ENVIRONMENTAL DESIGN
Do we really need a new chair? A new lamp? You’d expect a designer to say, “Why, of course! And let me draw you one!” Not so with 5.5 Designers, a collective design group of five graduates from the prestigious Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Appliqués et des Métiers d’Art in Paris. What’s their answer? “Of course not! Give us what’s broke; we’ll fix it.”
Since 2003, they have been causing a stir in the landscape of consumer products. Vincent Baranger, Jean-Sébastien Blanc, Anthony Lebossé, David Lebreton, and Claire Renard scour our alleys and yard sales in order to return their found objects as unusual diversions from their original use.
Wallpaper Games
One of their first projects was called Réanim, short for reanimation. Simply enough, you could take your out-of-use belongings to a warehouse the designers had transformed into a studio-cum-infirmary where, with their imagination, some tape, and other auxiliaries, they deliver an object with a second life. The seats of old wooden chairs are replaced by fluorescent Plexiglas, or three old tables become a bookcase.
The renewal of usage is born out of a reflection on our relationship with our environment. It is not a do-it-yourself hobby; it raises questions as to the way we look at the objects we desire, purchase, break, and throw out. By restoring the existence of an artefact, the five designers-poets as much as they are citizens-are encouraging us to look at their form, function, and history with new eyes.
That doesn’t mean the five “doctors” don’t know how to have fun. With one of their more recent projects, Wallpaper Games, they created wallpaper to write on, with mazes, noughts, and crosses (crosswords). Whoever said games were not important too?