French design duo Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec have worked with US manufacturers Skyline Design on a collection of glass panels emblazoned with colourful geometric patterns created using code.
The collection, named Oblique and Chevron, has been designed by Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec to explore how colours can subtly alter in tone when iterated in different patterns.
It comprises four translucent glass designs: Oblique Regular, Oblique Bold, Chevron Stroke and Chevron Fill, that each feature sheer, intersecting beams of colour with dark outlines – a visual effect that the brothers liken to the lead borders on a stained-glass window.
"[The lines] provide contrast and reinforce light and transparency into the panel," said the Bouroullecs.
"Traditional stained glass was designed to evoke a sense of magic and wonder among medieval churchgoers. The Bouroullecs bring the same otherworldly and nearly mystical sense to more abstract patterns," added Skyline Design.
To develop the palette for the collection, the pair took photos of everyday scenes, ranging from oceans and forests, to kids playing in a field wearing vivid sports jerseys.
"The project started by wandering, by walking out to capture in photographs the sensation of colour and light – we believe that light is a matter of variation, of multiple pieces of information that your eyes build into a unique panorama," said the designers.
They ran the resulting images through a computer script that Erwan Bouroullec developed using Processing – a simple programming language based on JavaScript that's specifically built for use in the visual arts.
It was able to collect and sample the thousands of colours present within the photos and layer them to create a unique base colour for the glass panels.
"The coding in itself is used to enter into a creative process that you can't achieve by simply wanting to do it – you need a tool to perform it," he told Dezeen.
"Our software-based research comes from the fact we've been designing for Samsung, when we made the TV. It was the first time I started to get interested in programming because we were looking into user experience and user interface. So now I've been learning how to do it by myself."
Oblique and Chevron was unveiled during the 2019 edition of Chicago design fair NeoCon, where each design was presented on an eight by 12-foot panel of glass to form an immersive installation.
This isn't the first time that Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec have worked with the medium of glass. Last year the brothers collaborated with Wonderglass to create a collection of handmade objects that are designed to be arranged in different formations.
Back in 2016 the pair also worked with Galerie Kreo to produce diamond-shaped glass vases with textured surfaces that Ronan compared to the appearance of "rain on a window".