Familiar/Foreign by George Coffin

Rhode Island School of Design graduate George Coffin has designed a collection of products that add twists to familiar objects, including this watering can with a bent wood handle.

There are also plungers combined with ornately turned handles or a walking stick, and more walking sticks with rubber wedges at the bottom to form door stops.

Pieces of plastic bottles have been used to cast concrete fittings for pendant lamps and the cord of a coordinating desk lamp is held in place by notches in a counterbalanced wooden frame.

Here are a couple of lines of explanation from Coffin:

I’m a recent graduate from the Furniture Design department at The Rhode Island School of Design and in the past semester, I completed a body of work titled Familiar/Foreign: Using Recognizable Components To Establish Comfort in New Forms.

The work focuses on object familiarity, and the way we process archetypal vs. foreign forms.