PRODUCT, PRODUCT, PRODUCT: an open meeting with design

How do the most prestigious studios in Spain come up with their product design processes? Well, Jorge Herrera Studio has provided some insight in the form of an exhibition at World Design Capital Valencia 2022. PRODUCT, PRODUCT, PRODUCT will be open to visitors until the end of September at the EASD, showing one-off pieces alongside fun facts about the design process.

Art direction, products, spatial design, and internalization

The exhibition combines these four concepts which, according to Jorge Herrero, are essential to the product development: “we must do away with the stereotype of us drawing drafts on napkins for others to produce. We are involved in the entire process, providing technical solutions so that functionality, design, manufacturability, and commercialisation all work well together”.

These values are easy to see in the objects featured in the exhibition: Find Me, Noray, Dial, Campana, Golondrina, and Tempo + Calma. They are displayed alongside a series of audio-visual pieces and interviews that make it easier to understand the processes that result in the products but that usually remain behind the scenes.

Herrara appreicates that World Design Capital Valencia 2022 chose to shine a spotlight on product design, a field he sees as “a bit of niche within the sector”, and believes that it’s “helping design leave its mark on society and embrace all its different facets and intersections: the urban, the social, services [among others]”.

Pieces, processes, and formats

Even though the exhibition includes finished pieces of furniture, Herrero points out that “the processes and formats are just as important because they form part of the objects’ stories. Using Fibracolour Negro EZ and Fibracolour Gris EZ, we’ve tried to show the difference between the final product and an exhibition piece made out of coloured boards en masse with their recycled parts visible. [This helps to] break the mould of the traditional exhibition model, which is comparable to a showroom. At PRODUCT, PRODUCT, PRODUCT understanding prototypes, drafts, and ideas is almost as important as the end result of all that conceptualisation”.