Alfredo Häberli Design Development

Alfredo Häberli and Christophe Marchand have successfully transformed an exhibition design concept into a design object for Luceplan, which set them the task of designing a one-square-metre folding display structure for some of its lighting products. Fortified by the spiritual exercises at the Museum für Gestaltung in Zurich from 1989 to 1996, the two designers devised a repeatable – and so mass-producible – structure suitable for a variety of situations to meet the needs of a firm increasingly moving towards total image control. The temporal dimension – the act of exhibition design itself – seems to have determined the final design, in the sense that Pop Up (named after pop-up children's books) is, more than anything else, easy to ship, open, assemble, dismantle, ship... The tiny instruction booklet with unmistakable drawings, itself a bried disquisition on the logic and philosophy of exhibition design, brings to mind a Häberli and Marchand exhibition at the Museum für Gestaltung in Zurich in which instruction sheets and leaflets for all kinds of products (from chopsticks to sewing machines) formed an iconographical encyclopaedia on the use of everyday objects. Needless to say, the exhibition design structure was easy to ship, open, assemble, dismantle, ship...