It’s very flat and sunny outside and we are on our way to give a talk at the Eindhoven Academy. This morning we finished setting up the exhibition. Somehow whilst working on it we realised the surreal side of it: We all use nature to artificially recreate nature. Wok Media go and chop trees from the forest to make their resin-branch (a book shelf), Loop.ph block out the ceiling windows in the Droog Gallery to install their weather-patterns (linked to the internet the panels glow according to the weather conditions outside) and I kill cows to make them into benches that look like cows (Ok, I don’t actually kill the cows, but someone does for their leather & meat.). Traveling through big cities with our array of dead cows, reconstructed branches and artificial weather-displays all we seem to long for is the countryside- or is it that the countryside itself has become so alien to then city-dweller that there is a need to translate it into something more accessible?
“It’s still flat outside” Rachel exclaims, and she is most certainly right- it’s flat, with straight canals, straight lines of trees and DIN Format plots of land. Is there more or less nature in this then in our products?

For more images of the Young British Design exhibition at Droog please visit www.droogdesign.nl