A Visual Spectacle From the "Erased" and "The Unerasable"
A Visual Spectacle From the "Erased" and "The Unerasable"
Yizheng Stationery is a market leader in children’s erasers in China. The experience center, situated in the factory, is meant to be a part of an entire sales journey; amplifying the understanding of a diversified product range for business partners. The aim is to bring the brand to life, creating relevance for both their partners and consumers. Corporate brand experience centres, which are targeted at business partners, traditionally has many exhibition boards with lengthy paragraphs just talking about their manufacturing prowess and production capabilities. Truthfully, these types of execution not only put people to sleep, but also delivers messages on a crude level. A sequence of experiments has concluded our lighting designs from vigorous experimentation within a span of 2 months. Along with Design Practice's branding concept of “things that can be erased and that cannot be erased” — reflecting memories of childhood.
We investigated the qualities and properties of the material of rubber, and explored how light can bring alive the expression of eraser's properties such as colours and translucency — and expressed them into a form of Light Art.
The start of the brand experience center leads the visitors into the concept tunnel. The 5 key posters developed by United Design Practice, are placed along the tunnel walls at a 15 degree angle (consistent with the incline in the logo). A line that shifts from black to shining white cuts the posters in half, emphasizing the two sides of the same story. This line is the spatial embodiment of the idea of what is erased away and what is not.
Turning the corner, the line ends at opposite sides of the tunnel, cutting across a black painting and a white painting — symbolises the past and future. As we walk towards the white painting; reflecting on growth and turn back to see the black painting —the obstacles on the black painting we've overcome. Light Collab illuminated the tunnel, highlighting posters and maintaining low light levels to prepare visitors for the main experience zone.
Entering the experience zone, the guests will arrive at the product acrylic wallfeaturing the impressive range of products produced by Yizheng Stationery . Visitors will also have a chance to experience the Scent Library, where erasers made of food shapes can open jars to smell interesting scents from their erasers.
“Rubber Pendant Light+ Podium”– where translucency of the rubber material (black and white) was used to make bespoke pendants to complete the podiums below. It took a while to get the right mix of both rigidity and translucency in the white and black rubber tubes. When the rubber material increases in transparency, it becomes too soft and unable to stay in its square profile. It should have the right translucency, to hide internal light source from the rubber material.
3 sets of these rubber pendants were finally conceived and configured differently on side view. However, when looked up from bottom, it spells the Chinese characters of Yizheng, a mirror image of the wooden blocks of the podium below.
“Footsteps of Light” — white rubber blocks that protrude from the wall in seemingly random fashion. When light is turned on, Yizheng chinese characters come into being. Experiments started with a series of small pieces of erasers from the factory to find the right dimensions of the rubbers and relation to the distance and angle of light . The size of the final installation was also magnified to the actual proportions of the space
"Speckles" —a painting with reflcted light from coloured rubber blocks. This installation was inspired by the beauty of the translucent jelly erasers manufactured and sold by the client. This sparked the thoughts of showing off the beauty of the coloured jelly erasers as reflected light.
Thus, we have made the inner sides of the blocks using specially customized pieces of coloured erasers while the exterior side of the blocks were left white, so that people find the simplicity of the white blocks when lights are off and yet surprised by the other side of the erasers which created the reflections.
