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Craft vs. Technology
Design as an activity that led to the production of something functional ended
in 1990, when Philippe Starck’s Juicy Salif lemon squeezer thrust its pointed
tripod-legs through the barely beating heart of Modernism. From that point
on, designers would never be able to escape the inherent uselessness of their
activities. As bitter juice trickled down the Salif’s sculpted stainless-steel surface,
dripping anywhere but where its user intended it to go, the profession was stung
with a painful message: use is useless.
But design’s apparent impracticality is not a failure; it is the point from which
to explore possibilities of contemporary culture (although, for those who find this
a ridiculously pretentious position, there are still plenty of products out there that
work). That’s why designer chairs are almost always more uncomfortable than
other kinds of chairs, why designer tables are a challenge to use.
Instead of helping us to do things, post-Salif design helps us to understand
things. It helps us to map our position on the grid of contemporary context. And it
allows us to explore the complexities of that context through the mute sensation
– touch, texture and form – generated by the materials and technologies of
an object’s production. Design allows us to feel qualities of the contemporary
before they are fully formed; it articulates ideas before anyone’s even had them
– a guide dog leading the blind. The Salif is not about squeezing lemons; it’s
about owning an object that looks like space-age progress (like a shiny culinary
Sputnik) and tells all your friends that you, like Philippe, have an amazing sense of
humour, that you understand that the most simple of objects (a lemon squeezer)
can appear to be loaded with as much cultural baggage as the most complex
(a rocket), even if you know it is not.
Even if design has not always been primarily about feelings, in some ways,
of course, it has always been about feeling. Its language privileges how and
of what objects are made as much as it does what they look like. This allows a
designer, in his or her choice of materials and construction techniques, to encode
cultural attitudes and ideas about the mechanisms of ‘progress’ that shape society
within an object.
One of the more obvious examples of this can be found in the proto-
Modernism of the Arts and Crafts movement. Designers such as William
Morris articulated a dramatic opposition to the cultural effects of the Industrial
Revolution by reviving medieval manufacturing techniques for the fabrication of
household furniture, and in so doing reinstated the role of the craftsman over the
machine. Far from being twee, Morris’s floral-patterned wallpaper was actually a
radical manifesto.
Instead of helping
Today, it’s the effects of the digital revolution and the new fabrication
techniques it offers that are preoccupying many designers. And the impact of
digital can be categorised into three tropes: the graphic cut; the fold and the
us do things,
complex surface; and nu-craft.
The graphic cut exploits computer-controlled devices such as laser and
(more commonly now) waterjet cutters to slice elaborate and intricate patterns
design helps us
into various materials. The technique itself is essentially two-dimensional,
and makes ‘objects’ that could be said to belong most properly to the fields
of illustration or graphic design. Typically, exponents of the graphic cut use it
to understand
to refer to a world of preexisting objects which are then deployed rather like
quotations on the ‘new’ object. So look out for the following in a squashed flat
things, to
form: elks’ heads, elaborate baroque furniture, Arts and Crafts wallpaper. In
this way, designers can easily allow their ‘new’ objects to reference history and
tradition – though these references are rendered immediately contemporary by
articulate ideas
the precision of the cut and the flatness of the material. Sometimes the patterns
created are wrapped around the overtly three-dimensional spaces produced by
complex surfaces.
before anyone’s
The complex surface exploits the potential of new software to design and
manufacture objects in three dimensions. Its effect can be an overwhelmingly
rich visual field, or a reduced abstraction close to a child’s cartoon, depending
even had them
on how it is deployed. This design approach often uses technologies of rapid
prototyping – if not in the final manufacture, then in the design development. >
Artreview 100
Design Focus.indd 100 7/3/08 10:21:50
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