Design Showroom: Edda Rabold, Laureate of the Région Sud Design Prize 2025
Edda Rabold
The work of designer Edda Rabold draws its essence from the exploration of materials, their contradictions, and their potential deformations. Her blown glass project, created using the traditional technique of modeling glass tubes with a torch, perfectly illustrates her approach, where craftsmanship and digital technology intertwine to create objects that are both organic and imbued with traces of the process.
Blown glass, although crafted by hand, allows for fluid and distorted shapes inspired by digital processes. This torch-modeling technique makes it possible to play with stretching and twisting, evoking the digital distortions obtained through parametric modeling. In this project, the glass undergoes physical constraints similar to those of digital tools: it is inflated, curved, assembled, interrupted. The result is a series of pieces where process and form are inseparable, each object bearing the traces of its manufacturing process. The object starts from the standardized shape of the tube, just as one might start from a shape in 3D modeling: sphere, cylinder, cube.
The deformations that arise from blown glass, far from being accidents, are instead signs that invite us to reflect on materiality and the importance of imperfection in contemporary creation, imperfections that industry and parametric tools have attempted to erase. Here, glass becomes metamorphic, capable of reproducing the viscosity and fluidity of digital modeling. Each stretch, each twist of the glass tube becomes an analogy for the digital process, where forms are evolving and where the material itself seems to be subject to the laws of the virtual.
Alongside these glass prototypes, Edda Rabold presents short videos demonstrating the parametric techniques of 3D modeling. These videos offer a glimpse into her studio, where she works with her hands. Here, her manual dexterity is applied to mastering digital tools and skills, as well as traditional craftsmanship.
This tension between craftsmanship and digital technology is not merely technical. It raises profound questions about the evolution of creative practices. In a world where digital tools are ubiquitous, Edda Rabold offers a reflection on the object as a metaphor for our era, where analog and digital coexist in a complementary manner. Blown glass becomes the meeting place between these two worlds, a place where manual gestures and digital creation come together, and where the material becomes the vehicle for this dialogue.
Text by Camille Lamy
