This article needs additional or more specific images .(June 2024) |
Michael Young | |
---|---|
Born | Sunderland, England | 23 August 1966
Nationality | British |
Education | Kingston University |
Occupation | Industrial designer |
Website | michael-young |
Michael Young (born 23 August 1966) is a British industrial designer and creative director based in Hong Kong. He works in the areas of product, furniture and interior design with studios in Hong Kong and Brussels. [1] He is known for unconventional use of materials and manufacturing processes, [2] and collaborations with brands such as Brionvega, Cappellini, KEF, La Manufacture, and MOKE International. [3] [4] [5] He is interested in "how disruption in society always has a design response, because it usually creates a need for things that perform." [6]
Young was born in Sunderland, England. [8] He studied at Kingston University and graduated in 1993. [9] Early in his career, he worked with the designer Tom Dixon in London. [10] [11] [12] A grant from the Crafts Council in 1994 enabled him to produce his first collection. [13] In 1997 he was selected by Sir Terrance Conran as the "Most Inspirational British Designer". [14] [15]
In 1994 he started his own studio and operated in England, Iceland, Taiwan before settling in Hong Kong in 2006 to avoid becoming a "European design casualty, wandering from trade fair to trade fair." [16] [17] [18] Young has been the creative director for 100% Design Shanghai (2010, 2011, 2012), [19] [20] prior to which he was the creative director for 100% Design Tokyo (2008), and creative director of the Asian Aerospace show (2009). He is a frequent public speaker, panellist, and design award jury member. [21] [22] [23]
Young has designed a wide variety of objects such as headphones, glassware, watches, bicycles, furniture, lighting, suitcases, as well as limited edition experimental furniture. [24] [25] He is interested in combining design with technical abilities of the local industry and often works directly with Chinese manufacturers and industrialists. [11] [26] Throughout his career, he worked with clients such as Bacardi, Cathay Pacific, Coalesse, Coca-Cola, Emeco, Giant Bicycles, Gufram, M2O, Magis , Georg Jensen, Trussardi, Schneider Electric, Steelcase, Swedese, and WonderGlass. [27] [28] [29] [30] [31] [32] [33] [12]
The Hanger Tree by Katrin Olina Petursdottir and Michael Young featured on a 2010 series of Icelandic postage stamps celebrating contemporary design. [34] [35]
In 2012, Young was approached by Chery subsidiary MOKE International to design a 21st-century version of the Moke (styled MOKE). [36] Young has said he considered this project a "call of duty". [37] In 2018 Young re-engineered a continuation model, which is also used as the basis for the Electric Moke. [38] [39] [3]
His work has been exhibited the Design Museum in London, the Pompidou Centre and the Louvre Museum in Paris, [22] and at solo exhibitions in Kyoto, Miami, Hong Kong, Milan, Paris and Belgium in 2016 for an exhibition curated by Maria Cristina Didero called Al(l) Projects with Aluminum at the Centre d'Innovation et de Design at Grand-Hornu. [40] [41] [42] [43]
In 2024, Young's collaboration with Japanese master craftsmen Nambu Tekki was included in an exhibition at Kudan House in Tokyo called Craft x Tech Tohoku Project (also curated by Didero). [44] The work, titled Blossom Links, was described as an exploration of "heritage and contemporary technology [with a] history dating back centuries", the pieces in the exhibition seek to "[bring] Japan’s traditional crafts to a new, contemporary audience." [45] The show included works by Sabine Marcelis, Studio Swine, Ini Archibong, Yoichi Ochiai, and Hideki Yoshimoto. [46] [47] [48] The work was subsequently exhibited at the Victoria and Albert museum in London during the London Design Festival. [49] [50] [51] [52] Also in 2024, Young's extruded aluminium Totem light sculptures were exhibited at Gallery ALL in Shanghai. [53] [54] [55]
Pieces designed by Young are held in the collections of the Victoria and Albert museum and the Design Museum in London, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the M+ museum in Hong Kong. [3] [56] [57]
He has spoken openly about growing up with dyslexia and how this impacted his education and career, stating "Dyslexia very much prevented me from becoming an academic. Every day in class I was left in my own imagination. I didn't really absorb any information from mathematics, English, geography, history […] I made my own universe and kind of built my own way." [58] [59] [60]
The Mini Moke is a small, front-wheel-drive utility and recreational convertible, conceived and manufactured as a lightweight military vehicle by British Motor Corporation (BMC), and subsequently marketed for civilian use under the Austin, Morris, Leyland, and Moke brands. The name "Mini Moke" combines mini with moke, an archaic term for a mule. The Moke is known for its simple, straightforward, doorless design; and for its adaptability.
The Design Museum in Kensington, London, England, exhibits product, industrial, graphic, fashion, and architectural design. In 2018, the museum won the European Museum of the Year Award. The museum operates as a registered charity, and all funds generated by ticket sales aid the museum in curating new exhibitions.
Marc Andrew Newson is an Australian industrial designer, creative director, and artist who, in a career spanning nearly four decades, has worked in many industry sectors including furniture, product, and transportation design, luxury goods, fashion, and fine art. His work is primarily characterized by smooth geometric lines, organic shapes, an absence of sharp edges, and the use of transparency and translucency.
Sir David Frank Adjaye is a Ghanaian-British architect who has designed many notable buildings around the world, including the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.. Adjaye was knighted in the 2017 New Year Honours for services to architecture. He received the 2021 Royal Gold Medal, making him the first African recipient and one of the youngest recipients. He was appointed to the Order of Merit in 2022.
London Design Festival is a citywide design event that takes place over nine days every September across London. It was conceived by Sir John Sorrell and Ben Evans CBE in 2003 and celebrated its 20th edition in September 2022.
Ole Scheeren is a German architect, urbanist and principal of Büro Ole Scheeren with offices in Beijing, Hong Kong, London, Berlin and Bangkok and was a visiting professor at the University of Hong Kong from January 2010.
Patricia Urquiola Hidalgo is a Spanish architect, industrial designer and art director.
Omer Arbel is a multidisciplinary artist and designer based in Vancouver. His output is broad, including materials research, lighting design, building design and site specific installations. He is one of two co-founders of Bocci, a Canadian design and manufacturing company. Arbel's designs are numbered in order of creation. Arbel invents processes that generate novel forms, privileging analog processes and traditional skills such as glassblowing, concrete forming, and metalwork as ongoing sources of inspiration and innovation. The objects, installations, and buildings realized in this way are to some degree unpredictable and variable, a meeting place between nature and technology, a potentially endless series of exceptions for which there is no restrictive rule.
Tokujin Yoshioka is a Japanese designer and artist active in the fields of design, architecture and contemporary art. Some of his works are part of permanent collections in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. In 2007, he was named by Newsweek one of the 100 most respected Japanese in the world.
Designboom is a daily web magazine headquartered in Milan and covering the fields of industrial design, architecture, and art internationally.
The École cantonale d'art de Lausanne (ÉCAL) is a university of art and design located in the Renens suburb of Lausanne, Switzerland. It was founded in 1821 and is affiliated with the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Western Switzerland (HES-SO). The designer Alexis Georgacopoulos is the director of ÉCAL.
Emeco is a privately held company based in Hanover, Pennsylvania. The Emeco 1006, known as the Navy Chair, has been in continuous production since the 1940s. Today, Emeco manufactures furniture designed by notable designers and architects such as Philippe Starck, Norman Foster, and Frank Gehry.
Hilla Shamia is an Israeli product designer based in Tel Aviv, Israel. Her works are included in Israel Museum collection as well as in Serge Tiroche collection.
Studio Drift is an Amsterdam-based artist duo founded by Ralph Nauta and Lonneke Gordijn in 2007. It specializes in choreographed sculptures and kinetic installations.
Bethan Laura Wood she is an internationally-recognised English designer of jewellery, furniture, decorative objects, lighting and installations. She has designed for such media as glass, laminates and ceramics. Work produced by her studio, WOOD London, is characterised by colour, geometry and visual metaphor, pattern and marquetry. She has been described as "[re-contextualizing] ... elements from everyday objects, often focusing on the pattern and coloration of objects as indicators of their origins, production, and past usage."
Inimfon "Ini" Joshua Archibong is an industrial designer, creative director, artist and musician who is active in product design, furniture design, environmental design, architecture, watch design, and fashion.
Sabine Marcelis is a Dutch artist and designer. She has worked with brands and companies such as Audi, Céline, IKEA, Isabel Marant, Stella McCartney, and Renault. Her style typically includes pastel colours, minimalist shapes, and materials such as resin and glass, while her work focuses on themes of transparency, reflection, and translucency. She has described her work as “an investigation of light, how it can create effects and atmospheres."
Stephen Burks is an American designer and a professor of architecture at Columbia University. Burks is known for his collaborations with artisans as well as incorporating craft and weaving into product design. He is the first African American to win the National Design Award for product design.
Studio Swine is a British-Japanese art collective and design studio founded in 2011 by Azusa Murakami and Alexander Groves. Swine is an acronym for "Super Wide Interdisciplinary New Explorers". They are known for artistic works in design that combine narrative, film, and process-based object-making with an emphasis on sustainability.
Maria Cristina Didero is an Italian curator, historian, author, and design scholar. She is curatorial director for Design Miami. Didero is quoted as saying that, "design is all about people, not about chairs." Architectural Digest called her, "Milan’s Coolest Curator".