day 37 – wearing a vietnamese hat

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Today, when I wanted to walk home after my weekly yoga class, it was raining. Not very surprising, since it’s still rainy season. But today the weather, in combination with the extremely nice girls from the yoga centre, made me discover something. Since it was raining, the yoga girls offered me to borrow a hat. Not an umbrella, no, a vietnamese conical hat. Of course I’ve seen them a lot after six weeks of living here, but I never realized how perfect their form is for the weather here. Obviously the wide round shape keeps you protected from the sun, but today I discovered they are also a wearable rain shield. It worked surprisingly well to protect me from the light rain that was still falling. It also worked very well to make me a hilarious sight for any Vietnamese looking at me: the walk home effectively shattered any hope that wearing such headgear would make me blend in.

day 30 – creativity

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When I tell somebody I’m a designer people often reply ‘o wow, you must be so creative’. Well, I like to think that I am. I like to observe the world as it is, I love to imagine a new world and then hopefully help create that world with the things I make. But, being a designer is only a recent invention and I definitely do not have the only rights to being ‘creative’. All people are creative, it’s one of the things that makes us human. In richer countries this sometimes seems to be forgotten, which is why people think that a designer/architect/artist is creative and all other people are not. Here in Vietnam necessity brings out a very practical day to day creativity: people have the ability to see potential in the material at hand, and use it in (to me) unexpected ways. A few days ago I found this example on the street. It’s a little stool that’s made softer by wrapping all these straps around that are normally used to close large boxes. I think it’s way cooler than a designer chair..

day 22 – phu quoc bamboo resort

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Please let me introduce to you The Cottages (aka Bamboo resort). Situated on a gorgeous bay further north than the majority of Phu Quoc’s beach resorts, The Cottages is the resort we are working for. Originally built as a family get away, they now receive guests in the cottages on the property. Our aim is to keep the homey feeling and make this a place where the guests can truly recharge before going back to their busy lives.
One of the things I’ve noticed here before is how the ‘inside’ of buildings is never separated from the ‘outside’. All architecture here is permanently open to the outside. Sound, smell, air and sometimes animals move freely in and around these tropical houses. I must say I quite like it. In The Netherlands, with it’s colder climate, houses are closed. Any communication with the outside comes in the form of draft or leakage, which is both not appreciated. Here the bounderies between ‘in’ and ‘out’ are blurred, which fascinates me. I’m sure it will influence our designs in some way, so you know what to look for now.

day 20 – review time

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On thursday last week the furniture was moved to the kitchen, the floor was swept and the local liquor store was raided for beer: review time! The companies we work with and some external reviewers arrived at the studio to see our work from the last month. We covered the walls of the studio with all our work, and turned the office space into an exhibition space. Naturally, the last part with all the ideas we’ve come up with, interested the companies most. I was, together with Yen, responsible for presenting this part. Yen’s explanation in Vietnamese was much more detailed than my english one, which I was glad about because all the vietnamese speaking companies saw everything for the first time.
All the companies were really enthusiastic, which is good and scary at the same time. To have a company say ‘I like your fruitbowl, I took a picture and I can make it over the weekend’ is of course flattering. But, I also want to have a say in the exact detailing before anybody starts making something. This ‘first do, then think’ mentality seems to be a common Vietnamese thing. In the airplane I read an article about the preservation of Vietnamese cultural heritage. Most of their old pagoda’s and houses of great historical value are actually worse than before renovation started. A general refusal to spend any budget on archaeological research is the main reason that many old pagoda’s are now outfitted with shiny paint and chinese statues. Which is a shame.
These companies seem to do the same thing in the field of consumer products. Hardly any research is done, because the sales figures decide in which direction they will continue. Part of our message of sustainability starts here: careful observation of your user and an accurate idea about the future world your product will help shape, are needed to make a product with real value. Let’s face it, being a designer is a schizofrenic metier. A designer adds to the world of products, and always uses energy and resources to do so. The least we designers can do is to think carefully if and how we want to add to this.

day 16 – mui ne

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I’m horribly behind in posting.. We’ve been so busy! Making the interior for an eco-lodge while also trying to manage the expectations of six different local companies is no easy task. To relax, and to research other hotels, we’ve been to Mui Ne last week. It’s a tiny fisherman village with loads of resorts. The signs in Russian made us expect the worst, but luckily it’s low season at the moment.  Continue reading →

day 14 – Lost in transportation

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Transportation in Ho Chi Minh City mostly happens by motorcycle. When you’re in Rome, do as the Romans do (I quote my father), so we’ve rented motorcycles to scooter around. Last week, when we went to visit a company named Truong Thinh, we got lost. Impossible to find on google (they don’t have a website for fear of their products being copied), they were also hard to find in the real world. The journey was long, dusty, hot and a good opportunity to take a few pictures of (to me) surprising aspects of Vietnamese traffic.

I never expected to see people wear gloves in the tropics. Yet the Vietnamese ladies do. Gloves, long sleeves, jeans, face mask, sunglasses and helmet are the regular outfit for scootering. I’m sure I would suffocate if I had to wear all that, but the Vietnamese ladies do everything to prevent sun tan.

Scooters are allowed on the high way, just like bicycles, cargo scooters and pedestrians.

And there’s a lot of them: crossing a road is like crossing a human motorized river. Imagine the congestion when the biggest dream of all those motorbike riders comes true: to possess a real car..