5 months and counting

Published in

Inside VBAT

6 min readJan 31, 2019

Time flies when you’re having fun and I have just realised that I am only a month away from the end of my internship period. So its possibly about time that I talk a little about me, and where I’ve come from.

Having just graduated from Kingston School of Art, I have managed to escape the trap of London and move towards the beauty of Amsterdam.

I am a designer and maker who’s personal work is heavily influenced by the collaborations that I form with those around me. I am motivated by the cross disciplinary movement within design practice which has evolved substantially over the last decade, connecting designers to alternative industries, expanding the practice away from its own bubble and towards the world of others.

Previous to my internship, I produced design which utilises this cross media design process to demonstrate my ideas in the best way. I strive to create work that is intriguing, stimulating and socially grounded. The concepts that I build consist of a social element, whether it is at the forefront of the concept or just an underlying tone, allowing my work to communicate with people from all spectrums. Throughout my last year of university I managed to work with, musicians, product designers, community icons and elderly care homes.

Here’s a little bit about a couple of my projects that I produced previous to arriving at VBAT.

Piks

In a project I worked on called Piks we crafted a collapsible table leg set that utilises large street waste material, and up-cycles it creating a bespoke table whilst also cleaning the street of abandoned waste. The idea arose when we were walking around the streets of Peckham where there was an abundance of this large street waste that was not being removed by councils. The ability to not just conceptualise the idea, but also craft a full size product allowed us to develop and test the creation in location and with a variety of different mediums to tackle the issue. Each set cost under £3 to produce and the legs allowed anyone to creatively help their local community whilst also improving their homes with bespoke furniture at the same time.

Local Currency

In my next project I pitched my design for a local micro currency within the borough I lived in. The project was setup by the community group to attempt to keep money circulating around the local area and to build support for small independent shops. To craft my route I connected with my local community, experiencing what they felt is important about the borough, which I found was the people who live there. It seemed apt to make sure this was at the heart of the designs, with the local heroes (people who had done amazing work for those around them) in the forefront of the notes.

Another aspect of my design practice is a drive to not stick to what I’m comfortable with, not making assumptions about design, instead allowing the user to influence the way that it works. This often means that I can’t predict the outcome of a brief.

Loops — The loops on the user interface are circles which move down the page as you scroll. Created with Stephen Pelling

In The Loop

In my project ‘In The Loop’ we found a problem within the music community where 35% of London’s music venues have been lost since 2007 and musicians are finding it harder to break into the world of music, restricting collaboration and communication within the musical community. We proposed an interactive website that allows musicians to loop together, based purely on their sound and talent. Our idea and user interface has been completely dependent on feedback from local musicians, forging the way it looks and works directly from the user’s needs.

Slow Fast Food — Created with Adam Morton-Delaney & Jay Daniells. Photos by Charlie Jeffries

Slow Fast Food

In a bit of a step away from my previous work, this short film encapsulates the beautiful thoughts that go through our heads after a night out whilst we are at the back of the queue at the chicken shop. We launched the short film at our local chicken shop, allowing the film to be screened where it belongs, on a classic fast food shop monitor.

Aside from the work I do, I have a strong interest in creative collaboration between designers and architects. I am fascinated as to how these two practices can work in harmony and are very much codependent. There will be a blog coming up to go into this.

So that’s just a drop in the ocean of what I got up to before I moved here. If you would like to see more you can check out my website at harryhobbs.co.uk I’m sure there will be more to come and I’m looking forward to creating more great work at VBAT.

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