V-ZUG Inspirations Magazine - Magazine - Page 15
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KONSTANTIN GRCIC
improving them step by step. Besides, I just love serial production. Seeing things being produced in large quantities gives
me immense pleasure.
Last year you started your own brand, 25KG. Why did you
take this step, and why now? Until five, six or even seven
years ago, I could never have imagined myself doing it. Something changed in the routine of my own practice. But also
because of the digital tools we spoke about. They make it
much easier to set up your own label, production, and communication channels. What is important is that my label is not a
critique of the industry as it is. I still work within the industry.
That’s my main business and I love it. After all, 25KG products are designed for industrial production. However, with the
streamlining we discussed, I found myself lacking the opportunity to contribute to what I call cultural production. I missed
bringing ideas forward and putting designs into the debate
– not just as renderings or statements, but as real things. 25KG
is a small operation and I get a lot of joy out of it. It feeds energy
back into the studio.
You refer to the 25KG products as things. We have three
things in the market now and a fourth will be launched on
the occasion of Milan Design Week. They’re called things
because that’s what they are. They are physical objects, and
all of them have an element of abstraction. So, I don’t want to
give them names like Billy or Bob, because that would assign
them a character. And that would create an identity or image
for them. A thing is a thing. Let’s find out what kind of thing it
is and what it can do.
What qualities does a design need to have to become a
thing? First of all, it has to be something that none of my
commercial clients would want to or be able to produce. With
the possible exception of THING_03, they are all quite raw. I
find this quality important but it’s difficult to negotiate with
“I see a real danger of losing the other side of creativity: the side
that is neither efficient nor professional, but which allows for
chance, intuition and poetry. All of those soft factors.”
