A good example of that would be like ‘Useful Living’, a series of ready-to-assemble furniture made of oak and brass that was influenced by urban spaces in Berlin. Can you talk more about this project and how it came to be?
Sanghyeok Lee: The series won the Time to Design Award in 2013 and the idea for the exhibition was: Design something that you would use for yourself – so, for me as a person. So first it was that concept, but I saw a lot of scaffolding structures in Berlin at that moment – and there’s still a lot here – and somehow I began thinking about the life of scaffolding structures.
They’re very useful in a construction site, but on the other hand, they’re very unstable as well.
Sometimes they’re very useful and other times, they’re gathered together and moved around to other cities. So I thought that was kind of similar to me, because it was right after I finished school, and I thought, ‘I’m very useful as a person and a designer. I can make things, but basically I’m kind of jobless and unstable in life.’ Then I tried to combine these ideas together and reinterpreted scaffolding structures into furniture – so building them up is kind of like a person becoming useful.