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The unmaking of democratic design...
This was the title of a project with Röhsska Design Museum and
the artist Fredrik Paulsen for the reopening of the Museum in 2020.
IKEA (a well-known Swedish brand) has seized the certainly
misleading expression “democratic design” and transformed it into
“low prices in flat boxes”. Our Dad, the founder of Blå Station,
always said that design is no flipping democracy. Röhsska design
museum knew this, so we were given the task, together with Fredrik
Paulsen, to create a unique chair presented in a flat package.
The easiest part was giving the chair its name, because obviously
it would be called Röhsska. The hardest part was to make each
individual chair unique. This became a long and tough process,
where we tried to get talented craftsmen who had great professional
pride and the ability to varnish hundreds of chairs in exactly the
same way.... to instead invent a new way, deliberately and without
aggravating or expensive measures, to varnish several chairs at the
same time with the result that no one chair resembled the other and
of course without compromising the quality of any of them.
Röhsska when playfulness is allowed to control the process.
