydkraft’ collaboration for Ikea will be in store from August.
Why do you do what you do? We’re always super enthusiastic about delving into a material, a craft and a brand, in combination with an assignment. Stefan and I work as a team. We share our work and lives, and that makes our lives unique and constantly challenging. Our assignments are extremely diverse. We travel a great deal and meet interesting people, from visionaries to master craftspeople. We encounter the most diverse cultures: from Japan and Korea, for example, as well as Denmark, France, Italy, Germany and the United States. Moreover, we become hugely passionate the minute we recognise the potential of a material or craft. It’s the combination of the masculine and feminine intuition and creativity that makes all the difference and results in successful products.
You’ve worked on everything from ceramics to furniture, textiles and homewares to a concept car for Mini. What ties it together? The way we work in our workshop is very special – we create with paper models. We call this the ‘Atelier-Way-of-Working’ or ‘constructive thinking’. During our design process, we add elements such as colour, material, texture and tactility. We mix our own colours and make our own models.
Who does what? Stefan is from the centimetre and I’m from the millimetre!
What’s the single most essential thing you do when designing? Our signature, in key words, is colour, rich detail, layers and transparency, coupled with hand-drawn illustrations and the combination of different materials. We use these elements to change anonymous mass production into products with a personal expression. Objects that stand the test of time. We think in colour and materials, it’s never a last-minute afterthought. We create our own colours for every assignment.
Our ‘Colour Plaid’ range for Hay from 2005 sparked the beginning of our love affair with colour and textiles. From that point on, we made substantial use of fluorescent details. Luckily, inks have been produced in recent years that are colour-fast, which makes it possible to apply fluorescent to wicker, wood, paper, metal, glass and plastic. But we don’t apply fluorescent to just anything – we only use it to emphasise if necessary.
A lot of your work is intended for mass production, but you’re also interested in the experimental and handmade. How do the two sides to the practice interact in your work? By creating designs in limited edition, we learned to collaborate with industry. Our aim is to arrive at a product that will contribute something unique to the world. A design starts to get interesting when our needs and the needs of the public converge – even though it might appear that we work like
artists by investing a lot of time in studying and making models. We are first and foremost designers who think that functionality is just as important as the beauty of a product.
Working with industry is extremely important for us and inherent to design. We think that’s where the greatest problems lie, as well as the greatest opportunities.