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January 22, 2017

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Designer focuses on freedom, evolution

Source: Shanghai Daily | January 22, 2017, Sunday | Print Edition

WHO is he?

JOSEPH Dejardin is a co-director of TAXONYM, a practice pursuing a variety of disparate interests within film, animation, fashion, set design, publishing and art; and of KIDS, a practice focusing upon fashion sets, retail design and conceptual furniture projects. He also works as a set and exhibition designer, and architect under his own name.

Tell us about some of your works, and name the one you are most proud of.

I have recently worked on numerous successful collaborations with artists, fashion designers and musicians. These have included projects with Feng Chen Wang, Marta Jakubowski, Places + Faces and Nzca Lines.

Most recently, I have been collaborating with Feng Chen Wang on her showroom and presentation at Shanghai Fashion Week SS2017. The showroom contrasted contemporary industrial materials and objects, such as steel roll-up shutters and ratchet straps, with a run-down period setting. The space was lit in a futuristic manner using LED strip lighting, while all the old disused wiring and shutters were left as found.

Are you currently involved with any project?

At TAXONYM we are working on a series of stage shows and visuals for musician Nzca Lines, and on a major public engagement project at the Tate Modern, London ­— “Future Medina” — examining the future of museums. This is a space that will host a series of installations and workshops by a range of artists and provocateurs, treating a floor of the gallery as a “Medina.”

At KIDS, we have been working on a series of furniture projects looking at the relationship between value, time and materiality, and on several retail projects internationally.

Describe your design style.

I don’t necessarily have a style across my practice; there exists however a coherent approach that does link my work. I try to begin with analyses of existing spaces, objects, materialities, actions and relationships at a specific setting or time, or in response to a set of stimuli. The challenges and desires of a project can then be considered in light of this and solutions sought through the manipulation, combining and juxtaposing of these existing parameters with the new.

I believe strongly in freedom of use and allowing the user of a design to interpret and use it however they see fit, even if that means changing its form and meaning completely. This means a design becomes a continuously evolving entity.

Where are you most creative?

Anywhere there are people.

It is inspiring to watch people, how they interact with the world around them, and what constitutes that world. For me these elements and relationships form the toolkit with which one can begin to design. Without people there would be no need for design. Areas where people, “culture” and perceived “nature” come into contact are of interest for this reason.

What does your home mean to you?

To me home is about providing the basic functions of existence. Everything else is superfluous.

I think this is reflected both in my approach to design and in terms of taste. I tend to favor found space and objects, minimal intervention, and inherent functionality, and then work from that, manipulating and adding as necessary.

What do you collect?

I try not to collect or keep too much of anything.

I‘m of the opinion that if you can remember something then there is no need to keep it. Its associations will still be there. In case of forgetting, just keep an image. Things of course get lost in time, but I think that is a worthwhile price to pay for greater freedom. One notable exception to this is that I seem to be building a sprawling collection of both books and online images.

What will be the next big design trend?

With the increased speed and connectivity of the Internet, everything is happening more and more simultaneously, and time is collapsing into a continuous, dense now.

In light of this, design that fuses and confuses supposedly contrasting and often conflicting concepts is becoming increasingly common; things that were previously seen as heterogeneous or even antithetical now exist together. I believe this trend can be seen in various forms across all fields.

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