Material values | company development | Aug 2017

Taktile

Establishing a design brand

Parallel to my studies at the Aarhus architecture school I have been designing and producing different products and furniture. Since the summer of 2017 - before my enrolment at Aarhus architecture school, I founded a company together Alexander Hammergart [DEN]. “Taktile IVS” was a design brand based on a simple geometrical profile and its way it communicated the internal material qualities of wood. The design was constantly revolving around the growth patterns of wood, trying to resolve its complex materiality in the form. It was especially important to showcase how wood types are forming differently and how diverse of an aesthetic it brings to the object. Wood is an amazing material that offers many benefits – such as haptic-, acoustic-, and air improving qualities (through diffusion).

The project was also meant as a critic on how modern-day consumer products are untrue to the natural materials they are imitating. The growing trend in mass-produced products is often to reference material properties without actually using them. Today we can see rugged “leather-like” plastic surfaces, on the dashboard of cars. Plastics and vinyl surfaces coloured to look like exotic stones and marbles.

Even when using wood, it is usually as veneer to cover up the products chipboard core a few mm below. These composite materials are weak, fake, and ultimately unsustainable. A cabin shelf in a typical IKEA furniture is covered with sheets of “long-grain-cut” wood veneer, that meets in unnatural and fragile corners. Had it been a solid piece of wood, the one side would have an “end-grain-cut” surface and the corners would be strong because it is non-composite. However, if the wood furniture were to obtain scratches, dents or fractures - a repair or transformation would still be possible. Edges can be chamfered or bevelled, and surfaces can be filled, sanded, painted and/or polished.

We thought this wrongful interpretation was a shame, as it lowers people’s general expectations for a wood product. perhaps we would start to see wood as a fragile 2nd grade material, instead of a unique, vocal and tactile material. It’s plain fact that wood is one of the most sustainable materials (FSC-certified wood that is), but if we design with bad quality timber, making cheap and fragile products with short lifespan – people will either consume more, or choose to buy a product of a different, more pollusive origin like steel or plastics!