Awarded

Nicolas Le Moigne

'Alps Express', shelving system

Products and objects

Jury report

Lifeblood and Metal
The germ of the idea for the 'Alps Ex­press' shelv­ing sys­tem was planted when Lau­sanne graphic de­signer Demian Con­rad had the idea of bring­ing out a line of ob­jects de­signed ex­clu­sively by Swiss de­sign­ers. Con­rad's first pro­ject for his Dadadum label of prod­ucts was a col­lab­o­ra­tion with prod­uct de­signer Nico­las Le Moigne. The two quickly dis­cov­ered their shared in­ter­est in ‘good old' Swiss fur­ni­ture de­signs by fig­ures like Willy Guhl, Max Bill and Ueli Berger and by man­u­fac­tur­ers like Vitra, Lehni and Wogg. Con­rad and Le Moigne quickly agreed that the stor­age sys­tem should be sim­ple to pro­duce and should per­mit a va­ri­ety of func­tions.
Early on in the cre­ation process, Nico­las Le Moigne had the idea of an ar­ti­cle of fur­ni­ture con­structed from only one ma­te­r­ial which would per­mit dif­fer­ent con­fig­u­ra­tions by means of fold­ing. A mod­ule had to be de­vel­oped that would en­sure the nec­es­sary ro­bust­ness and sta­bil­ity through sim­ple hor­i­zon­tal and ver­ti­cal folds. In his search for the cor­rect pro­por­tions, the de­signer quickly pro­gressed to 3D mod­els con­structed from card­board and ad­he­sive tape, which were also used to test the fold sys­tem. The de­signer chose Schätti met­al­work in the can­ton of Glarus as best suited to en­sure ef­fec­tive pro­duc­tion. After the first pro­to­types had been as­sessed, the final de­ci­sions on ma­te­ri­als, pro­duc­tion and colour could be taken.
This is the sec­ond time that Nico­las Le Moigne has won the Swiss Fed­eral De­sign Award, hav­ing pre­vi­ously won it in 2008. He has made a name for him­self in the Swiss de­sign scene over the past few years, and new prod­ucts de­signed by him reg­u­larly ap­pear in the Swiss spe­cial­ist press. Some of his de­signs have been in pro­duc­tion for a num­ber of years and enjoy con­sid­er­able pop­u­lar­ity. In ad­di­tion to the com­pleted 'Alps Ex­press' shelv­ing sys­tem, Le Moigne sub­mit­ted a de­tailed in­for­ma­tional brochure on the prod­uct's de­sign process to be judged in the sec­ond round of the se­lec­tion process. This brochure re­flects the de­signer's tal­ent and shows the lifeblood that went into 'Alps Ex­press'.

Biography

Nicolas Le Moigne
Born in
1979
Education
Product Designer

Web

also in

2008

2015