Ep. 116: Clever Extra - Tomek Rygalik and Circula
Industrial designer Tomek Rygalik of Studio Rygalik shares the story of his work developing Circula, a series of functional public furniture sculptures designed to host interdisciplinary discourse around the urgency of the climate crisis. In the face of a global pandemic, this project has taken on another dimension of purpose in the potential to assist recovery and reconnection in the aftermath of isolation and social distancing. Listen:
AD: I hope you enjoyed that time with Ayse. As promised, here is a short interview with Tomek Rygalik, a Warsaw-based industrial designer who along with the Polish Cultural Institute New York and WantedDesign has developed Circula, a social experiment in the form of public functional sculptures that aim to assist our recovery, reconnection, and strengthen our societal bonds in the aftermath of the pandemic and social isolation.
AD: And are those social and environmental projects, is that how you came to be in collaboration with the Polish Cultural Institute of New York?
TR: Yes, the Polish Cultural Institute in New York works on promoting Polish culture in the States and a lot of the things that the Cultural Institute works with are the things that are relevant to the design community. And for sure the sustainability has been at the heart of our thinking in the design community for many, many years. And this year’s anniversary of the Solidarity Movement came together with an urgency to speak about the implications of the environment that our industry is having or has and this is how the theme, Eco Solidarity came together.
AD: And Eco Solidarity is the theme that you had planned; it’s a platform of sorts that you had planned for this year’s WantedDesign, Manhattan. Do you want to tell me about it? What it’s meant to do, how it’s meant to serve and engage people?
TR: The Eco Solidarity Platform is meant to bring together professionals from the creative industry and engage them in interpersonal communication and leading to collaboration on urgent issues of our environment. year you had a project planned with WantedDesign and the Polish Cultural Institute, called the Eco Solidarity Platform.
AD: Can you tell me what it’s about and how it was or is meant to serve and engage people?
TR: Yes, the plan was to create a space, a public space where various designers and participants in the WantedDesign can sit together and discuss the future of our industry with sustainability at the center. To invite people to speak together openly and interpersonally in small groups about what can be done to truly contribute solving the crisis of our environment.
The meetings were going to be very much programmed around the true and down to earth strategies one can take as a designer or as a maker, or as someone working for a brand, to make a difference.
To amplify the issue and actually speed up the process of implementing necessary strategies that we are talking about for many, many years but often we don’t feel the sense of urgency when it comes to that. You know, it’s something that we, unlike the current crisis, which we don’t really feel urgent about, which we don’t really feel, we don’t unite and tackle together in a more intense way, if you will.
AD: Climate crisis talk is always, frequently, very abstract. But it sounds like what you’re creating, or attempting to create was a situation in which people could reclaim their agency and understand their ability to affect the built world, in terms of the products that they’re designing and creating. And share strategy and also confirm the urgency. So it seems like it was about solidarity and camaraderie in terms of understanding how to assist the crisis in really concrete terms. And as I understand, you had also designed a work, a physical sculptural public furniture piece that was designed to assist these conversations?
TR: This piece of kind of sculpture/furniture for the public space is a symbolic piece. It’s a circular shape where people actually get into this common circle, this common ground of discussion and sit together, facing each other without any obstruction, without any mediation or any obstacles. And they discuss just very openly what can be done.
We plan to have a program in place to bring very different people together to actually make sure that the conversations are as opposed to being abstract and general, to work out a real strategy and in a collective camaraderie way, to actually bring [0.15.00] people together on how they can do it together as groups often of interdisciplinary character. And as everyone comes from a different place and background, even in the design community, it’s quite all over the place when it comes to what we tackle in everyday work and what we can actually impact.
So this was about weaving these new possibilities, these opportunities that can be created between people that normally don’t have an opportunity to tackle this critical crisis together.
AD: This piece, this sculpture is called Circula, can you describe it for me.
TR: Circula is a circular shape, essentially a bench in a circular form which sits around eight to 10 people. It’s made out of wood. It’s made with bent lamination, so it’s actually wood that is going around the circle to create an incredible effect of a kind of wholeness of the circle to get into it one needs to cross the circular shape of the bench so the act of going into the circle and being in the circle is very pronounced, if you will. It’s very visible and it’s very much of an agreement of being part of this community, very symbolic in every aspect of it. I mean, the circle as a shape is very symbolic and it’s been around for as long as the humanity.perhaps. It’s very egalitarian, there’s no position, physically, within the circle which is more dominating than others. So originally this idea came to me as a piece for the schools, for people who will need to really slightly push and maybe not force, but push towards being together and face each other.
Of course it’s not binding them in any way, at every single point you can step out, if you feel like you don’t want to be part of the circle anymore, but this shape and this form gives a certain situation which pushes people onto each other in terms of their communication. So this is what was envisioned.
AD: As you are designing and conceiving of this, the world is undergoing this incredible situation right now with the global pandemic and you have shared with me how it’s meaning is now more important than ever. Will you talk about its purpose now and how that purpose has evolved?
TR: What has happened over the last weeks and months already is unprecedented and we are asked to physically distance ourselves from each other. We do our bits on various platforms to connect with each other. We very often, much more often than previously wave at each other through our windows and actually our longing for human connection. So the situation is showing how much we are the social species. So this symbolic piece has become, in a strange way, a potential solution for symbolic coming together and perhaps an opportunity to rebuild our social connections and be together and actually re-establish what we long for during this time of COVID-19 pandemic.
AD: Yeah, it sounds like it could be a really beautiful and functional tool in a sustained, a recovery, and reconnecting, as you say. And so ideally do you see this, you’ve mentioned schools, do you see this as a public piece in let’s say parks or community spaces where people are encouraged to gather when the isolating is over?
TR: Absolutely, this is a piece for many types of public spaces, from parks to indoor spaces or even our outdoors areas [0.25.00] around our neighborhoods. It actually can live pretty much anywhere, this is truly a versatile and universal design piece that can really occupy very different spaces.
AD: I love the sound of it and I love conceptually the idea of building functional sculpture and furniture that is specifically designed to foster connectivity, community, strategizing and reconnection. I know you had plans to launch this piece at WantedDesign, but those plans are, they had to undergo radical transformation [laughs] and there’s probably a lot of things still in the air. But what’s the ideal future for this piece and how will people be able to access it?
TR: I see this project in plural tense. I see this as not just one piece, which we were going to launch during WantedDesign but a growing network of circles, as such,therefore we are launching a website, it’s a non-profit called circula.org where everyone can learn a little bit more on what it does and how it functions and how it looks like. And also if anyone is interested, it can be ordered from the site.
We are determined to actually provide for every Circula ordered, yet another to a community in need, somewhere in the world, because we feel that the more the merrier.
AD: I hope that I get to experience it in person soon and for all of our listeners that want to track the progress, the circula.org website is the place to go.
Many thanks to this episode’s partner:
Polish Cultural Institute New York - to learn more about Tomek Rygalik, the Circula project and Eco-Solidarity platform head to circula.org and polishculture-nyc.org.
Tomek’s physical object-sculpture-public furniture piece named Circula, was planned to be installed in the public space of the Golden Triangle in Washington DC in September of 2020, however it is now being presented online in light of the current COVID-19 pandemic.
The object is designed to reduce social isolation and strengthen societal bonds, which in the following months can effectively support recovering from the social distancing. The concept based on ideas of sustainability and circular economy advocates for ecological approach in future design solutions. Circula provides a symbolic, functional, space for dialogue to encourage and facilitate direct social interactions. Once implemented, it supports urban infrastructure and belongs to the community.
Eco-Solidarity celebrates 40th anniversary of Solidarity formation (Polish: Solidarność), as it reflects the principles of the movement which united displaced communities in a common cause that inspired the world to lead to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and set the nation on a course toward democracy.
Tune in for a LIVE Zoom conversation on Eco-Solidarity, May 21st at 2 PM ET / 11 AM PT featuring Tomek alongside Joel Towers of Parsons School of Design, and Caroline Rubio-MacWright of Touching Land, moderated by Jaime Derringer of Clever and Design Milk. Register here.
For the rest of the Online Conversation Series schedule, visit wanteddesignnyc.com/online.
Clever is produced by 2VDE Media. Thanks to Rich Stroffolino for editing this episode.
Music in this episode courtesy of El Ten Eleven—hear more on Bandcamp.
Shoutout to Jenny Rask for designing the Clever logo.
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