Unfold

What is the role of the designer and how is it changing in a time when design and manufacturing become increasingly more digitized? This question is key to understanding the work of design studio Unfold. The studio, founded in 2002 by Claire Warnier and Dries Verbruggen after they graduated from the Design Academy Eindhoven, develops projects that investigate new ways of creating, manufacturing, financing and distributing in a changing context. A context in which we see a merging of aspects of the pre-industrial craft economy with high tech industrial production methods and digital communication networks. A context that has the potential to shift power, from industrial producers and those regulating infrastructure to the individual designer and the consumer. As ad-hoc interpreters who speak neither the mother-tongue of computer code nor that of traditional craft, they create unusual scenarios of confrontation between the two in which the untranslatable, the idiomatic and the unexpected are foregrounded against a field of normative design practice. At the same time, each of their projects also explores one of myriad tangents of the digital-analogue divide, building a line of inquiry into issues such as technical proficiency, intellectual property, and the uniqueness of the identical object. Unfold’s award-winning work has been exhibited internationally at museums such as the New Museum, New York (US); Yingge Ceramics Museum, Taipei (TW); Design Museum London (UK); Museum of Arts and Design, New York (US); Abu Dhabi Art (AE) or the Museum of Craft and Design, San Francisco (US); Jerusalem Museum (IL) and is in the collection of musea such as the Centre Pompidou (FR); Computer History Museum in Mountain View (US) or Design Museum Ghent (BE).