Digital Day

Christophe Guberan is a Swiss designer who endeavours to appropriate digital production technologies in order to explore their formal or functional potential. Always in search of simple and open formatting principles, he imagines new types of production or applications, for which these machines were not initially intended. Join him for an exploration of what new contexts are possible when designers reclaim craft by creating their own production technologies. Not content to wait for manufacturing tools and companies to meet his ideas, Guberan is part of a new generation of creatives who use rapid prototyping and digital manufacturing to control every part of the production process.

Guberan’s experience developing projects, will offer insights into what it means for designers to drive every aspect of production in a completely integrated and controlled way, what conditions are essential for building effective experimental partnerships and collaborations, and how digital fabrication can give designers control over what ultimately matters: making essential products that people use and value over time.

Christophe Guberan is a formally trained architect and product designer based in Switzerland and the USA. He graduated from the Ecole Cantonale d’Art de Lausanne ECAL and is the 2016 laureate of the Hublot Design Prize. As a product designer, he explores the possibilities of material interactions, digital manufacturing, self-assembly and variable aesthetics in his creations. Christophe’s products have been showcased at internationally recognized exhibitions and festivals such as Mutations/ Créations at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Miami Design Art Basel, the Milan Furniture Fair and the Salone Satellite in Milan. In parallel, his designs they have been produced by leading companies such as Alessi, USM, Steelcase and Google. His Hydro-Fold project, consisting of self-folding paper printed from a desktop 2D printer, has received wide academic and public attention that resulted in an ongoing collaboration with MIT’s Self-Assembly Lab. Their most recent collaboration «Liquid to Air: Pneumatic Objects», pioneers rapid liquid printing and is currently on view at Patrick Parrish Gallery in New York City.