Designing From the Margins

To understand the philosophy of Spanish industrial designer Curro Claret, all you need to do is look at his website, which (in today’s hyper-optimised, beautifully rendered online world) feels like some kind of vestigial organ, or time capsule. A hangover from the primordial days of the early internet, when the web resembled something more like a giant filing cabinet. There is no ‘design’, as such. It’s just a vertical HTML index of Curro’s many, many projects, arranged in folders. The home page is literally titled “Index of www.curroclaret.com/en”. The whole thing looks like what you get before you get a website.

“I often receive messages from people saying, ‘Hey, your website is not working,’” Curro laughs, “but for me it’s all about making people a bit uncomfortable and questioning certain conventions of ‘cool’ design. I like to think of it as ‘non design’.”

What Curro’s website is, really, is design stripped of ego, affect, trend-driven hype, and anything that doesn’t particularly need to be there. You want to learn about Curro Claret? Well, it’s all here. It just doesn’t look very sexy.

Born in Barcelona in 1968. Studied at the Elisava School of Superior Design and then at Central Saint Martins in London (a degree he technically never finished). Worked various odd jobs in Barcelona to make ends meet, including a stint at a car parts factory, which helped spark Curro’s humanist design ethos: “The job that most shocked me was the one at the factory,” he says, “the kind where workers are standing all day long in front of a machine, practically without moving, repeating the same gesture over and over again.”

For the young Curro, everything was design, whether good or bad. And this soulless assembly line was definitely an example of bad design, because it offered no room for human expression, or creativity, or movement, or purpose – only mindless drudgery.

“I became more interested in those areas of design that were not well attended,” Curro says, “where I felt it made sense for a designer to be there. I was interested in the materials and resources that others considered leftovers.

“It’s so easy for us to assume that design only refers to beautiful stuff, which it often does. But at the same time, as designers, we’re here to participate. To help things get a little better. And beauty limits our perception of what design can do.”

This is perhaps why, out of all the artistic disciplines and fields available to the young Curro, he settled on product design. He wanted his projects to actually do things. To have a practical function and purpose. To enhance lives. The aesthetics tended to come later, once the ‘doing’ bit was nailed down. But that didn’t mean Curro’s works couldn’t have a sense of poetry, or fun, or (yeah) even beauty.

Take Digital Postcard – a postcard designed with sensitive paper, which reacts to the oils on human skin, so every person who handles the postcard on its journey from A to B leaves a blue fingerprint behind. Or how about Bird Crumbs (neatly indexed under a folder titled ‘Love’). It’s a simple bread board, made from untreated pine, with several holes drilled into it. Under the holes is a black rubber tube that runs to a little plastic hopper. “When slicing bread,” the description goes, “crumbs fall into a funnel connected to a hose leading to a bird feeder outside of the house for birds to freely come and eat.”

Genius. And kind of beautiful. Not the materials themselves – they’re deliberately common as muck; stuff you could buy from any local hardware store – but the concept.

“I’m very attracted to punk, and the punk movement,” Curro says. “In the sense that the aesthetics they were questioning were a big part of the message. Is there just one beauty, or one aesthetic, that represents us? Or are there many?

Sometimes I feel a bit like Dr Frankenstein. I like the idea that a body – or a piece of art – can be made up of other bodies, or leftovers. It’s a re-used body.”

Given this, it’s no surprise that nearly all Curro’s works deal in upcycled or found materials. Old shoelaces turned into lampshades. An engagement pendant carved from the tooth of someone’s fiancé. Shopping carts with a hook that attaches to an elderly person’s cane, making pushing easier.

Curro’s pieces don’t look polished, or refined. In fact, many of them are verging on brutalist; like something cobbled together from scraps in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. He often leaves the construction logic of his pieces visible, too – joints, screws, mismatched timber and rough edges. This stuff isn’t hidden but celebrated.

What Curro’s pieces do have (in spades) is whimsy, invention and creativity. And one more ingredient: social connection. This is the missing piece of the Curro Claret puzzle. Over the years, he’s collaborated with several charities, including Arrels Fundació and the Ramon Noguera Foundation Group, helping the homeless and the disadvantaged become actively involved in the design process (while raising money at the same time).

La Pieza T300 is a great example. Designed in collaboration with the Arrels Foundation, it’s an entire furniture collection (stools, tables, even lamp shades) based around a single metal bracket. La Pieza brackets can be made by anyone with a laser cutter, and Curro has offered the plans (free of charge) to any organisation that needs them.

By bolting on materials and forming a rough tripod, workers – especially unskilled workers, or those experiencing hardship or disadvantage – can turn basically anything into furniture.

It’s a simple idea that combines everything Curro values: thrift, sustainability, dignity in design, and a certain ‘sod you’ independence of spirit.

Very punk rock.

“With this one project,” Curro says, “we’ve built furniture, we’ve run workshops, we’ve helped people in difficult situations. We sell the pieces on to museums and galleries.

“Too often, design is only about making nice things for a few privileged people. But if we want to be really useful, and not just follow the conditions of the market, we need to start designing from the margins, and finding other ways to participate. I like the more rough, non-professional work, because it generates an attitude in anybody to say, ‘Yeah, I have the courage to make something. To do something.’”