Reykjavík Grapevine - 01.03.2013, Blaðsíða 51

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The Reykjavík Grapevine
DesignMarch Festival Director's Address
Q&A
Alísa Kalyanova
DesignMarch Special 2013 11
Dear reader,
Welcome to DesignMarch!

I was strolling around the fair grounds
at the Stockholm Furniture Fair a
few months ago, square metre upon
square metre, hall after hall. There
were new chairs, tables, lights, and
what not in beautiful pale pastel pink,
lush jungle green, by Alvar Aalto,
Muuto, hot design studio, star designer
after another. My intention is certainly
not to insult the Stockholm Furniture
Fair here (which is a very fine Nordic
design event I am practically a regular
at), but I couldn’t help but think, do we
really need one more chair?
Surely we have more important
problems to solve than which colour
and shape we want under our butts?
While the design industry—and
any industry, for that matter—benefits
from a good look in the mirror every
now and then (I mean, seriously, 4,000
chairs. If not 40,000), design is often
sold a little short.
Which is funny, considering that
the hype around the industry has
been so enormous that most of us are
already fed up with the whole word.
And frankly, standing there, sur-
rounded by millions of chairs back in
Sweden, I did wonder whether design-
ers were just make ugly things pretty
or relatively nice things even nicer.
While we are proud to show lots of
new chairs at DesignMarch too (many
of which are designed and produced
in Iceland using local materials, which
may sound simple but is far from it), we
hope to take a closer look at design
and show how designers’ skills and
design thinking can be used to make
life easier, the world better, the city
more fun, the environment less taxed
and business more profitable.
Our DesignTalks, a one-day series
of lectures that opens the festival each
year is themed around the magic of
creativity this time. On Thursday, March
14, at the main stage of the National
Theatre of Iceland we’ll hear thoughts
by Mark Eley and Wakiko Kishimoto,
the founders of London-based fashion
label Eley Kishimoto; Juliet Kimchin,
the design and architecture curator
of MoMA; Maja Kuzmanovic, a leader
of a multidisciplinary team of design-
ers, chefs, engineers and gardeners
(among others) at FoaM and Inge
Druckrey, a graphic design teacher
with over 40 years of experience
whose teaching focuses largely on the
art of seeing.
From chairs to graphic design,
the question remains the same—are
these matters of taste and surface or
are some things genuinely better, and
if so, why?

We wish you a great, thought provok-
ing DesignMarch!
See you!
Greipur Gíslason
Festival director, DesignMarch
Iceland Design Centre
Illustration: Halli Civelek
What is your take
on the state of
Icelandic design
and architecture
today?
I feel as though Ice-
landic design is still
in its birth phase
and everything is
just starting to make sense. Design-
March is a venue for designers to show
their stuff. It’s an incentive to innovate.
It will be exciting to see if and when a
uniquely Icelandic style or aesthetic
starts to take form. As of now, I can't
really see any defining features that you
could call Icelandic design but it would
be interesting if we could.
- Siggi Odds, Fur Trade
What makes for great
( jewellery) design in
your opinion? What do
you aim at in your work?
I'll refrain from defining
what is great. I strive to
evoke a sense of time-
lessness in my designs
as it is reflected by the natural world, and I
try to form a kinship between the jewellery
I create and the person who will wear it.
Over the millennia the intimate relationship
people have had with what they choose to
adorn themselves with has cultivated mysti-
cism and ritual, and I hope my designs can
continue that tradition.
- Jóhanna Methusalemsdóttir, Kria Jewelry
You have been
based in London
for quite a while.
How does Icelandic
fashion design look
to you?
I love what people
are doing in Iceland.
I have been a huge fan of Mundi for a long
time. And there’s Eyglo, REY and quite a
few others… They are doing great stuff de-
spite obvious hindrances, such as import
taxes for samples and such, which make
the designers’ work difficult.
- Ingvar Helgason, Ostwald Helgason
The path to success is rarely direct. Did
something go terribly wrong with the Torg í
biðstöðu project? Could you share funny
stories from the history of the project?
This project is an experiment, so mistakes and
things not going quite as well as you would like is
just as important part as things going well.
Also, it’s not guaranteed that the citizens understand what we are
doing. I remember it bothering me at first, but now I see it being just part
of coming up with new unexpected things in unexpected places.
For instance, last year, one group designed this really interesting
and complex wire structure outdoor furniture. We were on site to see
the project one day when an elderly lady came up to us and asked us
why the city had put up all these traps for cats.
Even if she didn't know that they were benches and chairs that
she could sit on, the project made her curious and changed how she
experienced the space.
- Hans Heiðar Tryggvason, Torg í biðstöðu