“Design can be a tedious activity. It also can be fun. In this project we wanted to design products and build them on the spot. The process had to be fast, spontaneous and have instant result, so it was imperative to use materials that are very easy to work with. There is however a contradiction in such materials: the easier to work with, the less suitable they are to create end products. Like the polystyrene foam that we use. It is extremely easy to work with -in fact the material is widely used in model and prototyping industry- but completely unsuitable as material for furniture. We discovered however, that by treating it with heat, the soft skin turns into a rigid, durable surface.
This ignited the project. Heating the foam is a tricky process; a few seconds too long and all that remains is a puddle of blue goo. But with careful timing, each object finds its own way in the oven and comes out slightly different from all the others. That is exactly what we were looking for: It is much more interesting to design the making-process of a product then just to design its final form. It allows us to invent ways in which unique pieces with an individual character can be mass-produced.” from Melted Collection by Pieke Bergmans
This ignited the project. Heating the foam is a tricky process; a few seconds too long and all that remains is a puddle of blue goo. But with careful timing, each object finds its own way in the oven and comes out slightly different from all the others. That is exactly what we were looking for: It is much more interesting to design the making-process of a product then just to design its final form. It allows us to invent ways in which unique pieces with an individual character can be mass-produced.” from Melted Collection by Pieke Bergmans
