At the risk of alienating the whole of Switzerland, it is probably fair to say that globally Swiss design is most successfully represented by pointy chocolate.
And the font Helvetica. Although that may only be an issue to the hard working young men of Berlin-Mitte.
With their Swiss focus the organisers of the 2010 DMY Berlin set out to try to introduce other facets and directions of Swiss design to a wider public.
Something which they achieved; albeit with a couple of provisos.
The idea of jointly presenting the Design Preis Schweiz and the Eidgenössische Preise für Design was excellent and a concept that allowed visitors the chance to view a nice broad selection of products and styles.
We were particularly taken with Flip by Adrien Rovero, not because one can covert it from a sofa to a table, but because as a sofa it works wonderfully with the "in-built" side tables.
Just wonderful.
In fact it works so well as a sofa that we find the "conversion facility" an unnecessary complication of the design. Also Herrendiener by Moritz Schmid impressed us with its clear lines, competent construction and happy-go-lucky cheek.
However for us it wasn't all living in a mountain hut with with grandpa and goat Peter; there was also a little bit of suffering with the wealthy foster family in the city.
One of the biggest Swiss stands was that from ETH Zurich with their FIDU technology. Which was displayed at DMY 2009. We like it, find it a fascinating process, like the furniture that they produce and last year had an interesting and long conversation with Oskar Zieta about the process and its development. For us there is no doubt that it has a lot of potential. But the display was simply a repeat of last years. And surely no one can be happy with that, not DMY, not ETH Zurich and also not Zieta.
Secondly in a year when DMY Berlin were celebrating all that is good, positive and original about Swiss design the decision by the organisers to use a Berlin modular furniture system that bears an uneasy resemblance to the 20 year older Swiss System USM Haller was in our opinion unfortunate. If not wrong. We appreciate that they are keen to promote what Berlin has to offer; however.....
For some both points may be small, but they annoyed us.
But on the whole the impression of contemporary Swiss design presented at DMY Berlin, while not enough to allow one to to form a definitive opinion on Swiss design, it was enough to encourage a look behind the pointy chocolate.
