Molo, Mixko, and the Chocolate Factory
The first Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was my favorite movie for a long time. Something about a self-sustaining world that thrives within the mundane world, yet has a completely different feel and set of rules, has always appealed to me. I don’t think I’m alone; architecture developed first to provide shelter from rain and cold, but evolved to contain and enable these small worlds. Courtyards, bedrooms, and parks are all shelters from normative behavior and experience. Although we can’t step inside, I think products provide the same kind of shelter by offering a unique set of practices and expectations that differ from, but exist within, everyday life.
This is also how I understand the goal of branding, and some brands build very good shelters. Apple and Muji are the most obvious- their collections retain compatibility with the outside world while offering a complete and meticulously designed alternative. In contrast, brands like H&M and Boffi, while successfully pushing modern object design , rely on external meaning and don’t have looks of their own.
Molo is a lot smaller than Apple and Muji, but the world they weave with their products is one of the richest of any industrial design team I’ve encountered. They draw sparingly from trends and owe more to the forests of Vancouver than any single design movement. One could live quite a happy life in the closed loop of Mololand.
Their Float teacup pinches a membrane of whiskey between a sphere of ice and similarly shaped inner wall:
A gentle tunnel springs up from collapsible paper Softwalls:
Although Molo. Apple, and Muji share a love for cleanliness, a design’s closed or open foundation doesn’t need to imply a specific aesthetic. Ross Lovegrove’s and Olivier Theyskens’ work are just some closed-world designs that have complexly detailed looks:
Some products are more like mirrors than shelters, emphasizing and re-forming bits of culture, but blank when there’s nothing to reflect. Where Molo’s closed-loop work is quiet and thoughtful, these ice cream cone pendant lights by Mixko are clever and literal:
Mixko makes the Heli belt, which I wrote about for TreeHugger, from tatami mat off-cuts:
They love to play with scale and re-purpose everyday shapes. Here’s a phillips Posidriv head screw (thanks Shelby!) turned into an ashtray:
To “get” Mixko’s design punchlines, you have to be familiar with common shapes and cultural tropes. Unlike Molo and Wonka, their message is incomplete without the wider world, but this close interaction with culture allows Mixko to work humor and subversion into their object design in a way that’s tough for closed-loop designers, myself included.
Smokestacks behind a metal gate, enforced isolation is a major part of Wonka’s factory. “Nobody goes in, and nobody comes out” isn’t really true though- the whole movie is pretty much about finding Wonka’s successor, adding a drop of input from the outside world in order to keep the system running. I don’t think Wonka was the first Wonka, but rather one loop in a very long cycle, in which Charlie will be next.
Closed loops are never truly closed, they just filter inputs far more rigidly. They can draw from any period in time, which gives them a far larger pool from which to filter. Closed verses open is really a matter of speed: open loops respond faster to the torrent of culture than closed loops, which only seem closed in comparison.
4 Comments
October 1st, 2007 at 4:25 pm
Well said. I really love their soft materials, as well, the way in which material becomes branding.
The felt rocks are excellent.
October 11th, 2007 at 2:31 pm
Technically, that’s a Posidriv screw head, not a Phillips.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pozidriv
This is your five seconds of pedantry for the day.
November 6th, 2007 at 3:15 pm
“I don’t think Wonka was the first Wonka, but rather one loop in a very long cycle, in which Charlie will be next.”
Like the Dread Pirate Roberts in The Princess Bride?
December 5th, 2007 at 4:50 pm
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