Monday 2 July 2012

Jasper Nijs

Collection: Experience Expert












a and b: lemon squeezer
c,d,e, f and g: coffee grinder
h, i, j, k and l: nut cracker

Design vision
My collection is made up of products that direct attention to everyday life. My focus is on functionality, a subject I chart by giving an obsessive and ritual twist to daily routines. My products make a play out of grinding, pressing and cracking. I impart a neurotic aura to routines like this by designing tools that enlarge them to the absurd. Playing with your food becomes a new sensational experience in which overkill plays a dominant role.

Born: 1990, Nijmegen NL
Jasper was an intern at design label Vij5
Contact and information:
jaspernijsdesign@gmail.com


Research and Inspiration
It started with a small research I did on the relation between design and functionality. It’s a known fact that products with a super functional design do not always function as well as they look. This rather amusing conclusion brought up the idea to do it the other way. What if you would design an item with faultless functionality as your main objective, an approach that is not common in household products? The first faultless item that came up to my mind was a nut cracker. I like to eat walnuts. What keeps me from doing so in most cases is the fact that cracking a nut leaves you with a multitude of shell and nut fragments, a thing I deeply abhor. So I decided to make a nut cutter that would split a walnut in no more than two halves, time and time again, with no mess of fragments. I succeeded in doing so. The result of my work is a nut cracker or splitter of 8 kilo, made op 5 mm steel plate. It doesn’t fail. Never! You could compare it to a house wife bringing her children to school in a Hummer. It’s a case of overkill, a machine that goes beyond the reasonable. Yet it is fun. Machines like this, with an exaggerated functionality, focus attention on the experience of its immaculate operation.  It’s a conversation piece, something to amaze and amuse your friends and visitors and the same applies to my coffee grinder and lemon press. The first has a hard stone grinding wheel, speeded up by a special pump, and a slide by which the coffee beans are transported to the grinding wheel one by one to be irretrievably smashed.  The second is based on the mechanics of an old style swing press and squeezes an orange in only one movement not leaving a single drop behind.  Research to me is observing, analysing and thinking in the first place.  The next step is making models initially working with hard board, strings and glue. Then I start calculating and drawing as a step towards building a prototype.  In the end my collection is a proof I’m worth something in the field of design. I‘m able to see what’s going on in design. My products fill a gap and heighten the understanding of design as a human endeavour.



No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.