/ 7 January 2011

Looking at things differently

Award-winning designer Adriaan Hugo, half of the dynamic design crime-fighting duo, Dokter and Misses, has a knack for taking household commodities and transforming them into something simpler, better and much, much cooler. A powder-coated steel container that turns your plastic bag into a cool rubbish bin? Sure. (It’s called Chekas Bin.)

‘Our aesthetic is driven by function quite a lot. I work with very strict parameters and try to push as far as I possibly can. [I] try to add something without making it look like I’ve added bells and whistles. I want to make the functional as beautiful as possible. It usually starts from a need — how Katy [his wife, Katy Taplin, the other half of Dokter and Misses] and I live; what our space needs.

Then we think: how do we solve that? We relook at production and change it. Or we innovate. What table would I like to own? How would I make that in South Africa? Manufacturing drives the process a lot. People here are used to industrial manufacture, or pieces that are quite officey. They struggle to get the quality of the finishes. And I’m constantly fighting against China. What people perceive to be the right price. If you get something that’s cheap, someone is getting taken advantage of ­somewhere along the way.

‘Design also has to do with my mindspace at a specific time — the music I’m listening to; the stuff I’m looking at. Lately I’ve been listening to Bob Dylan again. Dylan always triggers something.

‘The Easy Now Mirror was born at the same time as the Series A collection — it has the same angles. It started as a drawing — I was trying to work out how things would balance, how to keep the weight up, playing with pulling the legs through the front surfaces. I started with the other Easy Now pieces and then I found a better way to produce what I’d drawn. Using wood decreased the weight and the wood has got a more 3D feel to it. This product wanted to be in 3D. Then I started working on proportions, thinking how it would fit into a domestic kind of environment, pulling another piece through the front so there was somewhere to hang a hat, a scarf, a bag —

‘The mirror is interesting but simple. Its footprint is not too big. Its stability is good. It’s designed for a side view — a little bit like a kid building something, with its overemphasised joins. It also packs flat.

‘We don’t want to be making generic things. That’s boring. It’s not what we set out to do. We’d like our pieces to be handed over to the kids. The stuff you keep because it’s ­amazing.”

The Easy Now range can be seen in Johannesburg at the Dokter and Misses stores in 44 Stanley, Milpark, and CO-OP, 68 Juta Street, or in Cape Town at the Dokter and Misses David West collaboration at 113 Long Street. For more information go to www.dokterandmisses.com