The Bloggomist: Design in the Blood
Design Opinion

If there’s anything that makes my blood boil, it is frivolity under the guise of good design. In my last post, I briefly mentioned the vacuousness of famous product designers such as Philippe Starck and Karim Rashid – they are certainly among my favorite to take shots at because they have the ability to design whatever they want and push it into the market with no questions asked. This is almost every designer’s dream; no focus groups, no restrictions, and no hard-sell to get a product onto the shelves. Name alone will often trump any level of prerequisite market relevance. Obviously this kind of fame and power doesn’t come without hard work and effort, but in Industrial Design, as in Fashion and other design-driven industries, this shouldn’t mean flicking on the cruise control at the plateaus of success. When given carte-blanche by large companies such as Herman-Miller, Alessi, Emeco, and even Dirt Devil, you’d think the result would be spectacular, visionary and ground-breaking. However, the result is often the opposite. There’s something to be said for what can’t be done when it comes to design…deadlines, manufacturing restrictions, cost, and of course, the environment usually define the end result. These pillars go back to the Bauhaus, the source of original Industrial Design, which drove creative thinking and solid solutions to relevant problems.

These days , you have design dinosaurs like Philippe Starck still lumbering around, still getting face time, TV shows and magazine covers. Emeco recently released his Kong Bar stool, an ill-proportioned addition to an already flooded market of designer chairs. Just as much over-priced as it is over-estimated, the Kong’s construction is energy intensive and complex to manufacture (24 seperate pieces of aluminum are hand formed and welded together, taking 8 hours, and it takes another 8 hours to hand-polish each one). Still, I’m told the chair was made using 80% recycled aluminum, which is great, but I don’t doubt that material would have been put to better use lining a baking dish or holding a fizzy drink. When it comes to wordplay however, it’s totally the opposite. Starck’s “Democratic Design” ethos is “to have better quality, cut the cost, and have an acceptable design”…which I have to say he’s failed at with flying colors.

A model of self-restraint - Starck and his Kong Bar Stool for Emeco

However the Starcks of the world are easy targets. They’re quite outspoken and therefore paint the targets of criticism on their own backs (albeit I never seem to read much of those criticisms in the mass media).

The flip side of the same coin is James Dyson. We all know the revolutionary Dyson vacuum cleaners and I won’t argue they work incredibly well. They may look like Tron meets Tonka toy- so aesthetics will have to take a sideline here – but Dyson did offer a product that revolutionized the market. It did what it was designed to do. You may think it is wrong then to throw him into the mix with those like Starck and Rashid. But if you were thinking that, then you mustn’t have heard of his new Air Multiplier. For $300 you get “Air that is accelerated through an annular aperture. This creates a jet of air that passes over a 16° airfoil-shaped ramp, channeling its direction.” Yes, you guessed it, it’s a fan. An over thought, over-engineered and over-priced fan. To justify the $250 more you’d spend on this, rather than a normal fan, you’d have to at some point explain the aforementioned sales pitch and I don’t know many people who’d be willing to do that.

James Dyson and his Air Multiplier

Bruce Mau’s Massive Change exhibition, touring the country a couple of years back, proposed an interesting question. “Now that we can do anything, what will we do?” It’s a good question, and one that those with such astounding and influential resources at their disposal should keep in mind before they set out to reinvent a market destined for the landfill.

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To see more from Leon Fitzpatrick, visit: http://evilmonito.com/author/leon/

Published on 9 December 2009 | |