The Future Talks seating Collection in Collaboration with Wunders is the starting point of an exciting relationship with Heath Nash for Wunders, a 40 year old business wanting to adapt and look at more sustaibanble ways to manufacture high end upholstered furniture and finely crafted homeware by exploring creative, design-led ways to divert their manufacturing waste from landfill.
A collaboration about simply exposing the structure of a Wunders chair.
Old, unused sample chairs were given new life by being stripped down to the bare minimum - raw wood and screws/staples - and fitted with natural jute webbing as minimalist backrests and seats, creating a moment for the speakers to shine in contrast to these perfect, elegant and simple objects.
A design/make, improvisational collection using parts of old chairs from the Wunders archive, found ‘waste’ from a junkyard near the Wunders factory, and contemporary master-upholstery techniques. There are a few different riffs presented, but the underlying idea is to expose how these objects were made, trying to make my design choices (and classic design/art references) as apparent as possible.
The Future Talks seating has been an opportunity for growth and connection between three parties - Decorex, Wunders, and Heath Nash. There were three things:
Nash outlined a brief to pull these parties together to create a situation to help to solve for this ‘problem’ in an effective and mutually beneficial way.
The brief he presented to Bielle and Bianca on 17 May 2024:
My starting point for this seating solution is a large pile of sample chairs and another pile of chair-parts at Wunders that I've had my eye on for months.
And this year's Decorex theme:
This year, we embrace experimentation, applied wisdom, and deep thinking in order to shift paradigms in our industry. Design cannot only be pleasing to the eye, but must also be practical and sustainable.
Importantly, to me process is primary. And there is a great set of inherent limitations to work within on this seating project.
This is what I spoke about at Design Indaba in 2007: self imposed limitations, re-looking at waste, and first doing no harm.
And social impact.
https://www.designindaba.com/videos/conference-talks/heath-nash-sustainability-within-design
Directly related to this and in a similar time period (between 2004 and 2006), Martino Gamper made his 100 chairs in 100 days. I will use this seed and historical reference to his project to make the Future Talks seating in as much time as we have left until the event - 20 days.
https://www.martinogamper.com/project/a-100-chairs-in-a-100-days/The similarities between the way both Gamper and Nash work are very evident in the following statement. The process is the point, the output is just that - an output, not a traditionally pre-designed, then manufactured object. It is a process of making-as-thinking; not designing and then making. The practice of a design-thinking/making methodology.
The Process of Making One Hundred Chairs by Martino Gamper
“I didn’t make one hundred chairs just for myself or even in an effort to rescue a few hundred unwanted chairs from the streets. The motivation was the methodology: the process of making, of producing and absolutely not striving for the perfect one. This kind of making was very much about restrictions rather than freedom. The restrictions were key: the material, the style or the design of the found chairs and the time available — just a 100 days. Each new chair had to be unique, that’s what kept me working toward the elusive one-hundredth chair. I collected discarded chairs from London streets (or more frequently, friends’ homes) over a period of about two years. My intention was to investigate the potential of creating useful new chairs by blending together the stylistic and structural elements of the found ones. The process produced something like a three-dimensional sketchbook, a collection of possibilities. I wanted to question the idea of there being an innate superiority in the one-off and used this hybrid technique to demonstrate the difficulty of any one design being objectively judged The Best. I also hope my chairs illustrate — and celebrate — the geographical, historical and human resonance of design: what can they tell us about their place of origin or their previous sociological context and even their previous owners? For me, the stories behind the chairs are as important as their style or even their function. I wanted the project to stimulate a new form of design-thinking and to provoke debate about the value, functionality and the appropriateness of style for certain types of chair. What happens to the status and potential of a plastic garden chair when it is upholstered with luxurious yellow suede? The approach is elastic, highlighting the importance of contextual origin and enabling the creative potential of random individual elements spontaneously thrown together. The process of personal action that leads towards making rather than hesitating.”
Taken from the book 100 Chairs in 100 Days, published by Dent-De-Leone, 2007.
And so it was done - between 17 May and 5 June 2024 Nash made the initial 30 Future Talks chairs at Wunders. Not exactly 100 chairs in 100 days like the now world famous Gamper collection (which was immediately bought outright by Nina Yashar from the Nilufar Gallery), but ultimately, now for Decorex Joburg, around 40 Future Talks chairs in about 20 days (Nash made a few more chairs in July…).
Nash has always worked in this way - as a designer and artist - and has always only been able to start ‘designing’ with what is physically available to make something from. The design is not separate from the material. Working with any naturally occuring ‘waste’ stream has got to be done in this manner, and this is a methodology he has employed as pedagogy in his work with learners (secondary and tertiary) and with the co-creators of a shared workshop he founded called Our Workshop, now operating independently in Langa.
He has been solving for such needs for a long time. From his 2007 Design Indaba talk:
“I want to address the idea of sustainability in two different senses: environmental and social sustainability.”
Heath Nash holds a BA in Fine Art (sculpture) from the University of Cape Town. He was the Elle Decoration SA designer and lighting designer of the year in 2005/6, and also won the title of British Council South African Creative Entrepreneur of the Year in 2006. In 2010, Nash was awarded in a Finnish eco-lighting competition judged by Ingo Maurer. Nash won Southern Guild’s 2019 ‘Design With Purpose’ Award for his work as founder of Our Workshop in Langa, and was much more recently given an Impact Award from Decorex 2024 for this work in the social design* space.
*Within the design world, social design is defined as a design process that contributes to improving human well-being and livelihood. The ideas behind social design have been inspired by Victor Papanek's writings, he was one of the first to address issues of social design in the 1960s.
Have nothing in your house which you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.
