Shame! on you for thinking chairs were humans and could talk or love each other or negotiate divorce settlements. Don’t suffer from anthropomorphism alone. Seek help and support. Start with the emergency room.
The Sitter is not fascinated by her fascinations. The Sitter is not creating awareness about issue X, X or X. The Sitter is not pretending to be materialistic, metaphysical or post-post new age. The Sitter is not a victim of the Milan PR economy. The Sitter is not a victim of the China-IKEA consortium. The Sitter is not even an image of our past or distant future. The Sitter is now.
The Sitter.
SAD DESIGN CRITICISM MOMENTS
It’s a sad day for design, when students put up their life savings to do a masters degree in design criticism, only to write about why white-trash chairs are interesting. Which we already knew. Before the Marti Guixe “respect cheap furniture” art exhibition back in 2009. And before the $50,000 loan was needed to pay tuition fees. It’s a sad, sad day for design criticism, indeed.
We’ve berated you before about the “take a chair and change ONE thing in it” ridiculous design trend. Well, here’s another example. Shame!
The truth is slowly leaking out: the field of narrative-story-anecdote chair design is actually art. Barbed wire + Office chair + Artist statement + Gallery exhibition = simplistic and uninteresting. But art it is, nevertheless.
“Office Terror” is a wonderful piece of art that denotes the danger and pressure of so many workplaces. To meet the gargantuan appetite of the funds of pensions, or other voracious stockholders, the worker is subjected to an enlarging pressure. Artist Johan Schulé uses an iconic Eames chair to reinforce his point that he also describes beautifully as “true contemporary art has to to be subversive, but also dangerous.” In fact, the creation of this piece did draw blood.
(Source: wolflion)
WHAT ARE DESIGNERS GOOD AT ANYWAY?
Finally, an answer to the never ending question.
by The Order of the Black Chair
February 2010
According to design experts today, designers are just about anything and everything. They are the form-givers of a multi-faceted techno-cognitive social realm. They are the arbiters of positive innovation with a twist of audacious action. They are the hand-crafted signatures of beautiful objects in our everyday rituals. They’re also the purveyors of democratic equality and sustainable values through ordinary items and images. And ultimately, they are the enablers of order and simplicity within the intrinsic, but unnoticed corners of our mundane everywhere.
In short, designers are so good at everything they fatally become good for nothing. So much so that anybody can pretend to a designer position because everybody fits the description somehow. And so designers often find themselves in a situation where their clients claim to know design better than them. What to do?
Question: Would a patient brief a heart surgeon on their medical research and key insights on the eve of triple bypass surgery? Or would a doctor’s skills and expertise be so clear, and a patient’s respect for this talent so profound, there was no reason for questions like this in the first place?
There’s a lot of wood to chop before we get to a place where design is to designers, what surgery is to surgeons. This essay will begin the process and attempt to establish a set of specialties so clear, that clients everywhere would be impressed to see them on a designer’s resume.
GETTING STUCK IN THE MUD
First, we look to history and the specific specialties designers were expected to master professionally. Starting in the 20th century, a designer’s role was to style and “modernize the appearance of” products and images. The goal was to increase sales using “good taste” as added value. Then came the modernist emphasis on functionality, like improved ergonomics for products, clear communication for typography, austere aesthetics and simplicity in general. Without the recourse of unnecessary decoration, a modern design was considered valuable because of its honesty.
In the 1980s, groups like Memphis broke free from “good design” by bringing humor and anecdotal decoration back to the forefront. Following in the 1990s, design sought a balance between all the previous tasks: that of style and function with a hint of emotion by tainting products with anecdotes. David Carson’s “dirty” and “emotion”-driven graphic design was making its way into the mainstream. The mention of “poetry” or “humor” in their work became a regular practice for designers.
Nowadays, expressing anecdotal features has become an essential task for selling products. The designer takes up the role of a “storyteller,” treating household objects like a painter’s blank canvas: lavishing them with funny little “conceptual” stories. It seems expectations are often misplaced: as long as a designer has a story (no matter how inspiring or dull), he or she is legitimate. Stories have gained importance in several ways: either the story positions the designer as “saving the world” by communicating global issues like poverty on chairs. Or, the story positions the designer as “sharing the personal” intimacies of their private lives with, well, more chairs. All of the sudden, every designer has something important to say.
This has lead to a growing mass of aspiring designers who’ve become self-inspiring muses. If one asks about the story behind a design, high chances are the answer would start with: “When I was little, I was fascinated by…” Another popular answer is the use of “experiments”. They are so greatly appreciated, a designer can simply throw clay ten times in the air, call it a series of chairs and the crowd goes wild.
MUSING ON MUD, AND MOVING ON
Looking back, design has evolved and a designer’s specialty is expected to change alongside. Some stick to the old ways, but many more follow the long path of non-stop tinkering. They question their forebears and move on; keeping what works and dispelling what doesn’t. Each new evolution does not eliminate the old ways, but creates new ways layered onto older ways. Eventually, old ways that are no longer relevant lose their authority, melting under the weight of the new and contemporary. So what is the contemporary way? Is it the amalgam of all specialties taken throughout history? Or is it an entirely new set of specialties, never existing before?
CREATIVITY IS NOT UNIQUE TO DESIGNERS
It seems many of the claimed specialties in contemporary design are not unique to designers. Take creativity as an example. Its so obvious and common, but needs repeating: when Joseph Beuys said “everyone is an artist” in the 1960s, he meant society was a collective sculpture to which each person could contribute creatively. In other words, everyone plays a part, whether designers, plumbers or politicians.
What about the other specialties designers claim for themselves nowadays?
“Designers make useful objects.”
“So do engineers and craftsmen.”
“Designers experiment with colors and materials.”
“Scientists do too.”
“Designers create visuals.”
“So do painters, filmmakers and camera-toting-tourists.”
“Designers have software skills, like 3d modeling or image editing.”
“So does my little brother.”
“Designers are problem-solvers.”
“As are CEOs, the cable guy and social workers.”
FINALLY, A UNIQUE SET OF DESIGN SKILLS
When explaining to others what they’re good at, surgeons and other highly skilled professionals have a fancy list of complicated terms they rely on. Consider dentists. What if they didn’t have specialized words like “prophylaxis” or “exodontia” to explain their unique talent? They would be better known for cleaning and pulling teeth. Most people clean their teeth on a daily basis, and some have pulled teeth here and there, but that doesn’t mean everybody is a dentist. What makes these operations unique to dentists is a specific lexicon. Would designers benefit from a specialized lexicon of their own? And if so, what would it consist of? Here is a set of unique specialties tailored to what designers are good at, and described with an appropriate terminology.
Circumscripting
Latin circus ‘around’ + scribere ‘write’
Circumscripting is the designer specialty of encircling a given or imagined context, whether social, political, economic or spacial. It’s also the ability to define the context in terms of its elements, features and principles. Context is important to identify in design because it gives it a reason to exist. If design comes out of nowhere (like thin air), or isn’t meant to be anywhere (against a blank, white background), it suffers from irrelevance.
Topodissolution
Greek, topos ‘place’ + Latin dissolvere, dis- ‘apart’ + solvere ‘solve’
Topodissolution is the designer operation of analyzing context. Designers search for problems or opportunities within a contextual framework. If there is a given problem, the designer will have to analyze its components in relation to a purpose within a context. For example, a client believes his website is “bad” and would like to have a “better” one. The designer’s role is to dissolve the given problem and clarify its purpose to better understand what is perceived as “bad.” If there is no given problem, the designer dissolves the context itself and searches for possible problems or opportunities under the light of his or her own purpose.
Optorioris
Latin optimus ‘best’ + orior ‘to rise’ + is
Optorioris is the designer operation of formulating solutions. Designers have a variety of methods for developing possible solutions. Some develop hypothesizes to then test and experiment. Others brainstorm or mind-map their way around the possibilities. No matter the method applied, the designer has the ability to elevate an option whose possibilities best fit the purpose, problem and context. This operation generally ends in the objectification of the solution by setting its properties (what it is) and boundaries (what it’s not).
Morphosemiotics
Greek morphē ‘form’ + sēmeiotikos ‘of signs’
Morphosemiotics is the designer act of meaningfully shaping the solution. Generally attributed to graphic or fashion designers, here designers determine mediums, materials, colors, signs or symbols in accordance to the context. At this stage the designer’s role is to establish the formal vocabulary of the object or experience. Some emphasize the importance of “storytelling”, some would opt for “soberness.” In any case, the designer has to pick what form works best.
“EVERYONE CAN’T BE A DESIGNER”
To conclude, if designers want to establish professional credibility, the enterprise of writing a noteworthy lexicon should be seriously considered. Nevertheless, design will always suffer from the misfortune of appearing as an accessible field, similar to how psychology and philosophy are considered common knowledge.
Yet, ultimately, there is another very important, if not the most important, way in which designers establish their expertise. Science-fiction author Bruce Sterling advocated in his seminal work “Shaping Things” that designers pay an inordinate amount of time and energy on thinking about design and developing their practice. “For people who are fully booked mentally – the vast majority of the human race who aren’t designers – those demands can be crippling. Everyone can’t be a designer.” In short, what makes designers the specialists of design is, above all, their compulsive and persistent commitment to it.
Designer Arman Mkrtchyan is suing Disney with a $50,000 “decorating fee” for using his chair as the Queen of Hearts chair in Tim Burton’s new “Alice in Wonderland” film. Decorating, indeed.
Ladies and gents, let me introduce you to today’s groundbreaking design approach, aka, “take a chair and change ONE thing in it”… If you try to be too creative, you may encounter the risk of confusing your audience right? So, if for instance you made furniture BIGGER, yes just that and NOTHING ELSE, here’s what the fluff-brained press would rub on your designer bum-bum:
“Robert Therrien presents a world of the unexpected filled with objects which are both familiar and strange. It can seem a fairytale place of deceptively childish charm and logic where ideas can literally be translated into reality.”
I’m still looking for an interview where the guy explains how he got to be “FASCINATED BY” his family excursion at Disney-shit-land… No but seriously? This fucker is at TATE???
Unfortunately Robert, my dear, you’re being too literal; it isn’t by pragmatically magnifying a four-legged piece of ass-furniture that one will ever reach the grandeur of the Black chair!
hAIL
