Schone Vormen (literally: beautiful shapes) creates, investigates, collects and disseminates everything that it considers beautiful. We are a collective that operates at the intersection of design and art, consciously exploring its borders and in some cases crossing them (or trespassing).
According to our philosophy, beauty is not only found in the traditional discrete disciplines mentioned above, but also in the material culture of daily life.
Currently Schone Vormen consists of two separate entities: the Bureau creates, whereas the Institute investigates.
Cyril Tjahja is a designer with more than ten years of experience working for design and advertising agencies in various countries. Aside from being a design practitioner, he also studies design in all its shapes and sizes. He is currently pursuing a PhD at Northumbria University in Newcastle upon Tyne (UK). He is interested in Dutch D/design (both with caps and without), material culture, design and social innovation, the Dutch government’s corporate identity and other types of (government) branding and identities.
Shanna Soh is a design researcher with a MA in Design Cultures and a fashion design practitioner with more than tien years of work experience in the fashion and media industry. As an academic researcher, she specialises in multi-disciplinary research on the historical and contemporary contexts of fashion and textiles, from dynamic transcultural and transnational perspectives.
As a design practitioner, some of the brands she has worked with include Converse, Kappa and Pierre Cardin Lingerie. She has also worked with various publishers and (film) production houses on the creative direction of print advertisements, TV commercials and fictional- and documentary films.
Aside from researching and “doing” design, Shanna is an experienced coach in creative education and enjoys guiding and helping others achieve their creative goals.