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Every year Artecnica pairs a well known designer with an artisan working in a small community to collaborate on a product for their Design With Conscience project. Though each product is typically greeted with a great deal of enthusiasm, the TranSglass collection designed by Studio Tord Boontje and Emma Woffenden has become one of Artecnica’s best-selling items. Aid to Artisans, a non-profit organization providing assistance to artisans worldwide, worked to bring Guatemalan craftsmen together with Woffenden and Boontje and ultimately, to bring their design to market, where MoMA saw it and acquired TranSglass for their permanent collection. The recycled wine bottle vases have been much copied, but Artecnica is the only place to get the original designs. The collection also cleverly repurposes wine bottles into carafes, candleholders and dishes.
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You’ve probably seen at least one of the first three editions of the colorful Themis Mobile collection that Stockholm-based graphic designer Clara von Zweigbergk created for Artecnica, but the company swears that Mono, the newest edition, is “vastly different than any other mobile of its kind.” First off, Mono has more sides than von Zweigbergk’s previous mobiles. D&D fans will know even without counting that this baby is a dodecahedron – that’s 12 sides – each in a different eye-popping color “painstakingly handpicked by Clara in her creative process, which she describes as ‘intuition and the way the colors work in contrast to one another.'”
Which brings me to my next point, which is somewhat tangential, but bear with me. As you might imagine, I read a lot of copy for product descriptions, and sometimes when designers, manufacturers or distributors aren’t content with a basic item description they go to great lengths to entice potential buyers with language so belabored and verbose it becomes comical. Nothing against Artecnica -they’re a truly wonderful company – but is this not just the long-winded way of saying that Mono is fun and colorful?
“The harmonious play of colors instill into the viewer a sense of visual pleasure and fulfillment further enhanced by the faceted nature of the geometry of Mono that allows each individual color to appear in four different shades.”
All critiquing aside, Mono works equally well above a crib and a dining room table, and there aren’t many design objects you can say that about.
about perrin drumm
