Jessica Banks was temporarily blinded as a child, and says she’s seen the world differently ever since. Now she designs household objects with an otherworldly flair.
Jessica Banks with her levitating cube table.
Rock Paper Robot
In a small lab on Brooklyn's waterfront, an inventive furniture designer is working away at a rethink on how we sit on chairs, lie in beds, and work at desks, applying ideas from classical physics and modern engineering to the design of coffee tables and chandeliers.
Jessica Banks, 42, runs Rock Paper Robot, the firm she incorporated in 2014. Its products include a coffee table that appears to levitate thanks to a matrix of magnetized wooden cubes, a diamond-shaped table that balances on its point, and a mechanized chandelier that lights up, contracts, and retracts as you walk beneath it.
Rock Paper Robot / Via rockpaperrobot.com
The objects have an otherworldly quality to them, and Banks says she quite literally sees the world differently than the average designer. She was temporarily blinded by a freak accident in high school involving a beauty product that was eventually taken off the market. The accident left her with severe corrosion on her corneas, but as she recovered, she regained eyesight that she now says is better than 20/20.
She compares it to the laser eye surgery that many use to correct vision problems. Banks describes seeing shapes very acutely, and from all sides, as well as visualizing shapes that don't yet exist, inspiring many of her designs. Her work is informed both by this unconventional inspiration and by eight years of study at MIT.
"It often feels like I'm lifting weights with my eyes. My eyeballs feel heavy, but then geometries in the world will cross and I make these visual mistakes that make me think, Whoa." she said. "My brain doesn't know a mistake right away, so the world becomes more magical."
Meet The Designer Making Furniture Float http://ift.tt/1JUfkoj
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