Clay Pudding

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If you have been to Portugal, chances are you have tried, or at least seen, a Portuguese flan, or Pudim de Ovos. It has a smooth, creamy texture and rich caramel sauce on top. This is what product designer Gabriel Tan had in mind when creating what he calls his Flan Table.

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Tan is an industrial designer from Singapore, but relocated to Porto with his wife Cherie Er in 2020. Together, the pair founded Origin Made, a crafts-focused design studio dedicated to preserving cultural heritage through reinterpreting traditional design processes and contemporary forms. “We wanted to create a brand that tells the story of Iberian craft. That’s how it was born, collaborating with small, family run workshops and connecting them to international designers,” Tan explains.

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One of the brand’s most recent designs is a ceramic side table, designed by Tan and produced by Porto-based ceramicist Joaquim Pombal, that will be showcased during Copenhahen’s Three Days of Design. Standing half a meter tall, the table poses a modest body, with soft curves and a tactile, earthen surface. The table comes in two colours – a sandy light tan which is the natural colour of the clay, and a rich bronze resulting from the clay being oxidised. “It’s not super grainy,” Tan explains. “It’s a tactile piece that you want to touch. It feels quite earthy and natural.”

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Tan wanted a name that connected the table to his own experiences in Portugal, explaining how “flan, or pudim, is a very typical Portuguese dessert you find in restaurants.” The table design was born from an organic encounter with materials Tan found in Pombal’s studio. “The first time we visited him we were fascinated by what he was making,” Tan recalls. “We asked him if he could make something in this brown caramel colour we saw. We wanted something that was subtle, but that let the colour itself shine,” he says. “It wasn’t an idea we already had. It was more seeing what he made and developing the idea after visiting him.”

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Tan strongly believes in the importance of collaboration when working with local craftspeople to try and find a harmony between contemporary design and traditional craft. “Design is not really a world that is connected to craft in Portugal; it’s not like Japan or Italy where there is a closer collaboration between the two industries,” he explains.“When I came here, I was fascinated by entering the old world, where you have so much heritage and craft and traditions. I saw ways that I could use these ingredients to create something new.”

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Tan and Pombal’s Flan table is the result of the meeting of two worlds, offering a dialogue between contemporary forms and traditional making. “I think our audience really appreciates that, because when you have old craft and rich textures applied in minimal forms, it’s easier to use in contemporary spaces,” Tan says. “We have a studio that works with a keen sense of responsibility: to preserve and carry on the human craft tradition. It’s a part of the culture of our world.”

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June 2024

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An Ambient Helper.

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Sawdust, silicone, ceramics, spray paint. Workshops are like Aladdin’s cave, if Aladdin's cave were full of carcinogens. “You might be aware of what you’re making and what those materials create in terms of pollution, but you have no idea what the person next to you is doing, and whether they’re also looking at that aspect,” Giulio Ammendola, the co-founder of Ambient Works, tells me.

To address this issue, Ammendola and his fellow co-founder Yuki Machida have set about designing a device to help users understand how to improve the air quality in their workshops and studios, after discovering that health concerns are a common concern amongst designers and makers. Ambient One is an air quality monitor designed to alert makers to the potential pollutants their work may be producing, and give tailored advice on how to minimise this via their user-friendly app. Ambient One is in its early stages of life, and will be launched through Kickstarter on 11 June 2024.

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“It’s quite industrial looking,” I say. “Yeah it’s a mix of things,” Ammendola replies. “One thing we realised was that it needed to be pretty small and sturdy to survive the environments it was being put through.” Weighing 300g, Ambient One has an outer shell of milled aluminium, protecting an inner sensor. The device is utilitarian yet playful, with a bright orange handle and simple display face where two blinking eyes greet you when the device is turned on. It’s like something out of WALL-E, I think. “It feels like a bit of fresh air compared to normal smart home devices that often feel like science lab products,” Ammendola says. “We hope that's also the seeds of something we can continue to build upon and make health-related devices that help people, but are also fun to use.”

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As well as being rather charming, Ambient One is constantly scanning for the four most common pollutants found in creative spaces. “It tracks particulate matter, NOx [from welding or car engines] , CO2, and VOCs - the gasses in the air,” Ammendola tells me, pointing to the small display screen. All of this data is tracked, logged and presented back to the user on Ambient One’s app via tailored AI-driven tips.

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Last year Machida and Ammendola secured a small catalyst fund from Innovative UK, with a proposal explaining how they wanted to improve the wellbeing of creatives in England. “It’s something that is not very well known, but we spend most of our time indoors where air quality can be five times worse than outdoor air,” Ammendola says.

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“For example, in ceramic studios, there are silica particles, which people getting into ceramics or pottery might not know about, which can leads to Silicosis [an incurable lung disease],” Machida adds. “We wanted to try and help creatives and makers that are spending all their time in these environments.”

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Machida and Ammendola have put Ambient One through an ongoing six-month user testing period, and produced several different prototypes, some looking like a device off the Starship Enterprise, until arriving at the current refined, more compact form. They have given a number of Ambient Ones to designers and makers across London - “We worked with two ceramicists in Camberwell, and it was nice when they suggested ways to use it that we didn’t initially think about,” Ammendola says. “One of the ceramicists was telling us that she now waits before going into the studio, because she realised [the pollution] was still lingering until 10am from the night before. She would not have been able to do [this] before.”

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Ambient One is technically still in the testing phase, with many models remaining in the custody of designers and makers who are relaying feedback to Ammendola and Machida. Ammendola laughs about how “the female makers are very responsive to taking care of their health, but the lads, the male workers, are like, No it’s fine, I don’t want to know that kind of thing. But the initial response is pretty interesting.”

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June 2024

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Objective Studies.

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“Someone said to me that with the sales of [their] products, PayPal was making more money than they were, because the percentage PayPal took was higher than the royalties the designer received,” Matteo Fogale shares.

Determined to bring more equity to the design industry, Fogale, a furniture designer and creative director based between Copenhagen and London, have teamed up with e-commerce expert Lijana Norkaityte to found Objective Studies. The pair’s newly established digital platform is a marketplace that provides limited edition collections of furniture and objects, while also serving as a launching platform for new talent. “We’re not as polished as a gallery would be,” Norkaityte says, “but we’re also not as commercial and fast paced as a [typical] e-commerce website or online shop. We tried to hit something right in between.”

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Objective Studies plans to release specially curated collections of objects and furniture throughout the year at a more organic pace than alternative platforms. “We want to break this cycle of consumers and expectations, because we are trained as customers to shop like there's something new dropping every month,” Norkaityte explains. Instead of building a website housing numerous products spread over tens of pages, Objective Studies aims to break away from the fast-paced consumerism of other commercial sites. “We don’t have a schedule,” she says. “We're trying to keep it a bit more organic and more like a surprise.” The pair hope that releasing concentrated collections will reduce the time designers have to wait for their work to be purchased.

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“There's no one single style or single theme across drops, but each drop will have a focus area, theme or material,” Norkaityte explains. Each drop also has the potential to alter the graphical presentation of Objective Studies’ website, which Fogale hopes will drive interest surrounding each release. The first collection includes a geometric lighting collection from Asca Studio, a female-founded design practice based in Copenhagen, whose forms bring a sense of calm into a room. It is showcased alongside Auckland-based designer Ted Synnott’s Pillar Table, an elegant wooden table that displays Synott meticulous joinery.

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“The other side of it is being the trusted platform,” Fogale notes. “As our name [Objective Studies] says, we're trying to actually to do the research and the hard work behind the scenes to select extremely good quality, well-crafted products that haven't been compromised by time or a lack of resources.” Fogale and Norkaityte understand the impact that a lack of funding can have on designers and, by covering the costs of photography and marketing, Objective Studies aims to provide designers with more time to invest in creating high quality work and furthering their careers. 

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Faced with the cost of living crisis, rising costs of materials and risk-averse retailers, many designers’ career progression has been stunted. “People don’t want to pay design fees, so it’s becoming really hard for independent designers,” Fogale says. “If you don’t have the means to support yourself it’s a real struggle, and I don't think we talk about it enough.” Fogale and Norkaityte explain that some designers don’t argue for higher fees because they are afraid of losing retail relationships or potential clients. “So you end up taking less than you should, and I think that’s not fair,” Fogale says. The pair believe the royalty system is outdated and often places designers at the bottom of the list, even though, as Fogale points out, “without them, there wouldn’t be a product.”

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New designers also face challenges connecting with companies who have long-standing relationships with more established designers. Since Objective Studies relieves designers of the pressures of funding the post-production process by themselves, the platform hopes to bridge this gap. “I want to be open about the whole thing, and more equitable about allowing everyone to have the opportunity to produce work and show it, so you don't have to spend crazy amounts to show in a fair or to ship the product somewhere,” Fogale says. 

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Objective studies launched during Copenhagen’s Three days of Design, and it is still in its early stages of life. But Fogale and Norkaityte hope the platform will be an international site with a broad network of designers and connections to industry. They believe it is time to change the way the design industry treats new designers. “I think we need to turn things around a little bit,” Fogale says.

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June 2024