Two eccentric, kind people, both first year of IDE. They didn’t know each other long before they found out they were in the same studio for FormX. Now Nathan would like to call Marre her buddy, and sometimes “pure misery” as well. Their humor is what they share, always looking for a way to be different. For their form & experience project, they combined their forces and made a stool, called No. 11, a stool with a face as seating. A stool called after the number of the madmen, who are these designers, and what made them make this outstanding furniture?
by Report ID
Marre van der Schee, a 22 years old freshman, is still living in Haarlem, her hometown. Before she started in Delft she had two gap years and began product design on the HvA, but discovered that she preferred university. She is a member of Plankenkoorts, where she kitesurfs and loves to kickbox. She feels at home at Industrial Design and likes all the aspects, although she thinks the creative side fits her the best. As she told us, she loves the stuff in between art and design and is interested in the question of when design still has a function.
The other creator is Nathan Douenburg, from Nieuw-Vennep. He just started Industrial Design Engineering this year. Although he is just 18, he has already done quite a lot in his life. Outside IDE, he likes to be artistic and he has a lot of photobooks. He’s also a director assistant and might go to the USA to pursue that. Nathan always had an illusion of becoming Willie Wortel from Donald Duck, unfortunately, he was pushed to study something scientifically. In high school he didn’t know in which direction he wanted to go to, so he played it safe and chose a nature curriculum with art.
He thought about doing an art study, but then accidentally stumbled upon Industrial Design Engineering. Now he’s content with his choice of IDE. His design dream is to either make very expensive unpractical design furniture, make visual art with aspects of design in it or find another medium in which he can apply design, like a theatre. He aspires to make his designs a social statement.
The idea of the stool was drawn on a Post-it note, while they were eating together. They wrote it down in their so-called “De meest debiele IO ideeën ooit” (the most stupid IDE ideas ever) notebook. This stool was originally a face where you could sit on and if you left it would cry or it would whisper all the time until you sat on it. They like to be this weird because no one dares to do it. “We are like Marina Abramovic in design or the avant-garde from design, no one asked us to do it, but we do”.
When the stool was chosen to realize, they sternly decided that the stool had to be strong enough for people to sit on, and they wanted the people to have a crisis when they sit on it. The stool was made in two days, however, the process was incredibly long and frustrating. As many design processes, there were ups and downs, and at one point Marre’s head was wrapped in plastic foil and had an industrial blow dryer in her face. Every material just didn’t work and eventually, they laser cut the stool and put some IKEA supports under it.
In the end, everything finally worked out and, although the plan was to make the face more realistic, it turned out to be more abstract and they did like it. “You can really find the process it went through back in the stool, I like that a lot,” Marre told us. There is no doubt these two will work together again anytime soon. We are curious about what kind of crazy design they will make next.
