Product Design Professor Earns International Recognitions
The product designs of John Arndt have been winning international acclaim with awards, exhibits and publications. His concept kitchen Flow 2 recently received a Silver IDEA in the Home Living category from the 2010 International Design Excellence Awards.
“Once you have determined what is useful and necessary, make it as beautiful as possible,” said Arndt, assistant professor of product design, referring to a Shaker philosophy. “This applies not only to the objects themselves but all of the corresponding details. I think this is how we try to approach design.”
Created as part of his Studio Gorm practice, Flow 2 originated as his master’s thesis project. The self-contained system participates in the natural cycle of food preparation and disposal, so that earthenware clay bins preserve food, food scraps are composted and drying dishes water plants.
“The kitchen seemed an ideal space because it is a big consumer of materials, water, and energy,” Arndt said. “By looking at natural systems, there is no waste, so the idea was to integrate these systems into the home and scale them down to something that could be used in a small apartment.”
Arndt first joined the university in 2008 to help jumpstart the product design program. He had already founded Studio Gorm with his wife, Wonhee Jeong, who also teaches at the UO as an adjunct instructor. They met in the Netherlands at the Design Academy Eindhoven and settled in Eugene, where they explore simple, natural systems of design.
“Our design style is friendly and modern,” says Arndt. “It’s minimalist and logical but very human. We try to make things that are smart and simple but just a bit awkward in a way that makes them approachable. We think of our design a bit like the local food movement that is going on currently, with good ingredients minimally processed.”
After founding Studio Gorm in 2007, Arndt and Jeong presented their work at the Milan Furniture Fair in April of that year, and the following July, were invited to exhibit at the Tendence Lifestyle fair in Frankfurt at show called Talents, an exhibition of upcoming young designers.
Their work has been featured in design magazines and books, primarily in Europe. Flow 2 will be included in Product Design in the Sustainable Era, published by Taschen, and also the forthcoming The Trend Forecasters Handbook by Martin Raymond.
Their Peg furniture, Flow Kitchen, Camp Bench, and Camp Desk are part of a current exhibit at the Direktoren Haus in Berlin in conjunction with the International Design Fair DMY 2010. And they were invited to include their Camp Bench as part of the Unexpected Guests exhibit this April in Milan at the Bagatti Valsecchi Museum. Coinciding with the Milan Furniture Fair, Unexpected Guests contrasted contemporary designs inside historic house museums. “I am probably proudest of the exhibition we just opened in Berlin,” Arndt said. “We put a lot of work into producing several new designs, which were well received.
With popular support for their work, Arndt and Jeong are now researching how to produce their work locally via small shops and fabricators, potentially evolving to a larger scale of production.
As for future projects, Arndt said he aims to have a new body of work ready to present in spring 2011 at the ICFF (International Contemporary Furniture Fair) in New York City.