Misfit
noun
1. something that does not fit or fits badly
2. a person not suited in behaviour or attitude to a particular social environment
The project ´Misfits´ uses emergent technologies of capture and fabrication to revalue hardwood timber components normally deemed worthless by the timber industry: tree forks, inosculations, crooked, irregular and infested parts of trees. The project bypasses the industrialized processing and standardization of timber, instead regarding the idiosyncrasies of misfit timbers as design opportunities.
The idea of ´Misfits” isn’t just understood in a material, but also in a conceptual manner: students were asked to disobediently and speculatively challenge inherited categories such as ´furniture” and ´product”. The starting point for this was a collective, critical and contemporary re-invention of the Bauhaus’ Direktor*innenzimmer: how do we challenge 100 years of musealization? This formed the basis for the development of the students’ individual and group projects. Our mode of operation: prototyping; our ethos: provocation through precision.
The project was accompanied by a series of excursions: a guided tour by the local forester, a trip to the largest hardwood timber processing plant in Thuringia and, of course, a visit of the Direktor*innenzimmer. It was technically flanked by the skills module ‘A Mill an‘ Toys - Creative Problem solving for CNC machining’ and theoretically framed by the integrated seminar ‘Computerized Materialization’.
Lecturers: Jun.-Prof. Dr. Thomas Pearce, Philipp Enzmann