Designer of the Month: Hella Jongerius

Week 2: industry and craft

 Soft Urn, 1994 and 1999. Design: Hella Jongerius. Distributors: droog + JongeriusLab. Courtesy of Design Museum, London.

Hella Jongerius studied industrial design at the Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands during the 1990s, a period that coincided with the birth of conceptual design.[1] Which goes a long way towards explaining Jongerius' career as a product designer. As there's so much overlap, it's not always easy to distinguish between conceptual, product and industrial designers. My categorization of Jongerius as a product designer is mainly because, when you look at her body of work, it's easy to see the ways in which her design career is focused on the creation of products, with the aim for these designs to be produced and sold. Of course, unlike concept design, the end result of which may never see production, and industrial design, which rests firmly within the realm of mass-production, Jongerius' work is unique in the way that she manages to fuse industry and craft, high and low tech, tradition and the contemporary.[3] "I am a designer," Jongerius has explained. "Craft is a theme in my work. Mixing it with the industrial process is like mixing high and low tech, mixing first and third world cultures, mixing tradition with a contemporary language, different ages and techniques. I am trying to find ways to make unique pieces from industrial processes and using archetypal forms in new techniques or materials."[4]

B-Set, 1997. Porcelain, glaze. Design: Hella Jongerius. Distributors: Royal Tichelaar Makkum. Courtesy of Jongeriuslab.

After graduating from the Design Academy Eindhoven in 1993, Jongerius worked on projects for Droog Design before starting her own studio in Rotterdam, called Jongeriuslab, which she relocated to Berlin in 2008.[5] Jongerius came of age as a designer during a period when the environmental and human price to be paid for the Modernist movement of the early 20th century - which romanticized the uniformity of industrial production - were truly beginning to be felt.[6] While other designers chose to focus on the environmental crisis, Jongerius looked at the human factor, using her role as a designer to develop products that successfully combine both mass-production and craft.[7] This is achieved through a variety of methods: using techniques and details that have traditionally be relegated to the realm of craftsmanship, such as the hand-painted details on her mass-produced IKEA vases; creating the illusion of preciousness by programming what look like flaws or signs of aging into the production process, such as with her decision to intentionally have her white porcelain B-Set dinner service fired at an unusually high temperature to slightly distort the pieces; and creating discrepancies in her work, such as her Polder Sofa for Vitra, where each part is upholstered in a slightly different shade of the same color.[8]

IKEA PS Jonsberg, 2005. Stoneware, earthenware, porcelain and bone china, glaze and various decorations. Design: Hella Jongerius. Distributors: IKEA, Sweden. Courtesy of Jongeriuslab.

As Jongerius explains of her IKEA PS Jonsberg design:

This responds to the challenge of how to pre­serve traces of the craft process within a mass-produced product. The same archetypal forms are made in four ceramic techniques and their decorations refer to specific parts of the world, the Soviet Union, Africa, Asia and Europe. This kind of timeconsuming craftsmanship is only possible at affordable prices when commissioned by manufacturers who can produce and distribute the objects in large quantities.[9]

While it may seem counter-intuitive for a designer like Jongerius, who puts such a high premium on craft within her designs, to create mass-produced objects at all, it is exactly by working within this system of production that Jongerius is able to create the aesthetic she desires without loosing affordability. As Alice Rawsthorn explains, "by designing her objects to look aged, flawed, eccentric or artisinal, Jongerius disguises their sameness by making them appear quirky and idiosyncratic. As a result her industrial products offer us the functional benefits of sameness - strength, resilience, affordability and precision... - without the monotony."[10]

[1] Louise Schouwenberg, "Complete Works," from Hella Jongerius: Misfit, ed. Louise Schouwenberg, Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli, (London: Phaidon Press Limited, 2010), 147.


[2] Ibid.


[3] Ibid.


[4] Design Museum online, "Hella Jongerius Q & A," from The European Design Show: Design Museum Touring Exhibition, http://designmuseum.org/design/hella-jongerius, (accessed February 9, 2012).


[5] Louise Schouwenberg, "Complete Works," from Hella Jongerius: Misfit, ed. Louise Schouwenberg, Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli, (London: Phaidon Press Limited, 2010), 147.

[6] Alice Rawsthorn, "The Human Factor,"  from Hella Jongerius: Misfit, ed. Louise Schouwenberg, Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli, (London: Phaidon Press Limited, 2010), 75.

[7] Ibid., 75.


[8] Ibid., 75-6.


[9] Jongeriuslab online, "IKEA PS Jonsberg," http://www.jongeriuslab.com/site/html/work/ikea_ps_jonsberg/, (accessed February 9, 2012).


[10] Alice Rawsthorn, "The Human Factor,"  from Hella Jongerius: Misfit, ed. Louise Schouwenberg, Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli, (London: Phaidon Press Limited, 2010), 76.