Perfectly imperfect

At a recent media conference we attended in California, a lot of emphasis was on the notion of imperfection as being a design direction to watch in the future. In a subsequent telephone interview a few days ago, British designer and jack-of-all-trades Faye Toogood (who is set to be the guest of honour at the second Nobis Design Lunch later this month) came clean to us about how perfection bores her. As a self-proclaimed tinkerer, she experiments for all the world to see, shaping her work organically and completely dictated by instinct. According to her, it is all about the process.

At large, the design world was previously permeated by a pursuit for flawlessly-manufactured pieces placed in an equally unblemished milieu, featured on the spreads of yet another indistinct interior glossy magazine. An early sign that the times were changing came when magazines such as Apartamento chose to feature the “real” homes of “real” people, grit and clutter included.

So how does imperfection in design manifest itself? Sometimes, as in the three examples shown below, it might be about letting nature run its course and the materials reacting naturally to their environment, without constraining them. In other times, as in Konstfack graduate Emelie Thornadtsson’s whimsical ceramics, it might be about letting the raw materials take shape in a seemingly organic way. Or, as artist Ulf Rollof proves by letting the firing of bullets onto a glass pane create its own pattern, it can be about randomness and haphazardness. For his collection *Svärtan* (which is co-created by students of National Institute of Fashion Technology in New Delhi, and will be launched at Ikea next year), fashion designer Martin Bergström is inspired by an imperfect setting – distressed walls and dangling cables left after the monsoon rain in India. This is proof that beauty can exist in imperfection, and that getting it wrong can be very right.

story / Micha Van Dinther and Magnus Wittbjer