User Design

Graeme Campbell and Sebastian Kirkland of User Design stepped into the public eye last year at Design Indaba with a mission to fulfil 21^st-century creative desires. The duo designs furniture that easily rivals international offerings.

VISI spoke to Graeme about User Design’s approach, their future plans and their views on creative networking.

What are your respective design backgrounds?
Sebastian and I met while studying industrial design. We formed the company after discovering a shared appreciation for certain design aspects across the industrial, furniture, architectural and graphics industries; similar style values.

Is User Design a fulltime venture?
It’s part-time because, individually, we continue to be involved in other creative areas. We occasionally introduce User Design’s products or expertise into our other projects, for example interior design. We also custom-design furniture, which includes reworking our own products, to accommodate a particular interior or exterior environment.

Your work is pretty austere and geometric, futuristic even. How has the local market responded?
Some of the products, tables in particular, have proven quite popular, although in subsequent years we’ve seen more geometric products like this enter the market globally as this approach attracts greater appreciation. We focus on clean lines and formal characteristics, so our range is best accommodated in contemporary, minimalist environments.

What inspires your style?
User Design’s debut range of products took inspiration from structure as a concept, more than anything. Geometric relationships meet functional and ergonomic requirements with an overall unadorned aesthetic in mind. We also draw inspiration from architecture, a field we could both have ended up working in.

Why is furniture important to you?
As fans of contemporary architecture, developing the smaller elements that “complete” it appeals to us. Furniture is also an accessible outlet for exploring tangible 3D forms that play a real role in our daily lives.

What is great design?
Great design is timeless, graceful, intuitive, confident, reliable, memorable, inspiring. And more.

Do you export?
We do export and all enquiries are welcome, although most of our focus is geared toward the local market.

Your plans for 2012?
We’re working on some new furniture pieces, prototypes of which we hope to showcase later this year. We’d also like to set up a blog cataloguing the design process as it happens, including sketches, 3D concepts and final prototypes. We’ll let you know!

Anything else you’d like to share about design and your place in it?
We’d just like to encourage a greater dialogue between different design faculties in tertiary institutions. There are a lot of talented designers across different genres in South Africa, but there isn’t much networking between them. The sharing of expertise pushes everyone’s standard of work to a higher level, which is important as we collectively work toward Cape Town as World Design Capital in 2014. If anyone wants to collaborate on a project, please get in touch.

More information: www.userdesign.co.za