Design Life: Troels Flensted

Troels Flensted has honed his craft in some of Europe’s leading design hotbeds, having moved from his native Denmark to study Product Design at Central Saint Martins in London, before relocating to Berlin after graduating.

We look forward to welcoming him back to British shores next month to showcase his work and style during The London Design Festival, when he will be joining us here at Material Lab for our Making exhibition and Live Making event.

His experimental approach often involves allowing his materials to almost take on lives on their own, with processes including casting different colours of Jesmonite resin into moulds where it develops its own specific aesthetic with little or no interference from the maker.

This week Troels will be taking over the Material Lab Instagram feed to allow us a closer look at his experiments with material exploration. We also caught up with him to find out more about his Design Life in the latest in our series of interviews with some of the most exciting emerging designers. See more of his work at troelsflensted.com.

What three things can't you be without when designing?

"When generating ideas I need a pen to quickly capture thoughts and observations. Then, when I’ve defined different directions or approaches I need the actual material I’m working with to start testing, experimenting and manipulating the material. The most important thing I need when designing must be my studio where I have access to tools and materials and am able to really mess around."

If you had to pick one, what is your favourite material?

"I don’t have one favourite material. My work is driven by material properties and material specific aesthetics, but at the moment I’m quite inspired by casting slip, recycled foam, granite, coloured glass, Jesmonite and black steel."

What project that you've been involved with are you most proud of?

"I’m very proud of my Poured Table, which is my self-initiated third year project from Central Saint Martins. It’s this project where I truly found out that materials, colours and manufacturing processes are my passion and started to define my design approach and who I am as a designer."

What project do you wish you'd been involved with?

"Must be Silo Studio’s NSEPS project because of their way of manipulating polystyrene with an industrial process in a very experimental and interesting way."

And what is next on the agenda for you or what upcoming work are you most excited about?

"I’m working on quite a few new projects at the moment but I’ve just done some very promising experiments with colouring slip casted objects in different stages of the drying process. The objects react in very different and interesting ways to applied pigments."