October 2008
Tyler Vreeling is a relative newcomer to the design world—he graduated from the University of Alberta’s industrial-design program just last year—but he already has change on his agenda.
“There seems to be this disconnect with not only public perception but designers’ perception of what design is,” he says on the line from his Edmonton office. “And we seem to get caught up in just making things look pretty. Even in an industrial-design sense; even though we’re designing something that has a function, we seem to want to just dress it up and make it look good, and that is considered ‘design’. I have a huge, huge problem with that.”
Vreeling, who founded Fat Crow Design upon graduation and made a major splash last summer with his White Moose line of Canadiana-themed furniture and home accessories, figures he has a responsibility to use his talents to make people’s lives better.
Toward that end, he intends Fat Crow’s future projects to focus on universal design (“making everything accessible to everybody,” is how he explains it), and the creation of products for people with specific disabilities.
In the meantime, Vreeling has become one of the country’s most visible advocates of “upcycling”, a vocation he took up this spring, when the Edmonton Home and Garden Show asked for his help with a project called Re-Use.
“They wanted me to create some objects out of garbage to promote reuse,” he says simply. The idea was to encourage the public to repurpose old furniture and scrap materials by turning them into something new rather than sending them to the landfill.
“We’re promoting several different things through this, although reuse is probably the most prominent—repurposing something that was meant to do a specific job or fill a function, and making it do something new using as little energy and waste as possible.”
Hence upcycling as opposed to recycling; the latter requires the reprocessing of materials, often through chemical treatment, and is therefore not always as “green” as we would like to believe.
For the Re-Use project, Fat Crow came up with a number of one-of-a-kind objects. These include a coat rack constructed from skis, with a car’s brake rotor as a base; stylish hanging lamps formed from scraps of sheet metal; and a room-dividing screen made from old closet doors held together with hinges.
Vreeling credits his background as an Alberta farm boy with giving him an ingrained affinity for upcycling. “I think farmers really get this and have embraced it in their lives,” he insists. “Growing up, we would use old cans in the shop, or old jugs to use as shelving compartments for different screws and nails and things. We would always have a bunch of scrap metal beside the shop."
"We were quite far north, so it was hard to get parts, but if a piece of equipment broke down, we could just chop up some metal and weld it together and create our own new part.”
It’s a way of living that our big-city culture could learn something from, and Vreeling notes that design-savvy urbanites are just as prone to the throwaway mentality as everyone else—if not more so.
“With the modern/minimalist aesthetic that most people seem to embrace in magazines and in our visual culture through publications like Dwell, they think that having a room full of scrap stuff is somehow ungodly, that it doesn’t serve a purpose in their life, or that they’re above that,” he says. “They’ll just buy something new. Well, granted, they may have the money to do so, but is it worth doing that, in raping the environment more?”
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