Thanks to a string of projects that playfully dismantle conventions, the all-female design collective Front, founded by four statuesque Swedes in 2003, quickly found itself in the spotlight. So it comes as little surprise that Sofia Lagerkvist, Charlotte von der Lancken, Anna Lindgren, and Katja Sävström took home the Designer of the Future award at Design Miami/Basel in June 2007. Being crowned queens at one of the world's most prestigious art and design crossover events belies the fact that these women are hell-bent on shaking things up.
With an approach that's closer to Conceptual Art than traditional industrial design, Front is rarely concerned with function. Instead it aims to provoke—why else would the designers create a life-size black polyester horse for Moooi that serves as an otherwise ordinary 60-watt lamp? "The most important thing isn't whether a project's going to be a chair, a table, or a mobile phone," says Von der Lancken, a brunette with an intense gaze and razor-sharp cheekbones. "It's about the idea behind the product and about how things are made."
Stockholm-based Front started making noise with a handful of unlikely collaborators—gerbils. Rather than designing wallpaper with a set pattern, the group tossed rolls of paper into cages and allowed the rodents to gnaw at random. Along with coat hooks that bear the traces of slithering snakes and a lamp cast from a rabbit hole, the Design by Animals collection put Front squarely in the vanguard before its members had even graduated from college.
Two years later, Front released another stunner with Sketch Furniture: Using motion-capture sensors, they sketched tables, chairs, and lamps into thin air and then printed the imaginary forms into reality with lasers. "We wanted to make the first sketch become the finished object," Von der Lancken explains. The plump, ropy furniture looks like squished-together Play-Doh.
The group's latest collection has people doing double takes. One cupboard borrows rotating slats from advertising billboards to shift its surface decoration every few seconds; a glossy black armoire comes printed with uncanny reflections of rooms somewhere else; and globe-shaped lamps appear to be growing plant life on the inside. "We work a lot with expectations," says Von der Lancken. "You think you know how things are going to be, but then they behave in a way you don't expect." The same concept holds true for Front itself: You can study the work, but there's no way of knowing where these designers might be headed next. —TIM MCKEOUGH
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