Not Flat 3: not your average design collective

From slick brand films to a robot that steals data, Not Flat 3 is an up-and-coming design collective with a broad and tantalising portfolio. Formed by four friends to help elevate their individual skills and ideas beyond what they could offer alone, the collective specialises in thoughtful and thought-proving work that asks questions the world around us and disrupts the status quo. It’s astonishing to think they’ve only just graduated.

Its founders, designers Jonathan Quaade, Nada Debeaumont, Wei Prior and Anna Sheriakova, met at Central Saint Martins but circumstances transpired that they never got the opportunity to work together. Fast forward to graduation and the quartet could sense there was an affinity to their ambitions and decided to form a collective. To begin, they gathered at Jonathan and Nada’s apartment (Flat 3), but before long their operation outgrew the kitchen table and they set up shop officially. Not Flat 3 was born. 

Design Can is a project very close to our hearts here at Zetteler. Built in collaboration with a group of designers, editors and activists – plus Not Flat 3 themselves, Design Can is a new campaign and online tool demanding and encouraging the design industry to be more inclusive. It features a manifesto detailing how the sector needs to step up; a You Can section with practical steps about how to better be an ally; and resources, where readers can discover and new talent and submit creatives they want to celebrate. Its playful branding is the brainchild of Not Flat 3, who we knew were perfect for the task as soon as we read about their fun yet thought-provoking oeuvre. “As a diverse collective ourselves, this was a project that we felt so strongly about from the get-go,” they tell us. “After hearing it for the first time it was like, ‘Oh shit, how did this not exist already?’.” The identity features a tin can icon, a play on the name but also symbolic of the hidden potential waiting to burst into the forefront of the industry, while also nodding to the idea of the preservation of resources. The identity also brings together a diverse range of typefaces from designers from London to Mexico. It’s typical of Not Flat 3’s approach to branding – conceptually rigorous, fun and conscious of being inclusive in its collaborators. 

For a series of films celebrating the heritage of BVLGARI, three members – Nada, Anna and Jonathan – came together to upend everything you’d expect from an Italian jewellery brand. Pitching against other students as part of a Central Saint Martins live brief, the trio devised a sensual series of films that used repeated voguing body parts to reinterpret BVLGARI's iconic Serpenti symbol and history. With dramatic lighting, clever editing and slick choreography, the project shows how the skills of Not Flat 3’s different members can come together to provide something fresh and unexpected. “Not Flat 3 is a platform allowing us to explore and experiment with the concept and codes of a modern design collective,” Not Flat 3 says about this approach. The films where shown as part of the jeweller’s latest exhibition in Rome.

At totally the other end of the spectrum, Jonathan (with the help of Wei) developed the Globotech Bot, a machine that explores and critiques how we humans willingly undermine our own privacy. Users could choose to publicly display their data in exchange for candy. The installation played on the gamification of humans' daily usage of social platforms, which encourage continued usage through addictive incentives. It’s a clever project that’s fun but also reveals an unsettling truth – a great example of the collective's more speculative work. They say, “The dynamic of our relationship is constantly changing as Not Flat 3 is an ever-evolving experiment: the four of us all have different stories, changes that we want to see in the world, Netflix series we still have yet to see, and the most exciting part is that this is just the beginning for us.”