Objectified

some salient quotes from the film:

We designers do not work in a vacum... we are not the fine artists we are often confused with. (Dieter Rams)

We now have a new generation of products where the form bares absolutley no relation to the function. (Alice Rawsthorne)

We tend to want new things- they can do something that has a different look, a newer look, a fresher look, a new now, next now kind of look and the problem with spending a lot of time focusing on what's very now and very next is that it isn't very forever and that means it doesn't last, because there's someone coming along trying to design what's new and next after that. (Rob Walker)

When you own the car and you drive the car even the decisions about whether you're going to put a bumper sticker on it- there's an idea of an audience- I feel pretty strongly that this is true not just of cars but for almost everything you buy that the real 'audience' is really ourselves, and the person you're really speaking to when you're speaking about 'Why me and this car? Why is this the right car for me?' You're making a statement to yourself about yourself.  (Rob Walker)

I like the concept of wearing in rather than wearing out. You'd like to create something were the emotional relationship was more satisfying over time. (Bill Moggridge)

mass communication vs. mass production (Anthony Dunne)

Dieter Rams

Wasn't sure I was going to enjoy the exhibition to be honest- I mean I know a bit about the guy and the designs but couldn't help feeling they were slavishly following a movement rather than doing there own thing and that they were plastic monstrosities created to be consumed and re bought with a different shell. The objects were however filled with an integrity and honesty which rendered a good majority of the objects still very contemporary looking. Of course some things dated- portable record players and some of the shavers and coffee makers. But alot of the audio equipment could have come straight out of Muji- and on reflection alot of the clean functionality which is characteristic of Ram's work for Braun can still be seen in Industrial Facilities work for Muji and others- (and if were going to name drop other contemporay people designing like that there's Apple to consider). I re-found Rams' 'Ten Principles of Good Design' and when you see some of the pieces it resounds very well. His universal shelving system is still on sale today and it really is a testament to the design that it looks so fresh.

1) Good design is innovative.

2) Good design makes a product useful.

3) Good design is aesthetic.

4) Good design makes a product understandable.

5) Good design is unobtrusive.

6) Good design is honest.

7) Good design is long lasting.

8) Good design is consistent throughout.

9) Good design is sustainable.

10) Good design is as little design as possible.

Design Awards 2010

Took a trip to the Design Museum and here's my round up of favourites from the Design Awards. The stuff shown is what I reckon is most awesome- there was of course some stuff that I didn't dig- but the following was so good I left feeling good about the Design industry which I hadn't expected. This is Sugru- a material which can be moulded by hand and cures at room temperature to become a washable, heatproof silicone. Sold as coloured lumps in various sizes it's designed for hacking your objects- fixing, making better and is generally just awesome.

The Really Interesting Group (RIG) have created the Newspaper Club- utilising down time at printers they have created a service which allows individuals to upload artwork for their own newspapers of between 5 and 5000 copies- they've made printing incredibly affordable. Perhaps the most interesting (excuse the pun) thing which started it off  is 'Things Our Friends Have Written On The Internet', a publication aggregating images and text from blogs, and websites into a printed publication. Heavy web 3.0 shit.

In a similar vain It's Nice That get my respect for producing a consistently quality package of blog, features, jobs board, exhibitions, artwork and most importantly for me an extremely affordable printed output: again, using the advantages of the internet to create content. Printing it turns it into something better- sort of brings it full circle.

The Incidental has so many people involved that i'm not going to try and name check them all but it's pretty fucking encouraging to see some familiar names in there. Basically it's an almost immediate magazine based in and featuring both Milan 2009 and The London Design Festival 2009. Content was sourced from the people going around the events- tweeted, blogged, reported directly and then sifted, filtered and created into a new publication each day. Simple- brave- dramatically scaleable- pretty and above all useful.

Real Time by Maarten Baas is a clock which is changed manually- he's done a few- some with brushes, some as installations but this one is done with some red glass- black paint (I think I read it was latex) and a squigee. Watch the video. Not in the show but found on his website: I really really like his clay furniture series- I mean I really like it and I'm not into chairs.

Also worth a mention were BBC iPlayer, Amazon's Kindle (Both of these were of going to happen, but are still well designed and pretty revolutionary), Why Not Associates Literary Forest, and The Trillion Dollar Project (to raise awareness for The Zimbabwean newspaper.

Some Vids from around the Interwebs

Sketch-a-Move from Superflux on Vimeo.

Dispatchworks

Beautiful repairs/artworks in an ongoing project by (as far I can tell) Jan Vormann & friends around Tel Aviv, Berlin, Amsterdam, and Bochignano in Italy . He's part of Platform 21 which seems like an interesting group of people also. I love these images for their striking anachronistic colour and geometry. As big Kev McCloud always points out- restoration is a mix of faithful material and technique vs. the super modern and as long as you make the new stand out, you're alright.

The Lonely Image

I'm interested in the relationships between objects. For the purposes of this piece of writing, 'objects' will be 2D images or titles/words.

I am interested in the relationships which can be formed between two objects when they are presented side by side- as in a book spread. The spread creates a context for the objects to inhabit and invites the viewer to understand not only two separate images, but also the narrative which the objects create together, through merit of sharing the same space.

There are three ways in which adjacent objects may reference each other.

The first is to do with the physicality of the objects - colour, shape, form -  strictly aesthetics. Two images may refer to each through merit of both being blue, or the focal point being a clock etc.

The second is concerned with the symbolical nature of an object and the ideas, attributes, and meanings which such objects reference. For example an image of a beach representing a memory of a holiday, a shell as a souvenir of the same experience, or a train ticket of the journey completed to get to the holiday. Other examples of ideological referencing could be religious symbols, celebrity icons, or brand logos.

The third referencing type is one of labelling and frames. Objects, even if attached arbitrarily, through their nature of sharing a page, refer to each other and have a dialogue. Through merit of being under the same title or being grouped together, these artefacts are forced to begin a discourse with each other. This is known as contiguity- from Aristotle’s ‘Laws of Association’- whereby things which are in close proximity are linked and ‘readily associated’.

Referencing is what allows objects to connect with each other and have a dialogue. Whether this dialogue is interesting or communicates the intentions of the curator depends on how well those objects rhyme together.

The skill of rhyming objects is similar to that of the story teller: to create either an ideological or physical (material or aesthetic) thread between a group of objects to create a fuller, deeper understanding of their context, history, and narrative. Juxtaposition of objects is very important and a pair may still rhyme even if the neighbouring objects are incomplete. Rhyme can give a spread a certain poetic and approximate logic.

I am particularly interested in the accidental ways in which objects may rhyme- when two things are abstracted from their original context and framed as a pair to extract something entirely unexpected and meaningful. James Turnley created 'Two for the Road' as "an editing experiment based on the visual similarities that can be found when photos are presented side by side." Through merit of proximity the images share a contiguous dialogue. Through this, the image's messages are skewed and a new message emerges. In a similar way that the title of an artwork affects the context it is viewed in, so when objects are put together they cannot help but be changed by each other. 'Two for the Road' is a curated attempt to create rhyme. 'Them Thangs' is run by Justin Blyth: 'It is a collection of things I like, intended for visual inspiration'. It is perhaps best described as a visual blogzine. The display of the images is part curated and part organic. Images are selected but then allowed to flow through the page, creating many and different relationships. Images which ordinarily would seem unremarkable, when viewed as a collection (through benefit of being physically/aesthetically, ideologically or contiguously related) become a necessary part of a captivating and beautiful whole. Words and Pictures is a website I am in the process of creating with Mike which attempts to cultivate the moment of rhyme by allowing uploaded content to appear next to each other randomly. This is to further explore the themes discussed here: particularly contiguity, and also to create content for an off line printed magazine of curated and edited pairs of objects.

Some notes on manufacturing and it's implications

So an amalgamation of things has led to this post- I'm pretty much going to repost stuff that I've collected on my way through the web. This is a google image of Google HQ in California.

First up is a great documentary off of the BBC-  The Virtual Revolution: The cost of free. Here's a couple of interesting parts of the film in quote form:

"What we've done is limited the range of human expression and activity on the internet to those things that are market friendly.

Look at the devolution of people's personal presence online, from the quirky individualistic highly personalised websites of the home pages of the HTML of the mid 90s, to the now utterly conformist and rigid profiles on something like myspace and facebook. You can no longer define yourself by anything- you must define yourself by what books you buy, by what movies you like, what actresses you aspire to- whether you are single, married or looking. By things that the market understands"

Douglas Rushkoff (Author: Life Inc)

"Millions of people obviously enjoy these recommendation systems and are happy with what they get in return- but I worry that in the process perhaps we've lost something.

I wonder whether if recommendation systems don't defeat the point of the web. Isn't the vast possibility that the web offers for serendipity  to bring us unexpected raw ideas from accidental encounters being replaced by a process that apparently broadens our horizons but actually sells the same thing."

Dr Aleks Krotoski (The shows presenter)

-----

Next is a repost from Ben Terrett of Noisy Decent Graphics blog (also of the RIG) about 'The silver TV steel and glass stand'...

This design kind of sums up everything I hate about bad design in the naughties.

1. It's totally meaningless, devoid of any added value. 2. It's essentially a style that's been ripped off. Hugely derivative of something (probably from Ive) that was once good and then expanded and bastardised to death. 3. It triggers more poor imitations, and leads design buyers to say things like "I want it like they did it". 4. Everyone blindly buys one because everyone else has bought one. No one actually stops to think, do I like this? 5. It's so damn ugly and intrusive. Sat in the corner of your lounge looking shit.

-----

Next is a repost from It's Nice That's 'Discussion' Feature: 'The Blog Blackout' by Chris Gray...

I probably spend an unhealthy amount of time on blogs, to the point where I waste hours looking at the same thing on about 200 different pages. Which did get me thinking about what I did before there was countless websites all doing the same thing yet are all equally popular. From working in a big studio environment and seeing the studio grind to a halt when the net dies to working for myself trying to be disciplined enough to not click safari every time I get a spare minute. There seems to be a total reliance on being able to surf the web as part of being a designer. Surely it can’t be a good thing that most of us are all getting the same inspiration from the same places. No wonder everyones work is starting to look the same. Every week I get e-mails from students that are carbon copies of a recent post and I wish I could reach through my monitor and give them a right old slap. Not to mention that every second advert on TV seems to be cack handed rip-off from something good found on a blog. I’m sure I’m not the only one who hasn’t forgotten the Berocca advert. So that’s me done. I’ve managed to convince myself that it would do me no harm from being offline. Well. At least until tomorrow.

So, where now, how do we stay aware without falling into the pitfalls of styles and trends?

-----

So fill in the gaps yourself, and rant over. Go watch that documentary though- here.

I immediatley filmed them up close

All you kids who like films about people who get food for free: hit this up.