Invisible Outlines : Nendo

'Giving people a small ” ! ” moment.
There are so many small ” ! ” moments hidden in our everyday.

But we don’t recognize them.
and even when we do recognize them,we tend to unconsciously reset our
minds and forget what we’ve seen.

But we believe these small ” ! ” moments are what make our days so
interesting, so rich.

That’s why we want to reconstitute the everyday by collecting and
reshaping them into something that’s easy to understand.

We’d like the people who’ve encountered nendo’s designs to feel these
small ” ! ” moments intuitively.

That’s nendo’s job.'    

Nendo is a Japanese Design Brand who focus predominantly on furniture design. The prestigious, award winning practice prides themselves on their simple, playful and innovative approach, with a clear story or process evident behind each design.


Their ‘invisible outlines’ exhibition at Milan Design Week stretches across seven rooms, with a stripped back white colour scheme and a soundtrack of meditative music. Each room holds a separate installation by Nendo, but all have a consistently similar visual language. The theme being blurring boundaries, outlines and borders of objects and things. In this blog post I will be discussing two of my favourite rooms from the exhibition that I feel, as a designer, inspired me and my work the most.


'Un-printed material’ is one of Nendo's installation that explores various forms and expressions of paper through simple outlines. "Graphic designers use paper as a medium to express their ideas," said Nendo. "Similarly, we wanted to work with paper but approach it from a different angle." Creating the sculptural designs both by hand and with a 3D printer, the design studio created all sorts of forms with black outlines made to resemble paper, some scrunched up, some with folded edges, and some that are made to look as though they have been torn. Walking along the rows of sculptural forms, I was in awe of how this installation celebrates the design process, taking you on the journey of an object from its initial state to its final form, not dismissing the importance of every stage in between. It takes paper, what would ordinarily be a mundane and everyday object and gives it lifelike, playful, almost animated qualities. 

'80 Sheets of Mountains' was the biggest installation at the Nendo exhibition. Originally shown Stockholm several years ago, the installation and has been reconfigured to suit the building used for the Milan Design Week exhibition. It consists of a roomful of mountain like partitions, each made from a sheet of  Forex, a rigid form of PVC. "By cutting them out and stretching them open, it becomes like a mountain."said Sato, the founder of Nendo. The room is incredibly atmospheric, with the arches forming a landscape that extends across the entire room. From outside this landscape, the scene appears disorientating, with no clear pathways visible amongst the mountain like structures, However, once you walk through it and are inside the landscape, the details seem more pronounced and the PVC strips are more distinguishable against the white flooring. I liked how immersive and experiential this installation was. As you walk through the space, seeing the exhibition from different angles and discovering areas that are revealed to you along the way, you see new sides and qualities to the installation.