Photography by Dezeen
Industrial Facility’s Kim Colin and Sam Hecht (pictured)
A thoughtfully demonstrated approach to creative resolutions applied across a multitude of domestic and commercial products is the pinnacle of Sam Hecht and Kim Colin’s design practice Industrial Facility. The London based partnership of British designer Sam Hecht and Californian native Kim Colin prove that when designing a set of products, the end user has a clarified statement of how and when to ultilise an object’s functionality. Often their pluralistic and smooth forms acts as the purpose in housing all neccessary components, nothing more and nothing less. Take the picture photo printer for example which is a double scaled pludo box developed and produced for Epson Japan. All the elements of the printer are immediately compacted which fulfills a modern office’s requirements that being space and light efficient. In this design, the cover lid has a dual role both as the paper tray and serving as the protective overhead with battery power and main control dials all squarely attached right below the lid as the main console. Another rigorous but effective design is a 2003 telecommunications device for the Japanese company Muji. Working with the simple principles and procedure of the telephone, the curvilinear device retained only what is necessary for the caller and recipient. It is a basic step motion action: when the handset is lifted, a dial tone is rung – when the handset is put down (by the receiver button) the dial tone ends. The partnership have strived for a investigative and reductionist approach, maintaining an applied object’s core functionality and deleting superfluous elements that render worthless and trivialised. Whilst this natural and harmonious effect of design is evidently seeable in their range of glassware to more personalised object pieces such as watches, glassware and furniture for which the studio has now branched into, Sam’s tutorship at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London reflects the studio’s own manifesto. From the Magnet Light by Jocken Fadet to Climate Station by Thomas Lohfert Wagner, often an ingenious way to subvert and revised already mass-manufactured products requires a collaborative effect that seeks to harness a vehicle of language, a language of communication which enables anyone to simplify and efficiently use today’s utensils more richly and understandably easy.
