Introducing Global Change designed by Kari Pei.
An afternoon stroll along New York’s Highline provided Interface Product Designer Kari Pei with the perfect inspiration for her Global Change Collection: a stunning flooring system that uses colour and texture to capture nature’s transitions – from shadows on a forest floor to sun darting behind the clouds.
“People were just streaming onto the area, locals coming from their offices and tourists thronging,” Pei recalls. “It brought such vitality to the park and underscored the enduring importance of our connection with nature.”
This connection she mentions is known as biophilia, which posits that humans have an innate attraction to our natural environment. And biophilic design, which endeavours to include nature in our built environments to enhance the overall wellbeing of end-users, is key to our underlying design philosophy at Interface.
“As I photographed shadows of leaves on the wood planks, I thought, this is going to be beautiful carpet,” adds Pei. Sure enough, the shade from a tree canopy definitively appears in Shading and Glazing – two of the seven styles in the collection. Although the two flooring systems are slightly different, they feature the same pattern and striated background, allowing the range to achieve a quality of visual and textural cohesiveness.
In fact, as there is a confluence between the patterns and hues of all the designs in Global Change, Pei refers to the collection as a ‘system’ and says that all seven styles could be specified on a single project, combining to create a fluid transition between different zones and pathways. Moreover, because they are available in various forms – Shading and Glazing are skinny planks whilst Raku and Ground are squares that install non-directionally – there is bound to be a suitable format for a myriad of sectors, applications and end-user needs.
Irrespective of size and scale, however, Global Change is perfectly positioned to give designers back their peace of mind. With the capacity to ensure that all aspects of Global Change integrates perfectly with every other product within the Interface portfolio, the collection can be paired with any number of new and existing flooring configurations to achieve heightened possibilities of rhythm, texture and visual form. Knowing that the design requirements on our A+D community are greater and more complex than heretofore, this high degree of adaptability of Global Change stands forth to offer clients, end-users and designers a unique stronghold to address the growing and multifarious needs we place on our designed environments: environments that can make an impact, carry unique and authentic design stories, and that empower all manner of end-users. As part of Interface’s ongoing commitment to allowing designers and end-users alike to access their full potential, Global Change champions the cause of +Positive Spaces™ to push the capacity of design to create positive impacts on the environments and communities surrounding us all.
Within this crusade for more positivity through the genius of design, Global Change’s heavily biophilic design journey provides important wellbeing benefits. In the words of Pei herself, Global Change’s configurability with the rest of the Interface portfolio couples with this collection’s characteristic visual language:
“The park’s various landscapes draw visitors along because the plants and hardscaping are not mutually distinct; rather materials interlace just as a coastal forest might meet the ocean in a transitional zone of scrub and grassy dunes. The flooring system embodies these transitions and the interchangeability of the Shading and Glazing patterns, for example, allow one to flow into one another.”
This stunning new range is a fitting addition to our commitment to design spaces centred on positivity that accurately respond to the changing landscape of today’s human condition. We believe that our commitment to connected, integrated and human-centric design resolutions harbours the potential to help motivate all end-users to achieve their best and feel their best. From Global Change’s inspiring colour palettes, and invigorating textures, to its high configurability and other acoustical benefits, the collection is active in ensuring that our environments make us feel healthier and happier: a better future, through design.
“Interface does everything in its power to turn the negative of industry into a positive. You see that in them reducing virgin material in the supply chain, in the habitat reclamation taking place around our manufacturing facilities, and in the science that is extracting atmospheric carbon in the chemistry of our products.” – Kari Pei.
Now her Global Change Collection continues that mission – employing a solution dyed nylon yarn system with a low carbon footprint and 75 per cent recycled content. “We have an ongoing mission to use science to create a product that not only does no harm but actually benefits the human condition in the built environment,” she says.
