A lot of great studios strutted their stuff at last week's Stockholm Design Week, including Note Design Studio. Their Marginal Notes #2 exhibition showcased an utterly unique approach to design. After a trip "deep into the forest to explore, measure and collect" and take notes on their surroundings, studio mates Alexis Holmqvist, Susanna Wahlin, Johannes Carlstrom, Kristoffer Fagerstrom and Cristiano Pigazzini went back to their office in Stockholm, where they paged through their notebooks, not for the notes themselves, but for the ideas in the margins.
The outcome? According to the studio, "many seemed to have a common theme that we simply called "Base Camp"; the simplistic materials and shapes of scientific field expedition tools adapted to stand wear and tear...We ended up with a diverse collection of colours, shapes, materials and expressions; just the way we like it."
The resulting furniture exhibition at Stockholm Design Week was a mix of those aforementioned simple shapes and clean lines in materials like untreated wood, metal and fabric. The color palette is bright green, red, blue, orange and purple. A good example of their efforts is the Settler seat, a cylindrical, metal bench perched on a wooden stand that was inspired by the logs the studio members sat on in the forest. "The iconic shape of a log on a sawbuck inspired these benches, since a dead tree in the forest is really the best place for a short rest," Fagerstrom says.
Other recent projects include Folded Functionality, a bright, striped room divider made from fair trade materials, the result their collaboration with Afro Art. They also design the friendliest office spaces, coffee shops and banks you're likely to see. And they're Swedish so yes, they've done work for IKEA. Take a look at the rest of their work.
