Industrial Playground (now a part of Rubberband) – a furniture design initiative by Ajay Shah Design Studio – juxtaposes playful formal and visual qualities of the objects they make with process-driven industrial manufacturing for characteristic precision and uniformity. Their contemporary aesthetic is derived from the intrinsic quality of materials they work with and the nature of this specific process.
In 1990, Ajay Shah, then a young NID graduate, founded the Circus Design Company after a few stints of working as a designer and a furniture producer. This new company was imagined to be a multi-disciplinary design firm that dealt with design as the process of thought rather than a professional service. The conceptual framework of the present-day Ajay Shah Design Studio can be traced back to this office. In 2002, a design commission that started out as an interior design assignment began to emerge as a holistic project centred around a brand that unified graphics, furniture, spatial design and communication design in a cohesive exercise that prompted Ajay Shah to establish ASDS: Ajay Shah Design Studio.
While much of contemporary design deals in creating objects for lifestyle, the domain of a boutique studio producing unique and crafted pieces was not of Ajay Shah’s interest.
Influenced by research in new materials and the power of design to unravel known characteristics of common materials like wood, mild steel and aluminium, the initial work of ASDS was influenced by global thought-initiatives which dealt with large-batch productions, engineering and precision. He wanted to think of furniture from serious industrial designers’ perspective and yet combine it with a sense of visual playfulness. Thus, though the objects designed within Industrial Playground and Rubberband initiatives have certain toy-like accessibility, they are designed within the discipline of serious, logical and material-driven industrial design that leans towards standardised, large-scale production.
A workshop-culture enables ASDS to experiment frequently with the possibilities constantly improvising on design in the making. At the core of the effort, their design process is a combination of sophisticated computer modelling and a back-and-forth idea that involves sketching and making paper models in the studio. Another approach that seems significant to the Industrial Playground aesthetic is to tinker with the known and existing production and design systems to generate surprise outcomes. This process of steady and informed disruption helps them to improvise on existing and popular mechanisms.
I have been reprimanded by people for not thinking of a customer.
This lack of a presumed audience puts the pieces they make independently in the market and attracts a design-aware clientele. The sophistication in detail enables Industrial Playground to appeal to corporate clients who use the furniture in public areas like food-courts, training centres and lounges. As a discipline, there is dissonance in terms of what furniture design in India stands for. Venturing into a more immediate and relevant domain of institutional furniture, Industrial Playground is also enabled by a fresh demand, the changing ideas about office and study culture and a shift in user behaviour in recent years.
This pushes them to think consistently about the economy of form and substance to design furniture that serves as both – select pieces in small quantity and production-line prototypes. This comes with a sense of simplicity and clarity – no work has the unnecessary embellishment and no part serves purely as a visual intervention. In the Indian context, modern furniture design is a discipline in its nascent stages with designers often banking on disorganised professional delivery structures and under-developed prototyping mechanisms. Brands like the Industrial Playground are also consciously aiding in changing this narrative by pushing the discipline to organise itself better and by making patrons more aware of the possibilities of Indian industrial design. ASDS continues to innovate in the field of furniture design through research-driven initiatives. The resultant objects intrigue and excite us with their playful designs and sophisticated making ⊗
Founded by Ajay Shah in 2002, AJAY SHAH DESIGN STUDIO [ASDS] is an interdisciplinary design firm providing holistic design solutions by unifying product, space and graphic design. After graduating from NID, Ajay Shah worked as a furniture designer, producer and retailer through Exemplar Systems Private Limited before starting an independent firm in 1990 by the title ‘Circus Design Company’. A studio that consistently re-invents itself, ASDS has created respected brands like Rubberband and Industrial Playground in its wake. In 2016, Industrial Playground products were merged into Rubberband as an umbrella brand. Today, the studio continues to work on select commissioned projects and Rubberband design developments from their Mumbai studio.
