This book showcases the research work of designer Mathilde Pellé, who explores design through subtraction in a sensitive yet radical way. It brings together a body of documentation and an inventory of prototypes and objects created over the course of a decade.
Subtract (House) is the starting point for the design research of Mathilde Pellé, a designer and researcher. Over a period of eight weeks, she removed two-thirds of the material from the 112 objects that make up her living space. Furniture, everyday objects and domestic items were thus gradually transformed, moved, hollowed out or reduced in size, turning her everyday space into a veritable testing ground.
By inhabiting the successive material realities of this domestic environment in ruins, Mathilde Pellé explores what remains when we subtract rather than add. Subtract House thus constitutes a situated experiment: at once a research protocol, a transformation of a living environment, and a sensitive observation of the effects of material reduction on uses, forms and perceptions.
Subtract (House) is the starting point for the design research of Mathilde Pellé, a designer and researcher. Over a period of eight weeks, she removed two-thirds of the material from the 112 objects that make up her living space. Furniture, everyday objects and domestic items were thus gradually transformed, moved, hollowed out or reduced in size, turning her everyday space into a veritable testing ground. By inhabiting the successive material realities of this domestic environment in ruins, Mathilde Pellé explores what remains when we subtract rather than add. Subtract House thus constitutes a situated experiment: at once a research protocol, a transformation of a living environment, and a sensitive observation of the effects of material reduction on uses, forms and perceptions.
This experiment marks the start of a design research project, undertaken since 2016, centred on subtraction as a method of investigation. Through functional prototype objects, experiments, documentary photographs, films, annotations and written texts, the research explores different ways of observing and documenting the transformations at work.
Carried out notably during several residencies—at the Cité du design (2020), at Cap Moderne – Association Eileen Gray (2021) and at the Martell Foundation (2024)—this approach combines the analysis of objects, sensitive observation of production processes and the narration of lived experience. It engages with design as a research practice, capable of producing forms as well as investigative contexts, narratives and knowledge.
Mathilde Pellé (born in 1987) is a French designer, artist, and researcher. Since she fears contributing to the material saturation of the world, one day she envisaged exploring the notion of less and recognising the value of
voids or free spaces. Since then she has been engaged in research in which she
develops, applies and projects so-called subtractive methods.
Attentive to lifestyles and the objects underpinning them, Pellé has built up a
cross-disciplinary corpus that defends the idea of a subtractive concept for the
production of new forms, which aims to challenge the material overload offered by
Western societies.
