Living on the outskirts of Utopia
Living on the outskirts of Utopia The more comfortable you are in a situation, the more likely you let things go by unnoticed.
As designers we constantly have to re-look, reevaluate, rethink, and take a different angle, strive for a different approach.
Liza Enebeiz The Netherlands, 2012
Working with trash does exactly all this. The group of Openset students, who all have high aesthetic talent and passion, were put in the situation in which they have to find, collect and work with trash. It puts them in the opposite of what all their ‘system’ and being is focused on: working with trash, the undesirable waste material, something to be disposed and not looked at; something that disgusts us rather than attract; ugliness instead of beauty, the end of a product’s life cycle instead of it’s conception.
2.3
Liza Enebeis and Erik de Vlaam: Trashland
It is important to challenge yourself, to put yourself in situations that are completely unusual. Then you suddenly notice different sounds, smells, colors, temperatures, structures and behaviors.
In an extreme way, this principle is related to how we work at Studio Dumbar. If we are invited into a new project, we try to understand the briefing we receive and to follow its line of thinking. But our response is not only a linear answer to the question put forward. We go for alternative paths, different angles and other ways to address the challenges in a project. This is the only way to be able to find the unexpected answer.