Back to Product, Packaging, & Furniture
Embedded Files
Irth Collection
Futuristic Palestinian furniture, re-imagining our heritage through design.
As Palestinians in the diaspora, a people at a disadvantage, we carry our culture wherever we go. It made sense to me that I do my graduation project in Germany to benefit my skills, but it made even more sense to use my heritage as inspiration. The idea of futurism is a luxury to Palestinians, but the future is something we must create; asking the question of how we would rebuild our homes once we return is inherently futuristic.
Since its inception, the aim of Futurism was to rid Italy of its past. As a movement Futurism has celebrated technology, youth, speed, and dynamism. Most importantly in my context, it has been an inspiration to many later movements such as Neo-Futurism and Afrofuturism, later moving to the Arab world with the recent start of Palestinian Futurism.
Costumes, characters, etc. Workers in mother-of-pearl. (~1920) Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/item/2019698042/
Southern Palestine. [Between 1898 and 1946] Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/item/2019700463/
Heritage is an heirloom.
My experience is solely based on stories and pictures. Culture gets passed down, just like the skills of crafts handed over to many generations. I started my research with the word 'Palestine' but the deeper I went, the more emotional it got. Emotions are sometimes dismissed by designers, but they are the basis of our relationship with the inanimate.
Emotional design is what makes objects things we love and hold on to. Our relationship with the inanimate is a driving force for our choices and dictates how we go about our daily lives, and that connection is something a designer has the power to emphasize.
Looking into daily life, I knew that in many Arab and Asian regions sitting on the floor with a mattress beneath was commonplace.
Daily life was simple. Furniture mainly consisted of wooden tables, mattresses for sitting and sleeping, rugs, and straw mats. I needed to bring these elements into my design. I wanted to mimic the mattress's functionality in other materials.
Thinking of ways to bring embroidery into the future, I experimented with soldering directly on metal mesh. The idea of replacing textiles with wire mesh, and threads with molten metal came together to form a new technique of bringing a traditional craft into the future.
Another big influence of my pieces came from finding many straw mats in these archived photos. Usually seen hanging, they were a big part of everyday life. Straw mats were mainly made by women, and they had angled and circular designs usually in different colours.
For my design, the combination of natural wood and steel was crucial to give both feelings of earthiness and futurism in a complementary way.
This light is meant to be a reminder of hanging woven straw mats of the past. Taking a futuristic twist with the metal and embroidery creates shadows of your own heritage based on the motifs embroidered.
Mattresses in the past served many purposes, you could use them for sleeping, sitting, and lounging as well. That idea continued on with this piece as a lounge chair.
With this design, I used the same ideology of having it closer to the ground but with curves to contour the body and provide a comfortable space to sit.
For the side table, it was important for me to not use the embroidery and make it out of a combination of natural olive wood logs and olive wood boards. This piece acts as a buffer between the others but still connects them by using the same visual identity.
One aspect I had in mind for this chair was interaction and dynamism. The idea was to be inspired by the downward motion of sitting mattresses that used to be common in the past, which is why I decided to design it to be lower and closer to the ground. As the user sits down the metal sheet will slide back slightly and provide flexibility that is not commonly found in these materials.
In conclusion, I believe that this design and the new techniques find a middle point to connect my original 4 concepts, sustainability by materials and heirlooms, futurism through new techniques and form, heritage with materials and embroidery, and finally emotions achieved by presence & form & materials.
Explore Branding & Editorial
Google Sites
Report abuse