2018
Designer of the Year
deFORM
Designer of the Year
deFORM
Pilsner Urquell auction bottle (Bomma), Orbital pendant lightings (Bomma)
The studio, established six years ago by Václav Mlynář and Jakub Pollág - both former students of the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague and both currently active in London – is extending its portfolio with remarkable projects every year and courageously plows through the waters of international design. Last year, it rippled them with no less than two extraordinary items.
The first one is a wooden shelving system Zig Zag, created for the Swedish company Hem that already has it on offer, which represents vet another success of Czech design abroad. It is a refined, immensely high-quality and at the same time smart piece of furniture due to its ingenious solution based on maximum serviceability. Assembly is extremely fast (the studio states a mere thirty seconds): there is no need for either tools or connecting material. The flat packaging, too, is user-friendly, and is thus very easy to move. This, as the authors themselves claim, will be welcomed especially by the still-expanding community of "modern nomads who keep moving from one place to another and reduce their property to a frugal minimum".
The second achievement of the studio is a table game with an excellently chosen title Koski, a diploma work with which Václav Mlynář in 2016 successfully graduated from the London Royal College of Art. The surprising fusion of the world of physical playing with a wooden construction kit and the world of digital games appeared to be an ingenious idea, which is also proved by the enormous positive response from all over the world. Today's generation of children suckled on computers can thus, thanks to the Koski project, be given one more chance and desire in an amusing form to return to assembling wooden cubes, which provides for almost endless choices. The studio, which even founded its own company specializing in the development and finalization of this project, is currently preparing new digital games for this purpose, whether from its own production or in cooperation with external studios.
Tereza Bruthansová
