Given that all we have too many household accessories and our planet too few natural resources to justify continually producing ever more household accessories, the vast majority of which will invariably merely gather dust before being thrown out next time you move house, how should designers react?
Stop designing household accessories? Certainly one option.
Move away from resource heavy mass production to more sustainable forms of smaller scale production, so more craft than design? Without question, another option.
Stop designing objects and instead develop share/repair concepts to encourage us all to keep those knick-knacks we have little longer? A valuable idea worth exploring.
Design very simple objects which allow you to create your own household accessories as and when you want.
Option four is the one chosen by Kobe Design University student Hiroyuki Ikeuchi and his Ripple collection.
Crafted from a range of woods, occasionally combined with marble and slate, the Ripple family allows you to create your own vases, storage jars, pencil holders, loose change collectors etc, etc, etc by simply rolling up a piece of paper. Or even more simply by placing a bit of paper between wood and marble/slate.
Just one of those painfully simple solutions, and one that we’d really encourage Hiroyuki Ikeuchi to put out there as an open design resource.
Its a concept, not a product, and a truly delightful one at that.
Ripple by Hiroyuki Ikeuchi, as seen at Ventura Lambrate, Milan 2015
Ripple by Hiroyuki Ikeuchi, as seen at Ventura Lambrate, Milan 2015
Ripple by Hiroyuki Ikeuchi, as seen at Ventura Lambrate, Milan 2015