“An Idea FORMING” workshop takes participants on a journey of translating abstract ideas into physical form. Starting from a shared theme without predefined answers, each workshop invites participants to develop their own unique interpretations through shape, form, and structure.
Ideas begin on paper, serving not as a blueprint, but as a thinking tool to record how thoughts shift, simplify, and evolve. The process then extends into sheet materials. Through folding, cutting, stacking, and joining, participants discover how material qualities reshape ideas—revealing the iterative nature of prototyping through testing, observing, and refining.
Light is introduced to ignite a dialogue with the structure, creating layered interactions of illumination and shadow. The workshop concludes with a collective lighting-up ceremony, bringing individual creations together to illuminate the diverse forms emerging from the same starting point.
Embodying Ultramar’s design ethos, this workshop offers a condensed experience of their process—guiding participants step by step as fleeting thoughts are refined into tangible reality.
Ultramar—Latin for “beyond the sea”—is a Madrid-based furniture and object design studio founded in 2023, inviting you on a journey through narratives and folklore from across the sea.
Our studio creates objects through a dialogue between culture, architecture, material, and technology. We look to what has been crafted before us—not for how it appeared, but for why it existed—extracting principles rather than reproducing forms. A shape becomes a principle; a ritual becomes a structure; an artefact becomes a language.
Material and process are integral to the design itself, not subsequent steps. Constraints become features, while technical anomalies are elevated into aesthetics. Moving between furniture, sculpture, and architecture, the work often demands time to fully reveal itself.
The past is material for the future.