In a world of densely-packed cities and dwindling greenery, the Dutch designer Simon Heijdens uses technology to aesthetic ends, creating subtle ornamental works that evolve in response to their natural surroundings. "Nature is becoming rare in our daily life," observes Heijdens. "We pass most of the day in perpetual spaces with conditioned climates and 24-hour lighting that mutes the relief [provided by] the day and year. When unplanned natural elements like a breeze, a shower or a setting sun are planned out of our surroundings, the timeline of our every day is lost." The designer points out that the natural world is in a continuous state of transformation, yet most designed products and places are conceived to be fixed and immovable, offering a limited set of possible uses and experiences. "I'm not interested in capturing my definition of beauty in a static shape," he explains, "I try to foster what is already there."
After studying experimental film-making in Berlin, Heijdens turned to product design, graduating from the Eindhoven Academy in 2002. Now, by applying the spirit and techniques of film to the development of objects, he arrives at designs that, like nature, unleash a continuum of expressions over time, thereby multiplying the experiences people have of them. Implementing technology in a more subtle way than his contemporaries, Heijdens's delicately constructed light installations are making him one of the leading exponents of ambient design.
Heijdens's Tree - a computer-generated eight-metre-high white silhouette - is projected on to building facades and portrays what the designer describes as "the character of a place" by charting both the passage of time and the evolution of its surroundings. Full of leaves at dawn, Tree loses a leaf every time someone passes it. The leaves fall to the ground and, because they are made of light, once evening comes, the growing pile of foliage swirls around realistically and lights up the pathway. At the same time, the developing image reveals the way passers-by are using the city. Eventually the leaves roll out when someone walks through them and a new Tree appears. Tree also responds to the physical changes around it: the branches move in tandem with the wind, as if the digital tree was growing there naturally.
"The great thing about Tree is that it is legible for anyone and any attention span," muses Heijdens. "I like the fact that it is not a work that you have to stand in front of and give your time... people pass it naturally and it becomes part of a daily surrounding... revealing itself over a period of time." Tree has travelled to cities around the world - including London, Tokyo, Berlin, New York, Milan, Amsterdam and Hong Kong - adapting to different locations such as museums, public squares and corporate buildings. Heijdens endeavours to integrate Tree into each new environment, which sometimes involves generating new tree species that relate to the location.
"The challenge for creating Tree was developing a combination of software and hardware that didn't yet exist," he explains. After carrying out a motion study of trees, and translating a tree's growth pattern and its characteristics, he was able to build up the tree from numbers, to achieve a hyper-real copy of the motion of a real tree. Developing its software, which could also read and interpret the sensors, was the most demanding and time-consuming part of the project.
Heijdens's poetic Lightweeds uses a similar projection system to Tree, albeit with more sophisticated software. Installed at the Erasmus Hospital in Rotterdam, computer-generated plants respond to passing human traffic and the weather outside, by bending, losing seeds and pollenating on to other walls across the room - a constantly evolving wallpaper that reveals the character and use of the space. At its core, Lightweeds is about "softening the skin of public space". "My hope is that it improves patients' lives," says Heijdens.
Lightweeds has found other homes around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where it is in the permanent collection. Imbuing objects with meaning and memories is a signature of Heijdens's work. "I think this comes from growing up in a closely planned country like The Netherlands, which tries to keep its balance through uniformity, pushing away the coincidental and the unplanned."
Heijdens believes that all the things around us act as continuous collectors of images and memories from their immediate surroundings, and they can and should respond, through equally distinctive physical expressions. They hold the potential to be, in the designer's words, "alive and talking". Referring to the sterile architectural landscape that is symptomatic of the ever-more hermetic nature of modern life, he declares: "I don't want to animate, I want to make projects that are animated through their surroundings."
www.simonheijdens.com
