B.Des Matej Chabera —

I design and provide creative direction services in products, industrial design and furniture. My design work covers all stages of objects creation from research and idea development to pre-production and supervision. I work independent and I collaborate with a range of trusted specialists. I setup an efficient system of co-operation individually for every project including choosing my usual three oponents. I am most interested in designing free standing functional objects. Its equally interesting for me to design one-offs for companies or private clients and serial products for the industry. I design and produce my own products and furniture with local manufacturers and craftsmen on a more intimate scale. Usually this work is somehow part of my research and development interests.

I see design as studying and creating the relationship of humans and human-made objects. We live with objects, everything around us thats not nature has been created by us and design is part of that. Objects we make or buy represent us. I relate most to free moving objects, ones that are designed by me, made by a producer or craftsman and then they go out into the world and become part of other peoples' lives, often in some unpredictable way. They get used, moved around, get damaged and repaired, get thrown away. It is then the most rewarding experience to find my product being used somewhere, part of some situation. This is a proof to me that I did it right.

Creative direction is a position that interests me more and more. The success of a producing brand depends on the greatness of the product, but the greatness of the product depends on everything that happens around it. A good idea presented poorly is a missed opportunity. The role of the creative director is to strategically weave together all outputs of the company ranging from the product portfolio to the psychology of the business card. Creative direction is similar to film direction, it is an orchestration of quality work from several fields into one coherent image and effect. —

My creative basis is in graphic design. I believe graphic design, typography, composition of text and image are all a minimum basic ability of any designer. They are the essential tools of visual presentation and communication. In design you will never go around creating and arranging images and text in a functional and tasteful way. The brain works with images and visual associations, all new ideas are usually sketched. In this sense I do appreciate my graphic design background and see it as essential for all my work. I studied graphic design at the Rietveld Academie, the most influential lectures for me were with Will Holder, Linda van Deursen and Stefan Sagmeister.

During my study at the Rietveld I have spent a lot of evenings at the wood and metal workshops. This experience and the transparency of the school and its departments together teased me from graphic design towards material work, space, light, actual functionality and body-related usability. I graduated from the Architectural design department with focus on objects rather than interiors. My professor was Henri Snel (UN Studio). My graduation project was Chair 01, which received nomination for MartStamPrijs in 2008.

Next to studying I worked with Willem van Seumeren at Architecten Centrale, where I resolved my relationship with architecture and interior design. After that I had great time working at studio Tjep with Frank Tjepkema and Janneke Hooymans. Tjep is part of the dutch Droog design movement. It was this experience that sealed my obsession with conceptual functional objects and which gave me a profound idea of how you actually make design into a business while doing fulfilling things. After graduation I moved to Milan to change air and I worked with Catharina Lorenz and Steffen Kaz. Their office is founded on years of experience working with Ettore Sottsass and James Irvine respectively and this environment gave me a lot of insight into running a design office in close relationship with elite producers. The design industries in Italy and the Netherlands are representative of all aspects of the design profession and provide essential perspective for independent work. In June 2009 I opened my office in Prague. — M Ch