Playing with modern materials and technology agitated the minds of designers and caused huge interest from spectators in the second half of last century. As time passed there was no drama left; solutions became blurred; the replicas of iconic sites has increased in number. At the beginning of the millennium there was a hot trend – items related to nature (I mean real forest with moss and mice).

Visitors at exhibitions of contemporary art got used to “tricks of the devil” and have not been surprised with plastic lamps with LED-backlit. Modern design consists of technologies and polymers, unique technical solutions and the names, which are in the secret of mass production. But the experiments with wildlife look more interesting on this background.

About ten years ago a group of Swedish girls FRONT appeared on the international design scene with the collection “Design, created by animals.” The first presentation of items took place in Milan at the annual exhibition of furniture and immediately fixed the attention of the audience. It was obvious: the visual and conceptual language of FRONT was unexpected and provocative. It was an attack of facture on the polished minds of customers. Just imagine a lamp, which body frame is in shape of a part of the rabbit hole; or a decorative pattern created by bark beetles on the table; there were many other strange and facture items. Nature itself expressed its opinion on how these and those everyday things should look like; designers have only created the conditions for the direct contact of nature and human. Fantastic! This is not just a beautiful concept, but also expensive art objects.

There are other examples when an artist, as a retranslator guided by nature itself, creates living and subjective things. In this case neither the appearance of objects cannot be predicted, nor the process of their creation. There is a touching idea of decorative grass cutting made by different animals and furniture constructed using growing tree trunks. Beautiful and strange ideas, like insects or plants in the jungle.

Nobody knows how such lawn or chair will look until the process of creation is completed. Sacred relationships between an artist-designer and nature are precious because they are supposed to be personal, subjective, unique, like nothing on earth and therefore particularly valuable. Wildlife crop up in our urban world with the help of artists.

But there is another, equally interesting way of development of the relations between animate and inanimate inhabitants of the planet. So to say, a feedback. A man animates objects and invests them with properties of intelligent living beings. Electronic toys and interactive communication devices no longer surprise anyone; but home furniture, which behaves like a pet, surprised me and made my day. Imagine a table from IKEA, which, like a dog, drives up to the owner by his command, or a chair, playing with the host, like a puppy. The purest art objects, the cybernated nature. If it continues, we will meet wild kitchen tables in the forest, and one night a thrown out desk lamp will knock on the door...

A thin world with interpenetration and mutual influence. Nature has always been and remained equally a friend and an enemy of man. And I don’t want to see the world in which that balance would be disturbed.