“Good design should be innovative
Good design should be useful
Good design is aesthetic
Good design is understandable
Good design is honest
Good design is unobtrusive
Good design is long lived
Good design is consistent in every detail
Good design is environmentally friendly and as little design a possible.”
Dieter Rams
I used these premises to give structure to my research about “New Energy in Design” because I think it defines what the attempts are behind designing and what more or less designers are trying to achieve in actuality. It is becoming harder to pinpoint what is design and what is not. When I say “ contemporary design” I mean all which design is surprisingly turning out to be : from sketches to little tryouts, researches that can surprisingly redefine your idea about design.
When you design you are not only making an object that could function in a situational context. It’s about giving meaning and making an identity for the object and the situation it will serve. Nevertheless, functionality plays a big role because initially as a designer you are trying to come up with a solution. A solution for a problem should always be on top of the head of a designer. But besides solving a problem there’s also a big amount of values being transmitted from the designers character to the end result. You project all the perks and peculiarities that was found in the making. You add important characteristics that will come to identify you, and the connections you made through the research.
Being a designer is really about having a set of creative paradigms and externalizing a generated map of routes that will lead you to a product, or to a stable outcome (for the time being).
At least that is what I gathered after visiting the Boijmans Museum.
I bumped into works that are surprisingly “Design” because they still whirl in between design and something less concrete: ”design-ish” if I shall put it that way. A very perfect example of what I mean is Debug, a work by a design firm in Eindhoven called EdHv.
Edhv retrieved the idea of mapping a route when they first started on a design project for a restaurant menu. Remco who is the founder of EdHv decided to create the restaurants identity based on the routes they take while they operate in the kitchen. Which is a clever solution if you ask me. Because what are we but pattern seeking creatures. The remarkable work I bumped in is just a small model of a chair and could be categorized as an architectural piece, product or even an identity for the project which is still ongoing.
Debug gives us a new way of approaching space, a new angle, a new perspective but on a whole different dimension, insect proportions. It kicked off when The EdHv crew started monitoring/tracking the movement of different insects on a model cast for a poster. A poster model generating 300 posters and counting. Every one of them is unique. Some posters are made by woodlice, some of them by house crickets. Tracking software and scripting, maps the walking patterns of these little creatures. The complexity of movement leads to stunning results.
click on image to see "Debug : Art by insects" a video made by edhv.nl
