Lonneke Gordijn took the stage at TEDxAmsterdam and started with a small story about when she was a little girl playing to be a horse, running through the fields, acquainting herself with the microscopic beauty of nature. Out of it all, she was intrigued by those seasonally changing flowers: dandelions. Lonneke decided to become a designer instead of pursuing her equestrian dream, because being a designer enables you to change your surroundings and ‘designing life.’ She does not value material possessions, she says. On the contrary, Lonneke focuses on the experience of a design – that’s the element that makes you feel happy about it.
When studying at the Design Academy in Eindhoven she met the love of her life, Ralph Nauta (who was originally trying to become a robot in his younger years!). The magic between Lonneke and Ralph resulted in a design studio, called Design Drift, where technology is the means, not the end, in creating a better world. One project that embodies this vision, is Fragile Future, which started as Lonneke’s graduation project. When Lonneke recalled her fascination for the fragility of dandelions, she thought of incorporating them into an electrical circuit which could form a three dimensional module, combing high-tech with low-tech. “It’s up to you decide whether nature is the high- or the low-tech”, is what she tells us.
Design Drift has a team of fifteen people who build these paradoxical modules into any form or shape, enabling its viewers to dream again about the beauty of nature.
Design studio DRIFT was founded by Ralph Nauta (born 1978) and Lonneke Gordijn (1980), both graduates from Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands. DRIFT designs products, projects and concepts for interior and public spaces, with the underlying notion of a boundless curiosity about the future in terms of the evolutionary developments in nature and human culture.
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