designswarm thoughts

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Ok so I’ve been back for a week or so and thought I’d report back on this year’s Salone del Mobile visit in a more interesting way.

I think the internet is really good at reporting on the Salone work and I’m sure you’ve all read and seen pictures of the projects presented there, but it only encapsulates one side of the experience. For me, Salone is all about who I saw, who I met and who I sadly only got to wave at. Making plans during Salone is impossible, meetups get changed or canceled, getting from one side of the city to the next takes forever, so it’s really all about who you do get to see and where.
At Bar Basso late one night

Outside the Ingo Maurer exhibition

At Arabeschi di Latte tea room

Outside the Lexus exhibition hall

Inside Molo design exhibition

Spotted on the world’s favorite waste of time: FB.

I don’t want to look like I’m crying wolf here, but certainly you can’t ignore the signs.

From why design conferences should be better to how we should design ouselves out of consumer culture ending with Stark himself saying it’s all a bit shit really, things don’t sound too good for product design at the moment.

As a “frequent traveller” I really enjoy work that rethinks our relationships to maps and geography. I wish I could wear my trips on sleeves sometimes as it would help avoid the very long drawn conversation I need to have with people to explain why I love Europe so much and that the only North American thing about me is my accent.

Lovely work by Elisabeth Lecourt.

Got this from god knows where, but thought I’d let Montrealers know about this evening next week.

I’ve finally found some time to have a proper read through Baudrillard’s System of objects to find it really is shaping my thinking around material culture and technology. Some quick thoughts based on quotes from the book:

“No sooner does an object lose its concrete practical aspects than it is transferred to the realm of mental practices”.

This made me think today about my first mentor if I can call him so. Hywel Jeffcott was my DTC teacher when I was 14-16 and the first one to truly encourage me to go into design. He gave me, on graduating from Year 11, a fabulous book I ended up endlessly flipping through called The Way things work by David Macauley. I think in a way the work I am doing with Tinker tries to somehow get back to the idea that innovation and technology are also palpable things that can be understood down to simple components. Simple components, simple actions that exist within the real of direct application are part of an art and a craft that in design is left to “fabricators”.
“Man has to be reassured by some sense of participation, albeit a merely formal one”

I think there’s much to be said about the fear that technology will take over. Baudrillard highlights an inconsistency in our thinking where we want technology to be as human as possible but if a sense of agency is too present (such as in articifial intelligence) then a line has been crossed which fills us with apocalyptic fears. We want so much for this technology to know about us and our needs, but not _that_ much. Where this line lies depends almost entirely on context of application, which means it isn’t policed and all sorts of privacy issues and concerns arise. It’s what he calls the “new anthropomorphism”.
“No man’s land between workplace and family home” is a metaphor that Baudrillard applies to the automobile. I think it can almost potentially extend to the cell phone. A personal object that is used so publicly and bridges space and time.

In any case, I truly recommend it as compulsory reading for designers. It is full of insights and questions about the great illusion we are creating and the mechanisms  and motivations that work just under the surface of  our everyday life.

Yes yes at last, it’s now ready to ship via everyone’s favorite site Etsy!

Let’s start with an anecdote:

I spent Friday on the go on a mad one-day trip to Amsterdam and then Eindhoven and back to London. Not as mad as you’d think, it was a totally self-indulgent decision I took at the last minute and ended up meeting old friends and new ones. Just lovely to be in the Netherlands as well. One my way back I didn’t have enough time to stop in town to had to settle for the sad choices at Schipol airport. I ended up getting a pannini at Per Tutti, some dodgy italian food chain. The waitress handed me a thick plastic-cased coaster and asked if I knew what this way for? I cleary looked like I didn’t so she went on to explain that when my sandwich will be ready, this coaster will ring and blink and I can come and get it at the counter. At first I thought: wow the future we’ve been talking about is getting nearer by the day, but wasn’t entirely thrilled either. The coaster reversed the role of the waitress and got clients off their backs, this also limited the reliance of the company on good and friendly staff as the interaction with the customer was limited, even more than usual. This felt like an efficient service definitely, but also one that made you feel even more like a number.

A few days later during the course of a conversation with Janne the larger implications dawned on me. The question for service design in the future isn’t only how will services be made more ubiquitous, engage people in different ways and get people to use things, but it’s also going to be: how are we going to be designing services that still involve people altogether?

Will our idea of progress eradicate the need for people to occupy a role in the service industry because we’ve designed them out?
In countries like China and India where population is a big issue, they are turning to solutions that see the problem in an opposite way. Each service must be broken down so as to involve (and pay) as many people as possible.

Does that mean that in the future, dealing with people in services will be seen as a less-productive method of obtaining something? Surely that’s not why so many of us complain about feeling unimportant and like a number when we interact with banking services. So it’s interesting to see that approach in the food industry which perhaps points the way to future changes.

Reminds me of The Hungries project I was involved in with my friends Dana and Alejandro.

“The more I read interviews with these rock star designers, the more I realize how out of touch with real design problems these people are. Approaching design solely as style and brand simply perpetuates the notion of Design as transparent and shallow, and if these people continue to serve as the mouthpieces for our industry, our industry will continue to simultaneously lose the business-centered respect and credibility it so urgently needs, and to ignore the social and cultural problems it so direly needs to solve.”

Via nice article in Core77.

I went to the Work-in-progress show at Central St Martins tonight to see the MA in Industrial Design and Textile Futures course. I’d been invited last December to attend a crit of half of those student’s works and was curious to see what they’d achieved. One of the many reasons I enjoy keeping in touch with students and people still in school, is that more often than not, they point to possible industry futures and this was definitely a surprising experience.

Firstly it seemed that more than ever industrial design drove into the same dead end as its colleagues in the fine arts, design noir and critical design and sometimes interaction design. A lot of ideas, a lot of statements and one-liners but not many projects that addressed modern issues.
One exception was the work of Sara Bellini (terrible picture of her project above) who is trying to cater to bed-ridden children in hospitals. Health is a subject that in my experience, design academics shy away from, partly because the unknown are numerous, it’s hard to relate to the needs of the target audience and also because it’s hard to be poetic in that environment. I think her work might change their minds. Do go check it out in the final exhibition in June.

Industrial design is losing it’s place as the more “technical” but still easthetic cousin of engineering to become the art-wannabe. The future of industrial design it seems, could be found on the 10th floor where the second year of Textiles Futures were exhibiting their own work.

There was really a broad range of applications, of a extremely high standard and with applications that went far beyond your usual motif explorations or weaving techniques: from wallpapers that would visualise your energy use, to furniture made from post-it-like layers of materials, shower curtains that visualise and conserve the water being used, fabrics that trap light, cartoon-like companions for everyday life, and interactive corridors in airports that reflect people’s cultural backgrounds, architectural structures that bring variable amounts of shade to public spaces.

Eager to explore areas they had never touched in their lives, and to learn about the technologies that would help them, I had met some of these women (no men to be found here) for the first time at an Arduino workshop I organised with Tinker.it. Not 1 but about 8 of them had showed up.

I was impressed (and you all know that rarely happens) and I look forward to seeing if this is “la nouvelle vague” of design.

I’m slightly baffled at what’s going on in design at the moment. Never more has the term “designer” meant something completely superficial, not so useful, egocentric and unsustainable. And at the same time, in business circles, the term “design” is being hailed as the great solution to a changing economy and market. Has the concept of design diluted itself so much we can’t tell one from the other?

When I was taught industrial design , it was always about problem solving. If the problem wasn’t valid, didn’t affect enough people or the research was poorly done, then the professors would shoot you down. I still feel that’s a great academic approach.

When did design start being about “making a statement”? Is it because it’s easier to think of a general public of “all” as opposed to a public of “some”. Is it because it’s easier to produce just the one piece than to care about bigger production and it’s impact. Is it because designers envy the glamour of art? Is “designer” a new way to say “applied artist”?

I don’t have an answer to these yet… but we should collectively come up with some and quickly if we want to still know what design is supposed to stand for.

A few links that brought this up:
+ Design is the problem by Nathan Shedroff.
++ But is it art? at Intersections07
+++Philippe Starck @ TED.

Found while doing online xmas browsing.

According to John Lewis, girls can only see the color pink.

Stupid.