Under the Surface with Øivind Slaatto
Øivind Alexander Slaatto, an acclaimed Danish designer and founder of the SLAATTO DESIGN studio in Copenhagen, Denmark, has worked with everything from speakers and cars to furniture and light fixtures.
Slaatto’s modus operandi is simple, clean and effective design. His iconic BeoPlay A9 speakers, which were released in 2012 for Bang & Olufsen, are simple in design and are little more than a circular speaker attached to three wooden pegs.
“We believe that at heart, people want to focus on their life without getting distracted by complicated products, services and unnecessary information,” Slaatto says. “We are not afraid of the obvious or even the banal because these qualities are timeless, they will stay appealing. Therefore, we work hard to keep things simple.”
“It’s kind of empathy,” he tells fluoro’s Managing Editor Audrey Bugeja. “I think with design, I try to disappear, as a designer. And when you see the A9, it’s just a circle. Well, the tree sticks is just the minimal you need to lift a circle and the shape is also so basic. I think the A9, what you see is very much human, but there’s a playful element in it.”
Bugeja caught up with Slaatto at DENFAIR 2017 in Melbourne, where he was exhibiting Bang & Olufsen’s BeoSound Shape, a new wall-mounted, wireless speaker that lets users tweak the size, shape, colour and sound performance to their liking.
The BeoSound Shape takes its inspiration from nature – the infinitely variable designs of snowflakes and honeycomb, in particular. While users can hook the speakers to their phone or tablet via Chromecast, Apple AirPlay or Bluetooth, it’s perhaps the fact that the design itself is morphable that is so unique.
Slaatto says that the spark for the design came while he was on a skiing trip in Norway and his general daily experiences.
“First of all, it came because the studio I [was in] had horrible acoustics,” he says. “Beautiful light, horrible acoustics. Couldn’t have two conversations at the same time. So, we had to do something else. From being a musician I know that if you want to improve acoustics you need to have a lot of soft bodies, lot of humans, or wood or surfaces that somehow absorbs or reflects the sound in different directions. So I wanted to make a module that could repeat itself with these abilities.”
It was his time spent at the Norwegian mountain cottage of his great-grandmother, who was an architect, that gave him the spark for the nature-designed aesthetic of the BeoSound Shape.
“There’s no water, no electricity, and if you come out there it was minus 15 degrees… It’s so beautiful. And up there you see this snow landscape that is very gentle. The light that comes in this snow you see 1,000’s of colours depending on which angle the sunlight hits the snow, or the fog light. And, I wanted to somehow get this feeling from a snow landscape, and this piece [came] from there.
“If you look into nature and see what kind of shapes are used for repetitive sequences – so the bees are making honeycombs, if you look closer at a snowflake, or at snow landscapes, then you will see that the snowflake has a hexagonal structure,” he explains. “They have all these 120 or 60 degree angles. But you’ll never find two snowflakes that are equal. So it has all these strong mathematics behind it. You can never predict how the snow will fall. It’s a little bit same how this one it’s very strict hexagon, but you can’t predict how people will place it on the wall.”
Slaatto did not take a straight path into design. He originally studied music at the Royal Danish Academy of Music, later earning a master’s degree from the Danish Design School before opening SLAATTO DESIGN in Copenhagen.
Music weaves its way through Slaatto’s designs. He says that Arnold Jacobs, a famous tubist that played for years in the Chicago Symphony, taught him to adopt a meditative, almost thoughtless approach to his initial design process, much like that of a musician working their way through a complex étude.
“He had an amazing ability to use his mind and to breathe,” Slaatto says of Jacobs. “And, his philosophy as a whole made the philosophy of all Danish, Scandinavian brass players, actually most European brass players. One thing he says is, ‘Don’t analyse. Analyse makes paralyse. When you’re on stage, you’re playing, then you’re not allowed to analyse your performance. Because if you analyse your performance, then you get paralysed.’ Like if you’re talking to me, and then you think about, ‘Oh, am I doing this right?’ This will make you crippled, and you will be paralysed.”
For Slaatto, the self-criticism and editing that is so typical of designers and artists is meant to come after this initial burst of creativity, not during. After all, a musician wouldn’t stop to fix a mistake during a performance.j
“When you’re creative, you should not reflect what you’re doing. This comes afterwards,” he explains. “So when you’re playing music, while you’re on stage, you’re not allowed to think about all the negative things that might happen, you’re not allowed to punish yourself. You’re not allowed to say, ‘Oh, I should play faster and slower.’
“Just forget everything and play. And focus on what you want to do. And then you can make recordings of it, and after the performance you can analyse every second of the concert. Then starts the thinking process, then starts the analysing. And, if you transport this to the creative design process, you start to be creative, quite playful. Don’t think and don’t judge, but just do. Just play. You should then analyse what you found during the creative process – here you can be critical, not before.”
Perhaps it is this no-nonsense approach to design has helped Slaatto overcome some of the stresses in life that have threatened to upend his career. In 2011, suffering from a debilitating concussion and with no projects on the backburner, Slaatto came to Bang & Olufsen, along with a business developer, to pitch ideas for several projects.
“He made some business models and I made some designs, so I used maybe 40 days to make these composites,” he recounts. “In a way, I went to Struer [to visit Bang & Olufsen], which is in the other part of Denmark. And I didn’t have money for the train ticket, so I had to lend money from a friend. I wanted to buy a shirt, [to look] a little bit expensive, because everything I had was holes and I was poor. I was really on the bottom.
“We went out and showed these products for Bang & Olufsen,” he continues. “They refused it, they didn’t want it. And I said, ‘Okay, I did what I could.’ And then 40 days later they called me and asked me to create a proposal for what later became A9.”
The beauty in a creation like the A9, Slaatto explains, is the effortlessly complex, yet simple, design. While the product itself may seem incredibly straightforward, there is a whole network of consideration and practice that goes into creating something so remarkably appealing.
“As you see, it looks really simple, while at the same time there’s a lot of complexity under the surface,” Slaatto explains. “And this is how I work, quite often. All the complexity, everything, is something I wanted to get rid of. Just like, if you see a really good ballet dancer, and she’s flying, looking effortless. But they have had extremely much pain learning it. There’s so many hours between something that takes a split second that may take years of training.
“And the same with something I try to teach with, of course music, but now that I’m not playing music anymore, but design. You should just look at it and think, ‘Why didn’t I come up with that idea myself?’ It needs to have this feeling, this kind of easiness or obviousness. And for this you have to sometimes, well I don’t say train, but you have to work extremely hard to work to get rid of all the additional complexity.”
While the A9 and PATERA, a modern chandelier inspired by the Fibonacci sequence, are two examples of Slaatto’s more minimalist designs, he has also released pieces that venture a bit more into the realm of the fantastic. GIANT DIAMONDS, to name one, is a multi-coloured lamp that was originally designed for the Eurovision Song Contest, one of the largest music events ever held in Denmark.
While the handmade, customisable lamps look like they could be stand-ins for the Times Square Ball in New York City, they still carry something that is crucial to Slaatto’s design: functionality.
“Functionality is always very important. Everything is about functionality these days,” he says. “From an aesthetic point of view, try to rip up everything that is not important. While at the same time, it should not be something that could be made by a computer, or by a robot. You should always be able to sense that there’s a human behind it. And that’s not because I’m important as a person, but because I’m important as a human. So if you feel my humanity in my design, then you can relate to it since you’re also a human.”
This humanity comes through at Slaatto’s Copenhagen studio, which is something of a genius’ playground mixed with a design space. Slaatto and his team, acknowledging the sensitivity of the creative process, use a mix of collaboration, physical prototypes and simple, human play to make their projects come to life.
“We’re not made to sit as humans, so we’ve got stand up desks,” he says. “And we also have a workshop where we actually make physical prototypes…first of all, none of us believe in the power of thinking just by thinking. We don’t think that you can just collect data, collect data, analyse, analyse. I mean, you think through everything and then you have a solution.
“For us, it’s very much learning by doing and thinking by failing. All the designs we make, we actually make physical prototypes. The workshop is actually a miniature of a factory. Because if we can make it in our workshop, it can be made it any factory.”
Looking into the future, the Danish designer will be visiting Japan to collaborate with two as-yet-unnamed companies to design several pieces of furniture and wooden space dividers. The Japanese culture, Slaatto says, is one that he deeply admires, given its many contributions to the design world. “I really want to learn from the Japanese design culture,” he says.”So, I spent a few months with the Japanese.”
Slaatto is not alone in this admiration, as he says that Japanese culture has received something of a cult following with some Danish.
“Many Danish people, they love Japanomania,” he says. “It’s this idea of the perfect Japan. We are obsessed with this idea that in Japan it’s minimalist and everything is so nice and honest,” while in reality that is not always the case.
“They also have the American capitalism or western capitalism that is extremely successful all over. It’s growing so much, often destroying cultural diversity. Which is also the reason why I’m here,” he jokes. “I’m also a soldier for capitalism, I’m trying to sell you speakers.”
Slaatto is also working with several start-ups, working on innovative lighting fixtures and several other projects. One company, is called Shade, and focuses on a new way of making lighting. Slaatto will be working established Danish brands Louis Poulsen and Le Klint on this venture.
Another is a company with staff from China, Russia, Denmark and the US, who are designing infrastructure for “charting mobile devices”, as well as helping bolster personal transportation in urban centres. “That is more environmentally friendly than what we have now,” he says, “that’s a little bit in the future.”
Slaatto is also collaborating with a new Danish brand that makes boxes meant to store precious memories that can’t be stored on a hard drive and objects you would risk your life to get out of a burning house, but no insurance could pay you anything for such as the last pacifier of your child. “So, it’s kind of a storage system for objects with an irrational value. I think it can be quite interesting. It’s really challenging, but it will become extremely beautiful.”
Nowadays, start-ups are unique both in their ubiquity and capacity for disrupting their respective industries, be they tech, design or anything else. For Slaatto, this energy surrounding start-ups is exactly what excites him.
“Maybe I’m good because I’m not interested in making things look technical. I just want them to be human, because I’m kind of a lawyer for the user, in a way. But what I like with start-ups, is the passion they have, and the energy. And also I love underdogs, sometimes big brands they can be a little bit like this, and be too arrogant.
“[Start-ups are] more flexible, but also they can be very unexperienced – but they learn fast,” he adds. “And they have so much passion and so much energy, which makes that impossible things become possible.”
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