Thwart Design’s sense of humor is amazing, both paying homage to and making fun of the design world in projects such as “Tools for Dying” (below). Rob Price, the founder, does awesome work across the board. In addition to interviewing him about what Thwart’s all about, we’ve added his Pork Chop piggy bank to our webstore for a limited time.
Why did you start Thwart Design?
A year out of school, I realized I really needed to have a creative outlet. I had a handful of friends that felt the same way, and I wanted to create a design collective as a venue for people to express their ideas and an avenue in which they could turn their vision into reality. The idea was to do something on the side that would be design for art sake. So I created Thwart Design – Thwart meaning to stop, put an end to, or to go around. It asks you to question design, and do something the opposite of it.
What I really liked about Thwart Design was just having a collective of creative people working together and supporting each other. In college you have this amazing collective energy. There is this driving peer network that really helps you be successful. I wanted to have that again.
What else did you notice, making the jump from school to the real world?
Like most art school graduates, I had unrealistic expectations when I finished school. I got really caught up in a hyperbolic design world that you read about in Wallpaper. The one with design rock-stars and these grand archetypes. With all due respect to design media, it represents a very small sliver of the design world. What they show is going to sell magazines, and struggling art school graduates toiling away in the trenches won’t.
When I graduated in 2002, I was going to do my own thing. Three months later, I had a ton of student loans and no income to pay for them. My needs changed, and I got a housewares job designing product for brands such as KitchenAid and Cuisinart. It was a good, senior position and gave me great experience in mass-market product design. But It wasn’t like I was Pablo Picasso, coming up with anything I wanted, and getting it manufactured.
That’s the real design world, though; those are the jobs that are out there and those are the jobs that round out your portfolio and help prepare you to launch your own projects. You learn a lot in those trenches. To no fault of Pratt’s, they don’t really set you up for the day-to-day of working in design. For the first year after graduating, I was definitely feeling my way around, independently, and in a way I’m thankful for that because I learned a lot about what I needed.
Tell us about your DWR projects.
In 2003 or 2004, I did a project called “Design Without Reach”. It parodied, and at the same time paid homage, to Design Within Reach. I took all these products of theirs and showed how to make them out of househole items – like a Tootsie-Pop version of the Nelson Clock. It did well on the blogs, got a lot of attention, and drew people into the website. At the time people were doing a lot of DIY stuff – I even got a few book offers – way more attention that I thought I was going to get.
Recently my fiancee and I produced a sequel called the “Tools for Dying” collection, because DWR was opening its Tools for Living stores in New York and California. I couldn’t resist.
You’ve also organized a few Thwart Design shows. How did that come about?
I used that momentum from the “Design Without Reach” project to book a show for ICFF in 2004. I called the Thwart Design contributors, and we had 2 1/2 months to create a cohesive show which ended up being called The Living Room. We set up a living room, and each product was a part of it. We had a couch, curtains, a mirror, lamps – all the essentials. Since it was a “living” room, all the things were either once living, or objects that were already dead and given another life. I made a ceramic vase that had a print of a bunch of dirt around it, so it was almost like replanting your flowers. It was a lot of fun, and cool to be a part of that ICFF world.
In 2007 I organized another show in Dumbo; a charity event. I took a bit different strategy in that I asked a bunch of designers to make sustainable green clocks for a competition called “Make Time for a Green Cause.” We held it at Spring gallery, and it was a great success. We had a ton of support – fifty local designers submitted clocks, and we auctioned them all off. All the money we raised went to this organization that would plant trees. We ended up planting something like 40,000 trees from the profits – it was a great event. I think that’s such a great feeling for people who get so stuck in their design-related day jobs that they don’t have the opportunity or time to participate in a show. To be able to facilitate that was really cool. Plus, I met my future wife at that show.
One of my favorite pieces is your clock, which I saw at Spring gallery.
Spring now produces my clocks for me, since demand was too high for me to continue making the clocks on my own. I used to make them myself until this one point; I remember it so vividly – I was living in Dumbo, my studio was in the Navy Yard, and I needed to drop off a shipment at Spring. I had this whole elaborate assembly line, where I was cutting pieces of molding, gluing them, clamping, and spray-mounting.
I stayed up all night making these clocks that needed to ship the next day. That night there was a torrential downpour, and I was on my bike, with two garbage bags full of boxed clocks, no sleep, riding my bike uphill back to Dumbo, hours before I had to go to work. It was a labor of love, but after that, I told Spring that I needed assistance, and they started working with an artisan in Vermont to manufacture my clock for me.
What are you working on now?
Since then I’ve done a few other products, and I’m working on some patterns and putting together a group show. Pretty recently, I manufactured a small run of a piggy banks that look like a pork chop. I actually scanned a pork chop, and then printed that image on ceramic. I had 50 of them made by these great potters in Greenpoint. That was something I had to invest a lot of money in, because of the printing on both sides and the lengthy and involved glazing process.
We love Rob’s Pork Chop piggy bank so much that we’ve put it up for sale exclusively in our webstore. $60, printed and glazed ceramic, handmade in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.