OneAndTenBeds. An interzonal project

OneAndTenBeds is the advertising strategy for presenting the latest design object by Piter Bålda & Associats: the AlfaOmegaBed model, an aesthetically refined bed which has given a substantial boost to functionality. In accordance with a scientific preliminary study, Piter Bålda & Associats decided that the design of this new product had to keep to the cultural and life uses that are the essential features of the object:

1.    Birth (giving birth).
2.    Sleep-rest (in which we distinguish between 2 and 3).
3.    Erotic sleep. 
4.    Sleep-experience close to the death-dissolution of the body.
5.    Insomnia (deep thoughts about existence). 
6.    Sex (with or without reproductive ends).
7.    Reading. 
8.    Hypertextual navigation (specific use at the exhibition). 
9.    Illness (attempt to recover from the illness in the bed, but which can lead to point 10).
10.    Death.

By providing for that whole range of possible uses, AlfaOmegaBed adapts to the user's experience. At the same time, by including the linguistic dimension, it becomes a symbol object laden with meaning and capable of moving away from purely functional design. Indeed, the Piter Bålda & Associats bed rediscovers the discourse aspect in order to refer us to a series of events that define our existence from beginning to end.

And so it is vital to mention everything to do with the promotion campaign Piter Bålda & Associats is launching to place the AlfaOmegaBed on the market, since that campaign itself is the source of the installation at La Capella. The evolution of the advertising strategy may be summed up in this sequence: ten young, unknown poets from Madrid are hired and each (separately) commissioned to draft a text, with pre-set limitations on style and length, dealing with one of the points on the list in the experience of people in the bed. Once the ten texts have been obtained, a team of professionals from Piter Bålda & Associats collects them, fragments them and links them through the words and concepts that have been repeated by chance in the pieces by the different authors in order to organise a hypertextual work. Next, the multimedia design department transfers the literary work to a digital environment so that readers can navigate freely through the hypertext and investigate its proposals.

Named after a famous work of conceptual art, OneAndTenBeds is presented as a piece that can agglomerate different languages and is therefore difficult to define. Piter Bålda & Associats has taken advantage of the art exhibition context to promote the design and has done so with an atypical campaign. The whole project is laid out from interventions from different fields: design and industrial manufacture of the bed, advertising strategy for promotion, literary creation, art for the net, art for La Capella, etc., in such a way that matters such as authorship or disciplinary definition are shaken as well marked out categories, and become understood within the network of relations in which they act.

Piter Bålda & Associats is a company made up of teams of young creators from the most varied disciplines, under the supervision of the famous Swedish designer Piter Bålda, who came to Madrid in the early eighties and later settled in Barcelona at the height of the pre-Olympic ferment. 
The products of this studio (mainly interior decoration and industrial and graphic design) aim to keep away from their natural circuits in order to penetrate other spheres of distribution and debate, so that there is a far richer analysis of the work.
Piter Bålda& Associats

Sponsors: Caja Madrid. Obra social
Sponsorship media:  El País i Ràdio 4
Collaboration: Schilling