50 chairs, a round office and a clock

Oki Sato founded Nendo in Tokyo in 2002. Today it is one of the most reputed conceptual design studios worldwide which talks about complex things by means of simple shapes and lines. We sussed out what Nendo created in 2016.

Rolling Workspace

Once upon a time, there was a square white table in some office... Actually, it is still there, but Nendo decided to rewrite a story about typical office interior and create an environment that boosts creativity.

New desk became circular shaped and mobile. According to the Japanese studio, you can bring it to a conference room for a brainstorm or even take along with you for a lunch. In addition, these desks can also be used as portable office space dividers.

Round office concept was presented at the Orgatec 2016 furniture and equipment exhibition in Cologne.

Slice of time

Futuristic installation for the brand Panerai. Designers created an ultramodern clockmaker shop where you can see every step of production. Visitors could feel the passage of minutes, hours and weeks as a physical object, not as an abstract aspect of daily life.

The name of the project materialized in the literal sense. Using an extrusion molding process, there was produced a 16-meter plastic tube to cut off body clocks from. Every visitor received a unique clock as a gift. Size of each clock was determined according to visitor’s age by converting it into millimeters.

Manga Сhairs

50 chairs of polished steel inspired by the Japanese manga comics. They illustrate emotions, actions, and language of manga characters. One chair symbolizes joy, another one – inspiration, yet one – a jump, and so on up to fifty.

With manga tropes in their minds, Nendo designers avoided direct physical similarities to comics in terms of textures, colors or shapes. The allusions are very subtle. For example, mirrored surfaces reflect ambient objects the same as manga comics reflect the reality.