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WHAT DESIGN CAN DO FOR ART R RT
‘In many artistic designs the user and the consumer have been taken out of the equation, and function and use are replaced by discussion and raising awareness’
Back in the 1990s, the personal approach of Dutch designers like Jurgen Bey, Hella Jongerius and Richard Hutten propelled them to world fame. Yet although so much Dutch design appeared radical, the work largely confined itself dutifully and obediently to the vase, lamp and armchair, the holy trinity of traditional industrial design. Encouraged by that success, many other design schools followed the Design Academy’s example and nurtured the ambition of designers to exhibit their work preferably in museums and galleries. In the process, schools of design transformed into producers of mediagenic design. That this situation could no longer continue was acknowledged even by the management boards and teaching staff of artistically inclined design schools, the very people who now mollycoddle the Mine Kafon as an example of design that not only is personal and conceptual but also represents an emphatic social ambition. Seen in that light, you could say that the recent establishment of Depart Departments of Social Design within artistic design schools in general, and at at Design Academy Eindhoven in particular, is no more than an exercise in catching up.
BORROWING FROM ART If only it were that simple. In their quest to make design socially relevant again, the management board and teaching staff paradoxically didn’t dis-
tance themselves from design’s safe yet largely uncritical relationship with the artistic world. On the contrary, it still borrows roughly and with full conviction from the methods and codes that apply in the art world to generate ideas, the results of which can be displayed and discussed within the context of gallery presentations. No wonder, therefore, that these feebly communicating vessels fail to generate any interesting discourse and, instead, demonstrate a lack of clarity in thought, inane concepts and vagueness in communication. Take the example of the Mine Kafon again. There is nothing at all odd about basing a design on personal experience. But simply taking the personal as the guiding principle, as often occurs in art, and then aesthetically blowing up the ideas that are strongest in communicative terms, is a technique that may work well when it comes to public presentations, but it is disastrous for a genuinely powerful design. Good designers know very well that a rich concept always relates to the demands that are ultimately placed on the design, so that serious research into the framework conditions can be conducted at every desired level. Even though the user and the consumer have been taken out of the equation in many artistic designs, and function and use are commonly replaced by discussion and raising awareness, that does not necessarily have to mean that relevance or social meaning has disappeared. In cases where the form reinforces