Blueprint Awards 2018 Winners Announced!
Best Product Design
Winner: Heatherwick Studio, UK
Friction Table
Image Credit: Heatherwick Studio
Judges’ Comments
‘Heatherwick doing what he is best at — creating innovative, artistic and poetic solutions to creative challenges.’Tina Norden
‘Simple concept, beautiful design.’Fernanda Marques
In 2004, Heatherwick Studio had an idea for a carpet that could change its proportions, based on the pivoting mechanism of a garden trellis.
Slicing a carpet into strips and allowing these to pivot past each other produced a carpet that could stretch and warp. Using rigid elements and attaching legs created a table that could change shape as dramatically as the carpet. While square shapes became rectangles, the studio also found that a circular one would thin into a long ellipse.
Heatherwick Studio prototyped the idea for the table in laser-cut wood, but settled on the use of a material made of resin-infused paper, offering warmth and high levels of precision that when finished revealed a beautiful and unusual grain from the hundreds of layers of paper. The final table can transform from a smooth circle of 1.8m diameter, able to seat eight, in to an ellipse over 4 metres long. With over 1,800 individual elements, the studio believes the table is much like a grand piano — a simple and familiar exterior form that contains incredible complexity and precision craftsmanship.
The name Friction is a reminder of the challenge the table faces: too little friction across the 212 articulating joints and the table will wobble; too much friction and it will never open. Each component has to be correct within one tenth of the thickness of a human hair in order to achieve the smooth opening movement.
Highly Commended
Patricia Urquiola for Laufen, Switzerland, SONAR
Commended
Ercol, UK
VON Collection
Foster + Partners for Benchmark, UK
OVO furniture range
Kokaistudios for Lualdi (presented by Poliform)
KOAN door
Finalists
Adam Nathaniel Furman, UK
1st Floor Mugs
Grimshaw for Tecno, UK
Aeris seating
KALLISTA for Kohler, USA
Grid Sink Faucet and Cube Handles
Neri&Hu Design and Research Office for GAN, China
LAN Collection
Liminal Objects in collaboration with Vicki West, Australia
Muylatina (coming together)
Rockwell Group for The Rug Company, global
David Rockwell Collection
studio mk27, Brazil
Quadrado
Category sponsored by: Hi-Macs
