No ware like elseware

Graphis, Nov/Dec 2001 by Noonan, Catherine

An informal gathering of friends, Elseware is not your average think tank. Dispelling notions of besuited brains in monochromatic office settings, members Janet Villano, Daniel Harper, Joel Hoag, Oliver Beckert and Perry Dixon meet over a pack of American Spirits and a six-pack of beer to engage in what they've dubbed "conceptual product design." Occasionally looking out over Brooklyn from Harper's loft window, these designers get together first and foremost to be themselves. "At work, it's different," Villano explains. "You can come up with all these great ideas, but the client wants a chair that looks a certain way, costs a certain amount, and fits into a certain size box."

Here, however, the guidelines are more flexible. Members share clippings they've seen from magazines-a new magnesium chair, an upcoming design conference-in between discussions of the day's happenings-a friend's car accident (no injuries), floods near Fargo (Hoag's hometown). Yet in these informal conversations, with their jokes, puns, non sequiturs and unfinished sentences, real creativity and collaboration occur.

In fact, the blend of work and whimsy is precisely what Harper was seeking when he decided, a few years ago, to participate in such a group. "I had been looking for people interested in getting together to talk and design for some time, thinking we could have some kind of show or just have fun and come up with stuff that was different from regular work. I met up with a few people before finding the Elseware group, but none of them were all that fun to hang out with or serious about actually putting out work." Eventually, though, over the course of time and a lot of trial-and-error, the current group came together.

A few years later, they have three successful exhibitions behind them and a host of designs in production for the wider consumer market. Though each member is free to develop their own concepts, a central exhibition theme provides some necessary structure. Watershed, at the Vision Gallery in Brooklyn, brought together a consortium of objects designed for use in the bathroom, thus the aquatic title. Notable products from that exhibition include the Aquariass, a toilet with an aquarium tank, and the Douchaise, an inflatable chair that becomes a shower. Next was the Yupo project, at the International Biennale of Design 2000 in Saint Etienne, France. As a showcase of their talent, Elseware's five members crafted an array of objects from a synthetic, water/fire-resistant paper of the same name. Their latest exhibition, []fuse (at the Front Room Gallery in Brooklyn), was organized around that word's permutations: [de]fuse, [re]fuse, [con]fuse, and so on.

Not surprisingly, the newest topic of Elseware's meetings is the fairy tale, or their collective ideals of the future. From this general idea, the group will design products intrinsic to their new lives-lives which invariably feature remote wilderness retreats with full wood and metal shops and, needless to say, no day jobs.

While the group is planning future utopias, life is busy presenting obstacles to test their collective creativity, not to mention their financial resources. Harper's salt-and-pepper shaker dubbed Sneasonings, for example, cost approximately $10,000 to produce. Licensing products to larger corporations or manufacturers takes time (Inna Alesina, a guest designer for []fuse, began the process of marketing her Lotus-Sit, a chair and rug, to Target Stores over four months ago).

Janet Villano's Chained Soap, though a relatively straightforward design, presented a host of challenges in the production stage. The colorful glycerin soaps were first conceived as a promotional item for Elseware. Featuring numbered dog tags with the group's Web address, they debuted at Watershed in 1999. Since then, they have been customized for clients ranging from Blue Man Group to the New York Marriott Marquis. Although most of the soaps are still poured by hand in various kitchens in and around NYC, there soon came a time to look into outsourcing. Traditional soap makers use closed silicone molds, and are not equipped to hang an object inside; candle makers deal with different temperatures and mold materials. "After several months of making phone calls and sending e-mail, I found a small shop in New Jersey willing to customize an assembly line with a melting vat left over from a previous candle-making job. Although the minimums are in the thousands, we feel lucky to have found a place that can make the soap, as it is so often difficult to find facilities willing to take on unusual projects for relatively small production runs," Villano explains.

The coffee mugs Daniel Harper conceived for []fuse, colorful mug! that fit together at the handles to create a flower-like shape, have als( proved surprisingly difficult to produce in small quantities. As a result, he is seeking lower production costs in China. However, it dealing with international companies and copyrights, he may hav( traded cost for complication.