Vienna Design Week: Eindhoven design duo Daphna Laurens collaborated with Austrian furniture company Wittmann to make this duck-like stool and a chair with a bulging backrest.

Stool 01 has a triangular base made from two loops of tubular steel under an oak top, which extends to one side to create a small side table. Chair 01 is made from a tubular steel frame and upholstered with a leather seat and back.

"Our approach is playful," the designers told Dezeen. "We start with cutting out paper in all kinds of forms. After this we make compositions like abstract art. Then we choose our favourite compositions and start to fantasise and make interpretations – what could it be? This is where we start sketching from 2D abstract forms to a product."

The pieces were shown at the Wittmann showroom as part of the Passionswege programme during Vienna Design Week, and are now at the pop-up exhibition restaurant Eat Drink Design as part of Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven.

Daphna Isaacs Burggraaf and Laurens Manders formed Daphna Laurens after meeting as students at the Design Academy Eindhoven.

Other projects at Vienna Design Week we've featured include lampshades made from seaweed and printers that use felt pens instead of ink – see all our stories from Vienna Design Week.

Other projects by Daphna Laurens we've posted on Dezeen include a lamp that looks like it's peeking through a wall and a set of cork and aluminium containers.

See all stories about Daphna Laurens »
See all stories about chairs »
See all stories about stools »

Here's some more information from the designers:

Daphna Laurens at the Wittmann Möbelwerkstätten
As a part of the Passionswege project Daphna Laurens worked with Wittmann. Passionswege is a major focal point of Vienna Design Week. The programme invites young, emerging designers to work with selected Vienna-based firms and manufacturers, exchanging design ideas and producing a tangible outcome, be it a product or installation.

Originally a saddlery, the Wittmann Company with its headquarters in Etsdorf, not far from Vienna, has grown in a hundred years to become the upholstery furniture specialist that it now is ‐ and which has also retained its expertise in the field of leather processing. Precision, exactness and skill in handcraft are the qualities that distinguish the producers and the 'genuine Wittmann' products.

Daphna Laurens chose an explorative and intuitive approach for their collaboration with Wittmann. Instead of taking a product representative of the producer as their starting point, the designers gathered colour and mood images in the inner world of the production site and translated these into what was at first an abstract repertoire of forms (bed or sofa? side table? Or none of these?)

Out of puzzle of variation options and ways of seeing things ­‐ and in a communication process between producer and designer -­ the eventually pieced it together and produced two furniture designs of striking character and with strong personality.