Contemporary Design in 2005

As someone who trained and works primarily as an Architect and came to design from that background, my view on contemporary design is from that position. However it is interesting to observe the evolving nature of ‘Design’.

Design / Craft / Art

Over the last 10 years ‘Design’ has become the hot descriptor. People like Phillipe Starck and Marc Newson have become icons which new generations aspire to equal. Design also stands as the career path with commercial form and the prospect of making money. Who hasn’t done the royalty calculation for mass production (sell 20,000 per annum x $2.00 royalty … how many products is Phillipe Starck getting royalties on?).

From my point of view, it seems this has led to comprehensive re- badging of many activities to fit under the design banner. The biggest area of shift was to convert Craft to Design and because Craft did not have the same cachet – it carried degraded connotations from gum nut mugs in bush potteries to gold trinkets in the cheap retail parts of town – people were quick to abandon it for Design. Object Magazine dropped the word craft long ago; the Colin and Cecily Rigg Craft Award at the NGV now is a Design award. You could go on and on – what are we scared of I wonder?

Art also, for a long time, rejected craft skill as a necessary part of art practice and now art is basically anything you claim as art. But perhaps that is changing as well. The current artist at the Australian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Ricky Swallow offers fabulous technique in wood carving as a critical part of what he produces. Similarly, Patricia Picininni, also at the same venue a couple of years ago, relied heavily on computer generated but highly crafted objects in her art.

So perhaps Craft is now Design and Art is now Craft? Regardless of how you badge it however, there is an overriding intellectual debate about what is good Design. And where is Contemporary Design heading in 2005?

Is Modernism Back?

When we design projects where do we start? Some students will be so full of ideas they don’t know which one to pursue. Others will have no idea at all, – be totally lost – and struggle to find something worthwhile. And in deciding what to do or where to start are there ‘rules’ available to help – what controls or informs what we produce?

With Modernism the rules were clear ‘form follows function’ and ‘less is more’ became the tag lines – looking backwards was wrong! Post-modernism threw that out with ‘anything goes’ and one of the hardest things was designing without rules or constraints. So designers have, in recent times, operated in a multi-streamed design world with advocates of each stream arguing their merits and disparaging the rest. It seems to me that some Schools of Design have become points of polarity pushing their philosophical position with the students forced to follow the leader. Fractal Maths, French Philosophers, and so on are offered as intellectual references. Need a point of departure? Then select your stream and jump in!

Design in recent times seems to have run amok! Yet through all this confusion I believe there has now come a realization of the value inherent in the clarity of purpose of modernism. This has led to a re- evaluation of it ethos and I think to an exent it is back. Perhaps not quite the same as before (we have learned from post-modernism) but many of the tenets of modernism resonate again.

Leading contemporary architects like Herzog de Meuron in Europe and Kazuo Sejima in Japan pursue an elegant form of new modernism. New because of opportunities that new materials and technology offer, together with the additional freedom to analyse, detail and fabricate complex forms, but essentially we still see pared back simple modernism.

Inevitably the influences of the past 20 years affect design’s direction and maybe this ‘modernism’ will be rebadged as something else, but design ideas developed clearly and rigorously are back, distilled to their essence; we again see the beauty of the functional object. Away with indulgent excess, the endorsement of ugly, the glorifying of the badly made.

It is interesting therefore to look at a manufacturer like Alessi’s production over the last twenty years. From a traditional production base using stainless steel to create restaurant ware, ranging from cutlery to coffee pots in the ‘Italian modern’ style, it expanded vigorously in the early post modern period.

Pushed by designer Ettore Sottsass, Alessi expanded its stainless steel production in new post-modern directions and then started to introduce a range of other materials using designs by Sottsass, Phillipe Starck, Michael Graves and others. Flushed with that success they workshopped, with Alessandro Mendini, new directions. These led to a plastic based range that met the objective of being cheaper and more accessible and also was quirky, decorative and over the top! Materials were used to create visually entertaining objects which somehow lack the integrity or backbone of good design.

The original Alessi Tea and Coffee Piazza concepts came at the start of post-modernism. The most successful – Michael Graves and Aldo Rossi – indulged in classical references and decoration which developed into a range of best sellers. With Phillipe Starck this evolved into the post-modernism of the ‘clever design idea’ but referenced a broader range of ideas usually encapsulated by the tricky title used to name the object. Alessi has now moved on from Starck and their foray into gimmicky plastic ware is now largely passe.

With the new Tea and Coffee Towers project of 2 years ago, revisiting the Tea and Coffee Piazza concept after a 20 year break, there is till the odd tricky idea or indulgent gimmick, but by and large the proposals explore a new modernism where the basic ideas of the modern movement reappear and some are now also expanded by form-making opportunities offered by the computer.

But CAD as a design tool is only an overlay on the movement back to modernism and CAD has also contributed to the excesses of the post-modern, seducing designers who allow the computer to create the object. Designers will need to reassert control so that the computer helps to develop their ideas not create them.

Is Technique Useless?

So what about technique, those basic skills you need to learn to make things? Well computers are on a wave and CAD / CAM can actually put the designer back at the making interface, but all too often the experienced technicians and lecturers who could pass on more traditional skills are few and far between. (Canberra School of Art fortunately has continued to use strong teaching of technique to underpin their Design Workshops.)

Today there is a tendency to ignore technique leaving those skills for someone else or later. Across ‘design’ based workshops there can be seen a trend to treat design as something conceptual and documentable but then someone else (ie industry) is needed to make it. We are just designers after all!

In his recent paper on Design through Making (AD Vol 75 No 4 July/ August 2005) Bob Shiel talks about Technique: ‘The prospect of realizing ideas into built form is a transition during which some qualities are gained and others lost. As immaterial and intangible ideas develop, the question of how things are made generates a period of opportunity. If equipped with a critical understanding of the rich potential of this phase, the designer will approach this transition with confidence … making is a discipline that can instigate rather than merely solve ideas – in other words a design process.

I believe it will be recognized that we have entered an era where expertise in making is becoming repositioned at the centre of design practice. For designers, the new era is most clearly defined by a convergence in the properties of digital drawings and the automated techniques of manufacturing into the hybrid and adaptive technology of CAD / CAM (computer-aided design / computer-aided manufacturing). Armed with an array of new tools that draw and make, the CAD / CAM operative is neither a designer nor a maker, but both. … Old skills have reappeared alongside new as complex automation technology offers exciting potential to readdress everything from mass industrial to handmaking techniques.

The key here is old skills alongside new and the extent to which we abandon old skills will materially determine the character of design in the future. However, I think the best students will always be happy to learn technique, for that knowledge informs the way you work, allowing you to better use computers to achieve the outcomes you want.

Co-Founder Denton Corker Marshall architecture and urban design, Melbourne

>>>