As remarkable as it is, in 2008 nor the election of Barack Obama as first black president of the United States of America nor Michael Phelps surpassing Mark Spitz in Gold Medals won at a single Olympics, winning 8, nor Ireland voting to reject the Treaty of Lisbon, in the only referendum to be held by a European Union member state on the treaty nor Íngrid Betancourt and 14 other hostages being rescued from FARC by Colombian security forces nor the 2008 South Ossetia war between Georgia and Russia launching a major offensive inside the separatist region of South Ossetia after days of border skirmishes between the 2 sides have arisen my curiosity and my interests as much as the Credit Crunch.

The financial crisis has notably impressed me by its international impact. The economic meltdown that affects us all on various scales has driven my motivation to focus on the variables, the ins and the outs of the financial world in the peculiarities it possesses that are eligible to investigate and to create a starting point of a challenging 3Ddesign project.

Most of us consider commonly and ingenuously finance being complex sets of numbers; which is not far from being the truth. The interesting parameter though is that these series of numbers in figures are a language and they refer to things just as does a poem or a painting or a music score.

I suddenly started to like the idea that the price of an object could be variable every day, and in my head the link with the credit crunch was born.

It is through the Commodities and Futures that I have found the content to give my project three dimensionality. The stock exchange has literally given me a list of materials to work with.

The Commodities and Futures list very different materials and some are rather uncommon to work with. This peculiar aspect is very important because it enables me to state on the future curiosity of the masses. An aspect of this listing food has made me think in the impressive work of Marti Guixe with his 10 Years of Food Design, dealing for some with molecules when I have to deal with fluctuating figures.

I feel there is an emergency to start working with new different materials. I am aiming to produce a series of products, in which the qualities of the materials would lead to an affirmed function.

I have decided to take the first meaning of sitting, referencing the each materials as the gold they can represent in different countries or for different cultures and decided to create a series of sitting product. The shape and volume would be a simple as possible to make the range look incisive and in order to create a sharp ensemble.

The challenge is now to produce within the selected commodities a set of several stools:

• Part One: Cotton - Sugar - Copper - Lumber - Corn
• Part Two: Aluminum - Cocoa - Zinc - Lead - Nickel
• Part Three: Soybean - Coffee - Tin - Wheat [Gold - Silver -Platinum if funding is found!]

To determine dimensions I have looked at the Modulor of Le Corbusier and then adapted the sizes depending on what I wanted the stool to look like.

In terms of marketing, I think I would prefer the range of stools to be sold as a whole, because each piece takes his meaning when confronted to the others. But I like the idea also that people are able to determine their preferences and their identities by chosing the stool(s) they like best.

To summarize, the project I am currently developing focuses on an economic context, the current one, rather uncommon materials and the challenge to make furniture out of it. It questions a new dimension, the contempo-reality of our time, where the idea of trades, money and materials are challenged. I am investigating a series of materials that emerge out of the common within and for a contextual reality. I am aiming to push again the boundaries of my own curiosity as much as the curiosity of the mass. As not a natural maker, I am stepping out the conception I have of making to produce my own language, dealing with materials and processes in a very personal way, to create at a satisfactory level of quality, a series of Commodities and Futures stools.

Charlotte Kepel, February 2009.