Friday Five with Pablo Carrascal of OSTRICHPILLOW

Madrid, Spain-based Pablo Carrascal is co-founder of lifestyle brand OSTRICHPILLOW, as well as a partner at design firm Studio Banana. You’ve likely come across OSTRICHPILLOW in your travels through our site and across the internet, but the brand goes beyond their original immersive napping pillow and strives to make life more enjoyable. The fun, functional products they design make the small moments in each day better by ignoring standard categories and expected norms in favor of exploring the unexpected. Today Pablo is joining us for Friday Five!

Photo by Pablo Carrascal

1. Spoons
I’m a collector by nature. I’m not interested in expensive portraits, but everyday objects. I own a collection of around 4,000 different cans from around the world, and now I’m very interested in spoons. From the cutlery I think spoons are the most complete item, you can make almost all the actions you can do with a fork or a knife. For me it is the perfect symbol of feeding, it’s the first tool we learn to use as kids after our hand. In fact, it’s a reproduction of our hand. My fascination is how both need and solution can have so many designs.

Photo by Takenaka Carpentry Tools Museum, Kobe

2. Wooden Joints
For a few years I had a wooden workshop where I used to work with my hands and wood. I was also fascinated with the different techniques to join wood, and not just as a beautiful aesthetic purpose but to resolve a practical need. The masters of this field are Japanese carpenters, where wooden joints are considered an art. They don’t use any other material than wood and as a consequence there are many smart and complex solutions.

Photo by Pablo Carrascal

3. Sleep
Since Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, it’s allowed us to sleep less hours because we could accomplish more when the sun went down, and that allowed our world to evolve faster. But when we analyzed it and discovered scientific data that ensures people can survive many more days without drinking or eating than sleeping, something exploded in our minds. While we have more and more access to food and drink, we have less time to sleep. It made us think about the importance of not doing so many things, but doing them in a valuable way.

Photo by Pablo Carrascal

4. Botijo
I really like traditional solutions, I remember when I was a kid my grandfather had one. The need to have cold water in the summer was solved with a BOTIJO. The system is very simple, but it works: when you fill the bottle with water, it is stored and filtered through the pores, and the hot and dry environment outside it evaporates, producing a cooling cycle. In Spain there are many styles throughout the whole country.

Photo by Pablo Carrascal

5. Cristophe Guberan
I recently met Christophe during one of our STUDIO BANANA Breakfasts. His passion about the process, and his willingness to get lost along the way, yields very interesting results and applications that have made me appreciate our profession as designers even more. The way he converts flat surfaces on 3D structures, from basic tools like a home printer to very complex machines developed together with MIT, it’s very poetic but at the same time very effective. And I suppose that’s where the beauty rises.