Five to inspire with Anton Repponen
Founder @ Anton & Irene studio
Who are you?
My name is Anton Repponen, born in St. Petersburg and raised in Tallinn, Estonia where I studied architecture. Later I moved to Stockholm where I started working for Fi as interaction designer. After three years I relocated to NYC where I live and work for the past 8 years. Currently I run a design studio with Irene Pereyra which is called Anton & Irene.
When I am not traveling and staying in New York, I typically wake up, have coffee and head out to our Anton & Irene studio in Gowanus, Brooklyn. I spent pretty much all day working on our client and personal projects collaborating with Irene. Around 6–7 I head out back home and if I am not meeting friends for drinks, I stay at home where I work on more personal projects, retouch photos, read sci-fi or watch movies.
In my opinion good design needs to have three things:
1. It should solve a problem that you are tasked with. It includes solving problems both for your client (might be business objectives or certain goals your client wants to achieve) and solving it for the end-user, for people who will “interact” with your project.
2. Your design should be beautiful. It’s a very broad and subjective topic, but in general people are drawn to beautiful things and your design must be aesthetically beautiful and pretty. You can’t solely rely on solving problems because the chances are there are other 10 things that solve the exact same thing. People should feel that your work is unique, hand crafted and absolutely beautiful.
3. The hardest thing to achieve is to make your design engaging, interesting to interact with and desirable. You want people to have desire to use your design. Best design is when people can’t wait to interact with your product, because it delivers certain pleasure while using it.
I really want to learn how to surf. What stops me is that I need to relocate to some place, where learning surfing would be adequate (for example Hawaii, where I’ve been many times, but not long enough).
Really want to do more industrial design. Nothing really stops me, but it’s a long process. I am in the middle of learning 3D and manufacturing a watch. But I definitely need to spend more years looking into this to become any good.
I want to go and photograph Arctic pole. That thing is super expensive though :)
Sometimes I want to be more productive. Laziness and good TV shows is what stopping me.
To be honest I am not. I can’t even imagine myself in 5 years time. I’ll just continue doing what I do best and see where it brings me.
My favorite designers who inspire me are Naoto Fukasawa and Issey Miyake. But I am mostly inspired by non-design things. Reading for example.
Where can we find Anton Repponen?
Our studio: www.antonandirene.com
Personal experiments: www.repponen.com
Instagram: http://instagram.com/repponen/
Twitter: @repponen and @antonandirene
Behance: www.behance.net/antonandirene
