facing page:
Apple Juice Bottle, 1999, Marcel Wanders for The rise of nu-craft as design activity is an alternative response to new
Droog. Photo: Marsel Loermans
technologies. Rather than a Luddite rejection of technology, or a total inversion
(as with William Morris), it more often appears as a negotiation between high-
and low-tech. It fuses craft techniques or materials with the latest fabrication
techniques as a way of providing a sense of perspective in the face of digital
technology’s fetish for novelty. In so doing, it draws on sensations such as
nostalgia and humour – moments of engagement that are not formal but cultural
– to make ‘the new’ seem both more and less outlandish. (Nu-craft is a field in
which irony is, without doubt, king.) Such techniques came to the fore during the
1990s and are particularly visible in the work of Hella Jongerius (traditional, ‘hard’
ceramic objects – sinks, vases, etc – produced out of ‘soft’ polyurethane), aspects
of Marcel Wanders (his most famous design – the Knotted Chair (1996) – fuses
old-fashioned knitting with the latest epoxies and aramid fibres developed for
the aerospace industry), Jurgen Bey and many other designers related to design
collective Droog.
This design attitude is most closely related to fine art – indeed, many
of its tactics seem to have been lifted directly from a contemporary art primer.
But unlike the first two categories, nu-craft does not try to overwhelm its user
with sensation. It is not a stylistic approach or a totalising design vision. Instead
it displays wit and ingenuity in specific instances – a kind of design intelligence
– which has made it something that has easily extended beyond the bounds of
‘professional’ design culture and into the rise of blogging and the related cult of
the amateur.
You could look, for example, at activities such as IKEA hacking – where
the amateur culture of bedroom computer programming meets generic flatpack
furniture. On websites such as http://ikeahacker.blogspot.com posters swap tips
and projects for things like a ‘funked up Klippan sofa, an ingenious idea for your
Pax wardrobe, a creative twist on your kitchen countertop, or even advice on
how to finally stop Forby stools from wobbling”. You can find similarly creative
DIY-ism in phenomena such as Make magazine, which includes how-to projects
spanning everything from electronics to knitting. One of the endpoints of nu-
The complexity
craft is that everyone can become a designer (as opposed to the specialisms and
arcana of high design culture), while at the same time suggesting ‘unique’ objects
can be created out of the detritus of mass production and the mechanisms of
of the surface,
consumerism.
The graphic cut and the complex surface, for all their intricacies, exploit
technology in a simplistic manner – that’s to say, they do what they do because
the seamlessness
they can. And that’s a good thing. New technologies have liberated aspects
of design that were, until recently, undrawable or unmakable; what they offer
is a kind of release. In their intricacies of pattern or form, they aspire to a kind
and lustre of the
of technological sublime, an overpowering encounter with digitally crafted
complexity. Nu-craft, however, has a cooler response to technology. It is selective
of how and when technologies are used – a kind of editorial or curatorial attitude
finish, create
to available and appropriate ways and means. Technologies are used here as
a more articulate language. The possibilities offered up are more open-ended.
The complex surface, for example, is a kind of dead end – a baroque endpiece to
a sense of the
a particular history of design as formal object. Nu-craft steps out of these vectors
of design history, instead forging unexpected links and hybridisations.
alien, of an
Despite their differences, these three categories dominate contemporary
design practice. Each of these techniques relates to a way of seeing. They share
a commitment to the object as a cultural lodestone, whose significance is a
object lacking
way of describing the contemporary condition (even if many designers don’t
themselves admit this). Importantly, they do not propose design as a solution.
After Starck’s Juicy Salif, it has been impossible to imagine design as an agent
obvious signs
of progressive change in the old modernist sense. Design’s driving aspiration is
to improve the world through the richness and relevance of its cultural presence.
Contemporary design produces devices that are not intended to perform as
of manufacture
advertised – as chair, table, lamp or whatever. Instead it produces devices whose
function is a particular kind of cultural experience.
Design Focus.indd 105 7/3/08 10:26:33
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