Vitals: Yael Mer (left) and Shay Alkalay (right), born in 1976 in Tel Aviv and based in London

Occupation: furniture designers

Education
Mer: MA, Design Products, Royal College of Art, London (2007); Intensive pattern cutting, London College of Fashion (2005); BA, Bezalel Art and Design Academy, Jerusalem (2002); Kunste Academy, Stuttgart (2001)
Alkalay: MA, Design ProductsRoyal College of Art, London (2006); BA, Bezalel Art and Design Academy, Jerusalem (2002); Politecnico di Milano, Italy (2001)

Selected exhibitions: FAT Galerie, Paris (2008, 2009); Commissaires Gallery, Montreal (2009); Craft Punk, Milan (2009); Spazio Rossana Orlandi, Milan (2009); Nowhere/Now/Here, LABoral Centro de Arte, Los Prados, Spain (2009); Into Dutch Design, Stockholm Furniture Fair (2009); Design Tide Tokyo (2008)

Selected awards: For Pivot (manufactured by Arco): iF gold award (2009); Wallpaper Design Award (2009); Dutch Design Award, Best Residential Product (2008); British Insurance Designs of the Year, London Design Museum, shortlisted for Stack (2009); British Council Talented Prize, Milan (2006)

School days
Yael Mer: We met in Jerusalem while completing our first degree in industrial design. Then we moved together for the product design course at the Royal College of Art in London.
My student work often had narratives. My second-year project was just after Hurricane Katrina, and it became a story about emergency beauty. I thought if one terrible day these ideas should go together, then it could be in my Evacuation Skirt. In September, it’s going to be in a show at New York’s Katonah Museum of Art called Readdressing Identity.
Shay Alkalay: Two of our student projects, my Bin Bag Bear and Yael’s Milk Cartons [whose shapes indicate the fat content of the milk they contain], were accepted into the British Council Talented Award Exhibition in Milan.

Living and working together
SA: A few months after we graduated from the rca, we were invited to go to China with a group of designers to do a project with Kobold, which makes accessories, bags and suitcases. By this time, we had been together for about six years and were living together, but we hadn’t really worked in a formal collaboration.
For the first time, we were designing, making, and presenting together. We realized although we have different skills and approaches – Yael likes folded, flat materials that can become 3-D, and I like mobile things and mechanisms – what we both look for is how to reinvent an object: its core, structure, how it works and how it’s used.
YM: We were always talking about the “raw edges” of materials. We started thinking about these words and how they represent our strategy, both with how we make things appear industrial and ragged, and keep our ideas fresh and raw. So we started using this as our name.

Read the full story in the print edition of our June 2009 issue