Spotlight: Coffee Collab Lauren Karle
Appears in the February 2016 issue of Ceramics Monthly.
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Ceramics Monthly: How did the collaboration with the Italian espresso machine manufacturer La Marzocco get started?
Sarah Kaye: James Lobb, Director of Pottery Northwest (PNW) in Seattle, Washington, sent me an email introducing me to Scott Callender, the director of La Marzocco Home (which distributes the machines here in the US and is located in Seattle). It was a lucky coincidence that a college friend of Lobb’s works at La Marzocco Home, so when they wanted custom cups they started at PNW’s gallery. I am a former PNW resident artist, and had work in the gallery at the time.
Callender was drawn to my work because we had a shared aesthetic, and while he knew that many people were capable of making the cups, coming from a creative background himself, he wanted someone who would share his passion for the cups they would be making together.
CM: What was the collaborative design process like and how does this differ from your individual process (if at all)?
SK: Callendar, Ben Blaze, Megan Neu, myself, and my assistant (Shelby the dog) met and started by looking at and holding all the different cups in my studio, talking about what elements we wanted to take forward into the new design. My development has always been rooted in product design, considering the user at each moment of the cup’s life—and the La Marzocco team came at it with a similar approach, so together we put functionality under the microscope.
There was lots of laughter, talking in hand gestures, and sound effects that morning as we honed in on what was important. When they left, I felt like I had been hanging out with friends rather than having been in a meeting. We swapped a few schematic drawings back and forth, and then I set about developing the gray color for the cups. I made a rough draft set of cups from our drawings, and then we met again a few weeks later and agreed we’d found the perfect color gray, tweaked the forms we’d designed, reviewed glaze swatches, and then it was go time.
Our collaborative design process was very similar to how I would have done so alone, but with the added benefit of having the La Marzocco staff members’ expertise there to help me make it better. Without them, for example, I wouldn’t have known to make the espresso cup a little wider than you are used to seeing, in order to capture both espresso streams.
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