How did you design the new Virus picnic table? First of all, we will never start by saying ‘let’s make a new chair’, ‘let’s make a new table’ or whatever. That’s not really interesting and I don’t think you can bring innovative stuff to it. We try to analyse things before we start and one of the things we found is that most of our customers are 45 and over. But we also see that we are really successful on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and then if we look at the average age of those followers it’s under 30, so there is a huge gap. That’s the first thing. The second thing is that the maximum space that people have for living is decreasing by five square metres every year. In the 1950s something like 30 percent of people were living in cities, whereas today it’s more like 50 percent. We expect that in 2050 about 70 percent of all people will live in big cities.
/ Extremis
Dirk Wynants likes to do things differently. As designer and managing director for outdoor furniture brand Extremis, he has honed his skills in design, marketing and business but still gets his inspiration from brewing beer, sailing and riding horses. Based in one of the most rural parts of West Flanders in Belgium, Extremis makes products that are manufactured locally according to eco-design principles. Wynants calls his furniture ‘tools for togetherness’. PENNY CRASWELL caught him at the Extremis stand at the Salone to talk research, design and inspiration.
DIRK WYNANTS The Milan Report 2017 Edition
Is Virus designed for this younger generation? Yes. We see there’s a huge group of younger followers who can’t become customers. We also see that the younger generation, the millennials, all those people born in 1990 and later have a completely different attitude to life. My generation worked incredibly hard to achieve as much as possible, to buy the nicest car, have the nicest house, and what I see with my children is that they have different goals in life. Money is not the most important thing. The quality or fanciness of the car they have is not important either. So these people will probably not spend the same amount of money on furniture as we do once they get older because they have other values. So at this stage we were thinking how can we make something as simple as possible and also offer different sizes, because you’re living with two or three people or whatever.
What piece of advice would you give to a young designer or do you wish you’d been given? Well I didn’t get this advice but I did it anyway. After school my first jobs were focusing on what I needed to learn to do this job better. I think it’s important to keep learning after school and choose jobs from a perspective of learning, not the perspective of earning, and to be interested in everything. I was interested in bookkeeping, I was interested in marketing, I was interested in everything. That’s the only way you can become a good designer because designing is very complex – you need to be a multi-talented. There are so many things that go into design: materials, sociology, psychology and then you have to make it financially viable as well. You have to be a businessman. I know a lot about production, I’m the son of a carpenter, my father-in-law works in steel, I know how to weld. If you want to make good design you have to think about everything, including packaging and transport.
And that is reflected in the price point? I don’t want my designs to be elitist. Our furniture is expensive because we have the highest quality and I don’t think doing cheap things is ecologically sensible. But I try to make it as affordable as possible. I want to reach as many people as I can. That is the goal. How do you conduct your research? Going out. Not to furniture fairs though – no way! That is not where you get inspiration. Also not reading design magazines by the way, because I want to design new stuff – it’s useless to read design magazines because that’s about what’s already there. I get inspiration from sailing, beer brewing, riding horses. I have a table called Hopper which is inspired by the slanted poles that support hop plants for instance.
“I don’t want my designs to be elitist. Our furniture is expensive because we have the highest quality and I don’t think doing cheap things is ecologically sensible.”
opposite Dirk Wynants, designer and owner of Extremis (photo: Penny Craswell)
this page Virus was specifically engineered to be low cost while retaining a high quality
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