Lift11 talk: Birgitta Ralston and Alexandre Bau on "Transplant, the story of a unique workplace"

Birgitta Ralston is the Creative Director of Ralston & Bau and Head of the Research program in Transplant. She has a broad design and concept development background from interior to profiling projects as well as design strategy. Birgitta is an authorized board member and is fluent in Norwegian, Swedish, French and English.

Alexandre Bau is Creative Director of Ralston & Bau, Head of Nordic Materials and partnerships in Transplant. He has a Master in Product & Furniture Design from the french Beaux Arts de Rennes with experience from the luxury and hospitality industry. Today he’s engaged in sustainability issues within design and architecture. Alexandre talks Norwegian and is fluent in French and English.

At Lift11, Birgitta and Alexandre will tell us the story of Transplant, a creative factory they built in Norway and that works with global companies.

Birgitta Ralston

Creative Director (SW)
Ralston & Bau

Alexandre Bau

Creative Director (FR)
Ralston & Bau
» View Lift11 speakers

Laurent Haug: What is the story behind the creation of Transplant, a creative agency operating from a remote Norwegian fjord?

Brigitta Ralston: At the beginning, it was a naive projection. We were living in Paris, a highly competitive environment, where we were trying to make both a living and have a meaningful life. But we had a dream we wanted to live, originally moving to the US and work from there. That is when a chain of positive and unexpected things happened.

Alexandre Bau: I met Birgitta, and one day she told me "let's change, let's go somewhere else". We were set to start a creative factory in LA, but on our way we were selected by an artists residency in Norway where we discovered an environment that made us truly happy, and allowed us to "make sense" despite the limited resources we had at our disposal. It was quite a revelation, we had more space to create, less inputs coming in the way of our creativity. Space and time were really the ultimate luxury, and we did not want to lose that. So we projected ourselves in Norway, we searched for our own space and had found the location where we founded Transplant.

Birgitta Ralston: We did hundreds of meetings and presentations for our concept of building a creative center from scratch and in the middle of nowhere. It slowly became a common project with the city, then the state, then several collectives who were behind us. The building started, and it generated a huge level of interest from the media. A creative factory in a small Norwegian village, nobody had ever seen that and it raised both skepticism and enthusiasm.

Was moving away from the city complicated?

Alexandre Bau: Working in the city is mandatory to begin your career, make a name for yourself and develop your network. Information, knowledge, people, they are all concentrated in urban environment. So when we moved away, it was painful at the beginning.

Birgitta Ralston: But somehow, moving to a foreign place and away from our culture made us more visible. If you take a candy and put it in the snow, it will stand out more than when left in the middle of thousands of other candies. People will see it more. This is what struck us with Transplant, we could not imagine the level of enthusiasm, the fact that people would film documentaries and write hundreds of articles about us.

Now in the second stage of its life, Transplant is more mature and established. How do you operate?

Birgitta Ralston: The second part of our story is interesting: how Transplant functions. The key is to connect to the networks and make ourselves known. To grow, we have to stop doing everything, stop trying to make everyone happy. What we need is to focus even more on what we want to do and why we are doing it.

Alexandre Bau: We created initiatives like the Ideal Lab, a design research project that wants to find meaningful answers to social problems. We are working on topics like "longer participation" (how to leverage the knowledge of the people who get ejected from the system because of their age, how to deal with an aging population), "precious food" (up to 35% of our food goes to waste, what can we do to improve that), "empathic home" (how to create more sharing and connections between habitants, how to communicate more with people around us and less with people away from us), or "replant the identities" (population movements, leaving a country to go to another, minorities). These projects allow us to help develop truly meaningful art and design projects as they give us a central position in the life of our community, and address issues that are widespread and relevant to industries and the future of society.