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What do you get when you cross an engineer with an art director and a photographer? Oh, and some furniture designers and a few industrial engineers?
Haberdashery is the fruit of such a cocktail, a multi-disciplinary creative team who work at all stages of the design process to bring artworks into being. Using a blend of traditional materials, lighting and technology and interactive “experiences” they design, manufacture, install and maintain artworks, sometimes bringing an artist’s vision to life and sometimes developing their own ideas.
“We often take on new projects where there is no precedent existing. So we will start with a blank piece of paper, and work with our clients to understand what’s really possible,” says Haberdashery Director, Ben Rigby, “we inhabit a weird area between art and design and engineering and make weird and wonderful things that no one else will go near.”
One such weird and wonderful thing is the Laserpod, an object for the home which uses a crystal to refract the light of a red laser into hundreds of soft beams, creating an organic, calming effect. While it has been used before in artworks, in particular by artist Chris Levine in his large scale sculptural installations, this is the first time that the team at Haberdashery has attempted to bring a product to the retail market. They are hoping that the funding for moving the idea from prototype to saleable product will come from a Kickstarter crowd-funding campaign which is currently underway.
“We regularly have new ideas for products which could be manufactured, but never have the funding to do so’ says Ben. Not only does Kickstarter offer the team the opportunity to draw that funding in, it also offers them a new way to interact with their audience. ’It is a lovely platform to engage with potential customers – people who find our work interesting – and to actually chat to them directly, cutting out the middle man,” says Ben.
“Collaboration” is something of a buzzword in the design world, as well as the promise to ’work with clients to define the brief’. Behind the scenes, however, these collaborations are often the battle ground of artistic wills and many a creative idea is compromised and stifled by a client’s commercial demands. The Directors at Haberdashery, however, seem to have a genuine interest in working with different people and in making ideas – both their own and other people’s – work.
“We’re as turned on by the development process as by the end product,” says Ben, “If we haven’t enjoyed the process then we haven’t done our job properly. We’re very centred on play and experimentation and we earmark one day per week, if possible, to messing around.”
Working for Haberdashery sounds like fun. And in the best possible sense of the word, it also sounds a little geeky. Ben waxes lyrical, for example, on the Laserpod’s functions beyond the aesthetic. “It can be used as an educational tool, to show how light works’ he says, ’it can also be just decorative, like a modern day lava lamp, but it fundamentally explains something about light itself. It is also hackable’.
Apparently “hackable” is a real word and regular currency amongst the technically-savvy. Hackable products have a built in capacity for people to hack into them and use their own software to make them do what they want them to. Haberdashery are therefore inviting people, by design, to break and remake their product – again demonstrating their refreshing lack of preciousness about their work and their openness to real collaboration. “Hopefully people will come back to us and show us what they have done,” says Ben.
by Emilie Lemons
Haberdashery’s Kickstarter campaign is open until Friday December 6.