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Rotterdam // Product

Studio Truly Truly

Partners in work and in life, they specialize in installations and objects for living — applying design principles across disciplines.

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Rotterdam // Product

Studio Truly Truly

Kate and Joel Booy are based in Rotterdam, but are originally from Australia. Partners in work and in life, they specialize in installations and objects for living — applying design principles across disciplines.

Anything that we create will communicate to an audience in one way or another, whether that's a chair or a piece of graphic design or an installation of a space. — KATE

Kate and Joel Booy design by doing. The IKEA PS Sofa was a result of Kate and Joel manipulating the cushions to learn and discover different form possibilities.

IKEA PS 2017 Sofa

The future of this was to design by doing, to learn by doing. — JOEL

Typography Lighting System

The decorative pieces come from a creative combination of cylinders and typography.

Our creativity is mixing different things and finding a beautiful place in between. - JOEL

If you find your personal fascination, express it as boldly as possible. - Joel

It gives you your unique voice in a place where there's so many voices. - KATE

Anything that we create will communicate to an audience in one way or another, whether that's a chair or a piece of graphic design or an installation of a space. — KATE

Kate and Joel Booy design by doing. The IKEA PS Sofa was a result of Kate and Joel manipulating the cushions to learn and discover different form possibilities.

Our creativity is mixing different things and finding a beautiful place in between. - JOEL

Process

00:00:07

KATE: it comes down to process, the process that we've learned for ourselves has, it's kind of formulated into something that allows us to tackle any question.

00:00:16

KATE: Looking at a bigger space that sparks certain considerations or questions about how we're using objects in the space, and then that influences what you might be doing on an object level.

Introduction

00:28

KATE: We’re Studio Truly Truly, I'm Kate Booy, this is Joel Booy. We’re partners in life and in work. We run a design practice that specializes in creating all kinds of objects for the living environment. We’re based here in Rotterdam, in the Netherlands but we’re originally from Austrailia.

00:47

JOEL: The brief was explore comforts for the living space. And so we're like, okay, what’s more comfortable than a cloud of cushions?

JOEL: we also do installation work, which helps us to understand how those objects fit in an environment as well.

KATE: Yeah. We're based here in Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, but we’re originally from Australia.

Sofa For IKEA PS-2017

00:00

KATE: Looking at a bigger space like a house or you know, an interior space that sparks certain, you know, considerations or questions about how we're using objects in the space, what kind of objects you might be putting together and then that, you know, influences what you might be doing on an object level.

00:00:57

JOEL: One thing we really wanted to do was to strip apart the idea of a sofa being made with MDF and glued on foam. And all these things where everything's all together and thrown out altogether. So that's why the Sofa is, it's just cushions.The process of making it was, well, we don't have any experience with making a sofa anyways, so let's, let's try it out when, and that was to play with an idea that we had.

00:01:22

KATE: Yeah. Manipulating the forms. We literally got the cushions in our hands and started playing with

JOEL: stapling them to lots of wood,

KATE: and what can we create with this. Yes. It became a material that we were playing with.

00:01:35

JOEL: So the form of that cushion is created by the natural force , squeezing it in the middle and then it creates this beautiful plume sort of image. And we didn't, we didn't, we, it's a form by, by gravity, by tension, by you know. It's not by drawing it, it's by finding it.

00:01:49

JOEL: And really, the future of this was to design by doing, to learn, by doing, because the idea of upholstery, you know, like, do you know what's in there? You don't until you've done it until you've tried to do something that's wrong. So that's what that was all about.

Typography Lighting

00:02:07

KATE: Rakumba an Australian lighting company, they approached us and we had a real discussion a conversation about lighting, where it was heading. And the question was, would it be possible to design a decorative track lighting system of sorts.

00:02:22

JOEL: Like typographies you've got all these different elements that when you put them together, they have to look beautiful together, but they're all completely different. Like somehow you have to put enough tweaked, little details in there that make it work. And gives us a lot of anchor points that help us making it interesting. To give it depth..

00:02:36 (156 seconds)

JOEL: So there's all these, there's all these details in typography that we knew deeply being typography designers, graphic designers.

00:02:46 (166 seconds)

KATE: it sort of ties into this anyway, the objects for the living space for the future that can be interpreted a little more abstractly so that they might be used in multiple ways, but it's not like a, a multi-use object where it's like a Swiss army knife and all the uses are really described. But more abstract pieces.

Communication

00:03:07

KATE: We believe that anything that we create will communicate to an audience in one way or another, whether that's a chair or a piece of graphic design or an installation of a space. And so when we're choosing all the different features of this thing that we're making, we're thinking about that in our mind. Like, okay, what will this rough texture communicate? Well, what will that feel like? What's the overall composition of all these choices that we're making and how does that apply?

00:03:36

JOEL: It's all just about the right decisions. Every decision, every single one is, is it is what a designer what a designer is all about.