If you are familiar with Design Addict, you surely noticed that there are a lot of talented people who express their opinion and questioning in our Forum. We have decided, every now and then, to draw your attention on subjects which seems to us worthy of interest.
The David Report Bulletin is a quarterly trend report with a design perspective and a humanistic approach. The latest issue is called 'The Sustainable Wheel': It’s important to have a holistic mindset when talking about sustainable design. Quite often ecological matters are overbalanced. In this bulletin David Report is describing an imaginary wheel (created by Designboost) which could work as a tool for designers, companies and organisations when defining sustainable design. You will also find an interview with designer researcher Jennifer Leonard.
Between his birth on February 11th 1902 and his death on March 3rd 1971 Arne Jacobsen had a most remarkable life and professional career. He became not only Denmark's most prominent architect and prolific designer but also one of the most well-known functionalists in the world.
Only 37 years before reaching this unique status a Danish newspaper, commenting on the newly finished "Stelling" house, had written that he should be banned from building for life and one of his masterpieces the SAS Royal hotel (1958-1960) in Denmark's capital Copenhagen won on it's inauguration a public competition for "the ugliest building in the city".
An Exploration of a Neglected Problem in Design Education
By Jan MICHL Department of Industrial Design, OSLO SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE, Norway Jan Michl's website | Jan Michl's e-mail
“… every picture owes more to other pictures painted before than it owes to nature.” E.H. Gombrich, art historian, 1954
“… one of the most important properties of all fields of production [is] the permanent presence of the past of the field, which is endlessly recalled even in the very breaks which dispatch it to the past.” Pierre Bourdieu, sociologist, 1984
“Any new thing that appears in the made world is based on some object already in existence. (…) each new technological system emerges from an antecedent system, just as each new discrete artifact emerges from antecedent artifacts.” George Basalla, historian of technology, 1985
“ if anybody were to start where Adam started, he would not get further than Adam did…” Karl Popper, philosopher, 1979
We talk of design day in and day out – but is design really the right word for what designers do? This article [1] is based on a sense that we lack a perspective encompassing more than the individual designer’s creative activity and more than merely the most recent designer’s contribution – in other words, more than the term design is able to embody. We also need a perspective that will capture the fundamental incompleteness of all design activity, the fact that, contrary to what the word design is normally seen as implying, no solution will ever be the ultimate solution.
Many people, both on the active and on the consuming side of the design community, share a restless fascination for "originality". This fascination is more than the usual form of design entertainment provided by design magazines and exhibitions. For nearly a century, originality has been closely linked to creativity. It is often seen as the inevitable result of that creative process. As in other creative activities like writing, composing and sometimes cooking, it has also become the ultimate criteria for the use of creativity in the development of products. There is little doubt about the fact that even in Western culture this longing for originality is a relatively recent phenomena. Tracing its origins is a task for social anthropologists and not the purpose of this essay. One constructive hypothesis is that the willingness of the modern movement to establish new standards and break with the past "at any cost", has not only generated new standards but also a new vocabulary in which "new", "original" and "innovative" have been redefined. Instead of defining the character of an object, they started to define original as a quality. To some extend art historians have re-written Western European art history in function of the innovative role different artist played in their times, but there is not much evidence that this was indeed the real motivation at the time. Skill and craftsmanship, mastering perspective and depth, conformity to the requests of the patron and professional competitiveness were more important motivations than the search of originality. Even in the early XXth century originality did not play a role in the relationship between Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso when they both were the pillars under the cubist movement. In fact their collages and paintings of that period are almost identical. Over the past thirty five years, which coincides with my years of practicing industrial design, I have been intrigued with our continuous search for originality, our fascination and admiration for its results, and with the fact that reaching an "original" result has never been questioned against the real aim and goal of our profession: user satisfaction. In fact, promotion of design, originally intended to enlighten the public on the benefits of useful and beautiful products, has slowly become a promotion of originality at any cost including the neglect of one of the pillars of the modern movement: making good and beautiful industrial products accessible to all; along with the neglect of informing the users about good, useful and environmentally responsible products.
Picture by Brent
