The Swallowtail Mirror by Australian designer Bernard Benny.
Dress me up by Warsaw’s Academy of Fine Arts (Faculty of Design) graduate Magda Pawlas, is an armchair with a sleeveless jacket that can either be worn by the user or slipped over the chair to provide cushioning.
One of the most ingenious projects to be shortlisted was Grip Chłodzący (Cooling Grip) by Justyna Strociak and Magda Gąsiorowska. Inspired by natural ventilation often used in architecture, the 3D printed bicycle handbar directs the flow of air caused by the movement of the bike into the cyclist’s hands to keep them cool. Magda Gąsiorowska and Justyna Strociak are in their fourth year of Industrial Design at the School of Form in Poznań.
The Kawara Chair by Tsuyoshi Hayashi is designed to salvage industrially rejected Japanese roof top tiles that would otherwise have been discarded. The tile simply slots into the wooden frame without the need for glue or nails.
Jan Godlewski’s Patyczaki (Stick Insects) uses 25×25 mm ash wood slats and fastening elements made of duralumin PA6 to create a modular system of furniture that users can design and make at home. The table, bookshelf, and lamp are just three examples of the potentially infinite possibilities.
zestawyZestaw (setSet) by Joanna Jurga, Dominika Wysogląd, and Martyna Ochojska is a collection of edible tableware, which after a meal, can be eaten, fed to the birds, or thrown away to decompose with the food waste.
Alicja Patanowska collects glassware discarded on the streets of London in the early hours of the morning, and hand-throws bespoke ceramic forms to give each one a new function as a plant pot or vase, hence the name of the project: Plantacja (Plantation).
Tapei-born Fabricia Chang studied at Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands. Flexible Order is an attempt to give people the tools to break out of the aesthetic conformity she noticed there and express their own personal aesthetic preferences, albeit within uniform and ordered parameters.
Latko & Fragstein (Michał Latko, Łukasz Fragstein) have designed A1, the first model from a collection of products that are designed to make use of vanishing crafts typical of the Silesia region – an area of Central Europe now mostly in Poland, with parts in the Czech Republic and Germany.
Dziupla by Polish practice Menthol Architects (Liliana Krzycka, Rafał Pieszko) is a nesting box for sparrows, nuthatches, flycatchers, redstarts, and woodpeckers, designed to be installed on walls and trees in urban environments.
And last, but by no means least, the winner of the 2014 Make Me Competition was Studio Blond & Bieber (Essi Johanna Glomb & Rasa Weber) with Algaemy. Algaemy is an analogue textile-printer which produces its own pigment made from algae. The resulting textiles changes color over time when exposed to sunlight.
