FASHION-able

Hella Jongerius’ design for the porcelain factory
Nymphenburg is a design of protocols and action
spaces. To make hand-painted porcelain distin-
guished from machine made ones, she designed a
scheme for the decoration painters to leave visible
traces of the painting process, so as to expose the
hand painting process onto the ceramics. What she
created was not a new design per se, but a painting
system, a protocol ensuring that every plate would be
unique as it left the hands of the decorator. In this
case, the design was “not following defined patterns
or matrices, but rather based on a system” (Jongerius,
2004)