Moij Design. The brains behind this Hamburg label are Angelina Erhorn and Stine Paeper, professional designers and Ambiente 2015 “Talents”. Together they create furniture and home accessories with a great sense for delicate and playful design. The young Hamburg-based creative duo offer inspirations that we shall be showcasing on #TalentsTuesday, including objects based on the traditional Japanese craft of origami.
According to Stine Paeper, they have primarily focused their creative efforts on interior design, home accessories and graphic design, “but we sometimes break out into other areas. For example, we are currently working on a bottle holder for sailing boats.”
Product design, though, is a broad field. So how do they find the necessary creative input? What inspires the designers in the creation of the style and look of their objects? “Actually, we constantly find inspirations in the most everyday situations. We go through the world with our eyes always open. We also like experimenting with materials and techniques.”
In their work the Erhorn-Paeper design duo have a specific division of tasks. “I mostly take on the production part,” says Angelina Erhorn “and Stine is better at things like visualisation. We complement each other in many aspects.”
Of course, it makes a difference whether as an artist you are able to follow the principle of “L’Art pour l’art”, or whether the current job is to give an attractive design to a certain everyday object. When it comes to product design, Angelina Erhorn and Stine Paeper have a quite traditional approach: “We normally start by drafting out a rough idea and creating a mood board. In a second stage we use the computer for further visualisation and, if possible, we construct a model in the workshop,” explains Stine Paeper.
Ultimately, when designing products for everyday use, practicality is just as important as the look. Form follows function – or perhaps not? Angelina Erhorn agrees only partly: “Of course, both are important. However, with us the focus is on creating a form that is out of the ordinary. And if a wonderful form means that you can’t stack the crockery, then that’s just the way it is. Perhaps you could say that with us: form follows concept.”
It comes then as no surprise that Angelina Erhorn is particularly keen on the work of celebrity Spanish designer Patricia Urquiola: “She also experiments a lot with materials and creates incredibly beautiful and unusual pieces of furniture.” When asked about design icons, Stine Paeper goes back to the past: “I like the design duo Ray and Charles Eames. Both of them designed great items of furniture but were also active across various disciplines and tried to view things from different perspectives.”
The best example of the Moij look, according to the young designers and Ambiente “Talents”, is certainly their current “pet” project: origami tableware. “Inspired by the Japanese art of paper folding we have created various bowls, plates and beakers from square sheets of paper,” explains Stine Paeper. “The paper is then moulded in plaster and the porcelain can then be cast in the plaster mould.” Originally, the two designers wanted to find a manufacturer who would produce the tableware for them. “This turned out, though, to be very difficult,” says Angelina Erhorn. “We then decided to take the project into our own hands and started a crowdfunding site at www.Startnext.de.”
Here people who donate to the project receive one of the first snack bowl sets as a thank you. The crowdfunding campaign was successful and Moij Design were able to start production of the tableware with the money that was sent in. “In this way we have managed to produce an initial small run of 500 snack bowls,” states Stine Paeper. “We have now also set up a porcelain workshop in Hamburg-Harburg and manufacture a whole range of tableware that we sell via various online shops and in the ’99 cubes’ shop in Hamburg.”
The participation of Angelina Erhorn and Stine Paeper at Ambiente, the world’s leading trade fair for consumer goods in Frankfurt, promises an even higher profile for Moij Design: “We have never been to Ambiente before – this is our first time. We hope to be able to forge interesting contacts and publicise our products! We are very excited because this is the first major trade fair at which we are exhibiting. Since we are heavily involved with porcelain, this sector is naturally of major interest to us.”
