2nd Chance Designs was born after a long reflection about living and designing today.
We wanted to create something about today & tomorrow’s World,
and also about the act & consequences ofdesigning today.
This project is related to what we have discovered, nearly by chance, while cruising between the bulky waste in the streets of Brussels and around, looking for nothing in particular.
Besides the furniture, the tires, the clothes and all the mess, we’ve found a box full of diapo’s. There were hundreds of these, all classified by year, with the name of each particular event written on it (“Alice’s birthday -1971”, “Yugoslavia - may 1957”, “Barbecue with grandpa - summer 1966”, ...).

This was a decisive point of the work, as we realized this was not
“common waste” but some unusal
material, material with a soul, aban
donned on the street, with a whole story dedicated to death. So, we saved these and took them with us.

Suddenly we asked ourselves WHY


Answer to that question didn’t take long to appear, as we found, at a few meters further, a box full of Super8 video tapes, also with significant titles, then in front of another house, some
5,25 inches computer disks, with
“Design-Mode Brussels 1988” written by hand on the box.
This was enough, we had suddenly understood what was going on: previous owners did not have a working machine to read these anymore.

However, even if we had the reason, we couldn’t feel any other than sad, as we felt these little industrial “all similar/all unique” boxes were still alive.
Not only sad, but also hopefull, as we felt
something was going on there, that there was a great relation precisely between them and our questions about designing today.

But, first of all, we had to check if this was some unusual case. So, the day after, in another quarter, there it was: bingo, media was everywhere! In front of each house we found 8 tracks, Super8, VHS, diapo’s, disquettes, cassettes, cd’s, etc... At the same time, we realized we also had at home some tapes, VHS and disquettes at home without any working player. Not some “old” stuff but songs from 1999, pictures on disquettes from 2001, and VHS from 2002, and these were OUR media!

This was relevant, something was to say, something was to be created, this was the beginning of something.

Death of the memories could not go on, we had to offer them a second chance.