Dunja Weber

During my time with James I have followed the realization of various exhibitions and exhibition stands. One of the first ones was “The View from Domus” an exhibition about 75 years of photography for Domus which took place in the Armani Teatro a building by Tadao Ando in Milano. The exhibition consisted of huge “lightboxes” with backlit photography. The funny thing was that the architecture was so clean and rigorous that there was no power supply available. This is why James came up with the idea of bringing the power in from the ceiling (the only point where it was available) and passing it through the coloured tubes.

The same concept was employed for “Kuramata’s Tokyo” (also organised by Domus) the following year.

The most important exhibition I have followed for James was when he was nominated guest of honour at the Interieur fair in Kortrijk in 2004. Instead of showing his own work he decided to design an exhibition called “Design Anatomy”. It consisted of a series of products ranging from upholstered, wooden and plastic furniture to a Ducati motocycle, a washing machine and a toilet. All were shown complete and “exploded”. This way James wanted to illustrate the production processes that are behind different products. The exhibition was conceived in collaboration with Marimekko. This is why we had a ceiling with glow-in-the-dark Unikko flowers.

The concept for the book publishers company Phaidon is interesting in so far that it was designed and manufactured in order to be modular and reusable. The elements can be reorganized to fit different stand sizes and locations. This was not only a good intention but has actually worked over several years now.

During the eight years of working with James Irvine I have helped to develop a large number of products but there are a few projects whose development I have particularly enjoyed. Funnily all three of them have movement in them.

Pens seem to be the perfect object for designers onto which to apply their style to. But what is there to be invented? For the “S3″ pen collection for Spalding James invented a clip which is activated by a button rather than working as a spring. This way shirt or jacket pockets don’t risk ripping.

There are many 3-legged folding tables with a removable table top, there are far less 4-legged ones. The reason being that if you use a central hinge point the corners of the table top do not line up with the feet but are automatically slightly twisted. To avoid this James had the idea of curving the legs so as to bring the feet back to where they should be, straight under the corners of the top. The “X4″ table is produced by the Swedish company Swedese and the first one was bought by the king of Sweden to do his watercolours outdoors.

Some tools are generic, a knife for example. It can be used to peel an apple, to cut some cheese, to spread butter… and some tools are very specific for a specific action, a butterknife for example. The Germans seem to want to take this idea to the extreme. One day they asked James design a Spaghetti Tester! Being a Foil-Cutter “Captain Cut” seems to be one of those objects but actually turns out to be rather useful in the end. It is placed on top of a wine-bottle. By pressing the button while slightly twisting it it’s 4 little cutting-wheels cut the foil in a clean and easy way. It has turned out to be a very welcome gift!

When Olivetti decided to launch itself into the world of consumer products, James Irvine, teamed up with Alberto Meda, was comissioned to design the first product for this line. I think this was the most important project I have followed with James.

I realize thst it was a very rare occasion to being able to take part, right from the start, and to every aspect of the product development of the new area of Olivetti. Everything had to be defined. In a very Italian way Olivetti involved us into everything from the design strategy, the discussion about the product functions to the definition of the interface and icons (which were studied together with IDEO, London) down to the product logo and the product communication. We worked together with the marketing department as well as the engineering department. Since the project was very important for Olivetti even the highest levels of managment took part in many meetings. The amazing fact is that Olivetti is the only European brand that produces consumer inkjet printers! The competitors are Epson, Canon, Hp and Lexmark!

James was involved so much into this new project of Olivetti that he also ended up designing their product manuals and their fairstands at IFA Berlin, Smau Milano and Cebit Hannover. Since I was his Olivetti assistant I followed all of these projects with him.