DURAN GROUP

With glass solutions for the future as the theme, DURAN Group was invited to present new trends in the glass industry – and to get the company’s products and solutions challenged by the students of the Design School on Bornholm. During an intensive day with workshop, materials, samples and techniques as well as presentations from DURAN Group engineers, agents and developers – the student’s knowledge and the traditions of the company were investigated and challenged. The day was rounded off with the launch of a design competition. The task for the students is to re-design a glass series. A jury of representatives from the Design School and DURAN Group will evaluate and comment the suggestions to be presented in February 2012 at the Design School Bornholm. The prize for the two best suggestions is a trip to the factory of DURAN Group in Mainz, Germany and via this a meeting with a modern German glass industry.
Christian Heide, Head of Department: “We encourage our students to get out and use the industry: make contact with the factories and material producers. An early contact and dialogue can provide new possibilities. It is important that our new graduates and companies obtain a mutual understanding as to how design and craftsmanship can be integrated as elements in the business development. It is a substantial potential, that our candidates come out to the small and medium sized companies, but also the really big ones, as the one we meet here today”.

The competition and workshop is a part of the target of the Design School to provide close contact between education and business. And the German company DURAN Group met the students with the most up-to-date knowledge, about how glass designers can get ideas realized for an international market and create new glass products in larger series.

About the workshop
The workshop started with a welcome by Christian Heide Petersen, Head of Department, Bornholm. Peter Ludvigsen, Scandinavian representative of DURAN Group, told about the milestones, which since the discovery in 1887 of the formula for heat-resistant glass, Borosilicate 3.3 lead to registration of the DURAN® brand in 1938.
From here, the development since the start in 1955 of the world’s first automized production of heat-resistant glass to today was illustrated by Marcus Geier, Product Engineer of DURAN Group. He showed a number of flows from modern German glass production. From forming in rotary-machines to dimension- and visual controls, final packaging into customer specific boxes – to more innovative “styling-features” such as organic print, ceramic print and transparent colour coating of glass. Also the latest achievements adding delicate silicone patterns with both functional and visual properties, were demonstrated.
Andreas Krug, Director Business Development and Marketing, Consumer Glass, DURAN Group then went into a dialogue with the students about the factory’s development and production competences. He emphasized on “design-coaching” – how a copyright owner of a design can benefit a lot from involving various experts early in the process.
”More and more designers can see the advantage of our flexible project teams at DURAN Group – where we are “thinking out of the box”. This way we can implement projects with materials and services, which demand more knowledge and much more than core production of quality glass” – Andreas Krug explained.
As an example he shows the asymetric tea-pot from the German brand mono. It was launched in autumn 2010 and it took three years to carry the original idea to the market. In 2004 the company asked the designer Tassilo von Grolmann for a new, different tea-pot. Three key-words were identified: elegance, dynamics and innovation. All together it became: “ellipse”. But what Grolmann did not know at that time, was that no-one (yet) possessed the technology to mass produce the product. “So what now?”, asked Andreas Krug at the Design School. ”They got hold of DURAN Group three years later and we accepted the challenge. The latest available techniques, machinery and development software, combined with creativity and some prototypes, resulted in a first model ready 2009 – and available for the market soon after.”

The students at the Glass and Ceramics program at Bornholm have now got the assignment to challenge the production capabilities in the German glass industry and perhaps create the next exciting glass adventure for the international market.

Contact
Christian Heide Petersen, Kunstakademiets Designskole, Bornholm,
+45 2338 5439, chp@kadk.dk

Peter Ludvigsen, DURAN Group/Schott Scandinavia,
+45 2120 6630, peter.ludvigsen@schott.com

Andreas Krug, DURAN Group,
+49 (0)6131 66 4470, andreas.krug@duran-group.com