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Designer; Director of MFA.DESIGN at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar.
Mar 13
2011
It seems that every decade has its favorite design object. This object captures public imagination as a focus of exploration by leading design companies, and as a darling of the design media. In the 1990s it was the plastic chair; the 2000s, boutique hotels. Today design is often focused on ideas as much as it is on objects, such as issues of sustainability, social responsibility, or network culture. So what will be next?
As we enter a new decade - the 2010s - what object will come to define this new era of design?
Leo gave the final word
Why not a personalized object which can live a life of its own, where scratches enhance rather than ruin, and where companies sell us the latest technology rather than more waste, a hardware which can be upgraded instead of scrapped?
Thursday, March 17 at 5:57pm
“… in some regards questioning the traditional role of the designer as the solitary creator.”
Yes, the entire process will become much more collaborative. We have reached the end of the “heroic” visionary designer. The new designer will not only require some familiarity with digital tools, but have at hand teams who can translate his/her thoughts, drawings and models into complex instruments, tools, toys, etc.
Monday, March 14 at 10:27pm
I agree that objects will serve less as metaphors and more as instruments taken in hand to perform specific tasks. Toward this end, there will be fewer objects but these will enable greater multitasking, while requiring less engagement on the part of the viewer, i.e., one can illuminate a room with a finger and know nothing of electricity, in the same way one can download Pandora without a notion of the algorithms that make the feature function. Which is to say that designers will become increasingly obsessed with simplifying the look and streamlining the function of the objects of their affection.
Yes, there will be greater interconnectivity and with it more “surveillance.” Whether this will trouble the subsequent generations.
Finally, more and more people will be more conscious of “design” in general, as in recognizing Apple’s design of the iPad, but they will be less likely to articulate the principles underlying it. Design, at its best will simply become a brand attribute.
Monday, March 14 at 7:37pm
Where do we begin? Objects, from smart phones to medical devices, and everything large and small, will enhance connectivity between individuals and institutions while providing data collection and analysis. These devices will reflect advancement in voice-activated software and personalized interfaces, enabling more complex multitasking functions. Sharp edges will be rounded and this will be a central metaphor for the coming decade. In sum, we’re looking at objects that reduce friction in every sense of the word.
Apropos of our consciousness of human and physical relationships, concepts and the objects that arise from them, such as “organic,” “natural” and even “humane,” will provide necessary points of departure, to the extent that in regard to materials and ingredients, sustainability will, ironically, give way to a new appreciation of “disposable.” Disposable will apply to objects as varied as housing and roadways and eventually human remains.
As our lives are increasingly mediated by touch-screen interfaces and automated processes, objects will offer increasingly immersive experiences, which in turn will lower our threshold for boredom and increase our desire for diversity. An unintended consequences of “smart” objects will be shortened attention spans and poorer memories, of both the short- and long-term variety. This loosening of mental rigor will result in a hunger for more and more distraction that will be satisfied with more frequent virtual activity.
One response will be objects placed in our public and private environments that assume the superficiality of movie or stage sets. The apparent will rival the real. Along these same lines, background spaces will make increasing use of sophisticated 3-D projections, so that our interiors and some exterior spaces will resemble the video games that are designed to entertain, educate and function as work stations.
The life cycles of objects will accelerate, and they will pass from everyday use to the “compost” heap or directly into proper recycling bins, with a regularity that might appear morally suspect but will allow commerce to continue uninterrupted.
Inevitably, faster manufacturing methods, more elastic materials, and strictly enforced regulations will combine with a culture of consumption that privileges the glance. This preference will encourage designers to resurrect antiquated styles or to offer surprising mash-ups of fashions from different epochs and cultures, to satisfy ever quickening fads and trends.
In the final analysis, consumers will seek from objects greater usefulness and personalization, while designers will be tasked with reconciling the tensions that exist between values previously considered at odds, i.e, the personal versus the public. The result will be new notions of compatibility, along with the erosion of certain traditional values such as the primacy of the individual.
Which is to say that almost all of our relationships will be defined by counterintuitive pairings, as seen above; sustainable will equal disposable, the personal with the shared.
There will be a reaction to the inherent instability that will come to characterize our new relationship with objects. This will allow a subset of designers to work with traditional materials and forms to create objects that appeal to senses other than the aural and visual and so perform on an aesthetic as opposed to functional level.
Monday, March 14 at 7:11pm
I do think, however, that regardless of how ubiquitous some of the more virtual components of design become, there will inevitably always be some material/ physical/ tangible artifacts that retrospectively come to represent, act as summarizations of, an era or culture. A passive book will, in any age, have more content that a powerless ipod…
One should never underestimate the emotive, emphatic, tactile and embodied connections we make, and associations we create around, objects…
Tuesday, March 15 at 6:41am
“A passive book will, in any age, have more content that a powerless ipod…” I’m not quite so certain. The point of the iPod and its sister devices is to be always on. Our existential crisis will occur when such a thing exists as a powerless iPod.
Yes, one shouldn’t underestimate the various connections we make with objects, both those sacred and profane, but it may be a mistake, on the order of nostalgia to believe those bonds are unbreakable.
Tuesday, March 15 at 7:54pm
It looks like objects are losing ground. Our responders point out immaterial, communicative, network qualities of the forthcoming world culture, where “the content” will surpass the physicality of the object.
The argument is not exactly new. “We will be sitting on columns of air”, predicted Marcel Breuer in the 1920s as he advanced his work on gradual dematerialization of the chair. Well, we don’t. Even if columns of air were available today, many would still seek out physical chairs to suit their environments and their temperament.
The issue is that every immaterial function still requires a material object to facilitate it better. In this respect, a smart phone (it is tempting to say: iPhone) has already become such an object. It is an enabling device: people in African villages with no electricity and running water often have mobile phones. With help of these phones, the people’s revolutions are organized and coordinated. An object, even a pocket-size one, still has very big implications.
Tuesday, March 15 at 7:57am
An emphasis on the immaterial does not suggest a lack of appreciation for actual material things. The material is not going away, so long as our souls remain locked in our bodies.
As much as I’d like to respond telepathy, I am compelled to hammer with my fingertips the plastic keys that set in motion literally tons of actual physical objects from from my keyboard to the power plants that channel 0s and 1s into thoughts and wishes and sends them over deserts and across oceans. Saying this I love the quote from Breuer and look forward to my chair, or better, a bed, that consists of “columns of air.”
Apropos of objects which enable, it’s worth reminding the optimists in the “room” that while technology enables, it doesn’t necessarily enlighten. There seems to be a bias here that technology equals progress, but the fact that “mobiles” and social networks may have helped facilitate a “people’s revolution” in Egypt, we may see shortly that these objects prove less persuasive than other technologies, say automatic weapons.
If I’m not impressed by the tweet it’s because I suspect it will prove no more compassionate than the pamphlet of 18th Century France. Who can anticipate the ultimate meaning of the introduction of mobiles to African or Indian village that lack electricity or clean water. The implications are not logical outcomes but riddles.
For me, the material provides the metaphors that enable me to make sense of the world. I suspect this may be less and less the case. You may be correct that most may never prefer columns of air to a comfortable leather club chair, or slightly off balanced bar stool, or lumpy Barcalounger, but we will yield to its charms. We don’t really have a choice. Even our current fetishizing of food, our encyclopedic listing of attributes for wine and chocolate, which appear to suggest an enduring love of the things, may simply portent the ultimate collapse of conceiving life in material terms. The passionate denial before the abject surrender.
In the end, we will willingly ignore the man behind the curtain, his levers, switches and assortment of media and float away on our cushions of perfumed air.
Tuesday, March 15 at 7:50pm
Abraham Moles wrote a piece translated as “Design and Immateriality: What of It in a Post Industrial Society?” (now included in Margolin & Buchanan’s _The Idea of Design_ [MIT, 1995]). In it, he makes the claim that “The Immaterial civilization must be reliable; otherwise, it could have no social impact… The task of the designer is, precisely, to ensure reliability by mastering the factors that jeopardize it.” Writing 30 years ago, Moles called on designers to adopt a ‘maintenance mentality.’
Instead, fueled by cheap oil, designers adopted the ‘redundancy mentality:’ make many so that when one fails it can be quickly and easily replaced. This is particularly the case with digital equipment, where the near-free-ness of processors (only free because the ecological impacts of the materials and the energy involved are externalized from the cost) allows rapid cycling through of the equipment that materialize my digital presence.
The result is a kind of anomaly. An object that supposedly manifests all the best of design (form, interaction, digital ecosystem backend), such as anything beginning with a small ‘i’ is lauded as a perhaps-classic design icon. And yet, what is valued is precisely the idea rather than this particular physical manifestation. I love _the_ iPhone, not this particular handset I have in my hand right now. What I value has nothing to do with the patina of a personalized object (scratched here when my daughter tackled me and it fell on the ground, etc); it could be any iPhone, precisely because the really valuable personalization lies only in the curated cloud-based data that is (more or less) me. And so even though I say I really value this designed object, I actually just value this _kind_ of object, the next one that I can effortlessly sync.
People like Heidegger freaked out about this. But if we can just get (product and building) designers to admit that what people really value is (interaction) design – in other words, what things do (the title of a great book from which I am getting this argument, by Peter-Paul Verbeek [Penn State Uni Press, 2005]) – then it just might be that what comes to define design this decade is no longer an object. This will allow the decade ahead to be focused on people; on services that sustain people and the things they depend on.
To put it more stridently, if we can stop lying to ourselves about where the value of objects lies (it is in what they allow us to do, not in their contextless form), then we might stop being so obsessed about ownership. Businesses would then be liberated to take care of things (in closed loops), extracting sustained value from things in the form of access, use and results – a more sustainable service economy.
So, it is perhaps worth saying that over this last weekend, as so many (more or less well-designed) things got swept away, along with the lives of thousands in Japan, and as worst case scenarios become real revealing the in-the-end unreliability of nuclear power, I was one of more than 1200 people around the world participating in the Global Service Jam: http://planet.globalservicejam.org/
Cameron
Tuesday, March 15 at 10:53am
Not a specific object or an outstanding trend but “inflation of design productions” is the all over visible characteristic for “this new era of design”. No single segment but a general smell of exchangeable adaptions and intelligent copies defines most of the worldwide design fairs and events. A bit of ecology, of material research, a bit of sustainability as an alibi for so called contemporary design productions. We are missing the socio-cultural responsibility.
To stop the worldwide overproduction of things and the enormous plagiarism in products we have to do LESS BUT BETTER (we need less but better products). To reach this level we have to think about how to “destroy design”, i.e. to start a radical paragim shift in product development and responsible communication with industries.
Against the background of natural catastrophes in shorter intervals, knowing about finite rersources, suffering of overconsumption the time signal for a designer is to go for a realignment of the things.
Wednesday, March 16 at 8:26am
Can there ever be a “USELESS OBJECT”? Any object creates relationships and defines tastes and ways of engaging or disengaging.
The non object would be of interest. The imaginary object, that exists in sound waves alone, would be of interest. Thought, dreams or prayer, bring to mind the non object that can exist without being manufactured.
Wednesday, March 16 at 5:19pm
Critical or discursive design is engaged in producing what might be called “non-objects”. It is an important development in enabling people to engage with thinking about the implications of designing products without consuming them. The web is, it seems also providing us with a way of collecting things without consuming them physically.
To further explore some of the earlier points, I agree with Hans that there needs to be a “radical paradigm shift in product development…” and I would add that we are entering a phase where the public will have unprecedented access to manufacturing technologies (3D printing etc.) and methods of financing and direct selling (Kickstarter etc.) that will enable a far more radical range of objects to be released than marketing departments of corporations have allowed. I’m not suggesting everyone will become a designer/manufacturer, but those who are interested will have more direct means at their disposal.
Finally, I totally agree that we should focus on what objects enable us to do, but it does not necessarily follow that this means largely rejecting ownership. Are we not empowered by owning things that represent our world view, inspire us and remind us of those we care about? A shift towards services and leasing certain objects might help put in place a chain of responsible repair and recycling, but it’s not a panacea.
Wednesday, March 16 at 7:03pm
Tim mentions above (and I’ve blogged about this numerous times on MySpace before it was common wisdom–that’s how long ago it was) that we are entering a phase where the public will have unprecedented access to manufacturing technologies, methods of financing and sales, that will enable a far more radical range of objects to be released than marketing departments of corporations have allowed.
However, it’s those very “open systems” — the 3d equivalent to the birth of desktop publishing that lead to semantic pollution, overpopulation of the market with marginal or amateur objects and the demise of design authority.
A more prudent route for design activity is designers could continue to question the philosophical which possibly could affect change of the nature of the typologies we design (e.g. a subtype of which is design as an inclusive activity that engages community.) And these new types ( I stress the plural) of design don’t have to be sentimental or pretend to be useful. As other participants have also mentioned, consumers need to be engaged strongly and emotionally.
Thursday, March 17 at 12:15pm
A decade is not so much time, and we are already 20% into it. A favorite design object for this decade must already be within view. When I think about what frenzy is abuzz in the innovations circles, I cannot help but think about those objects, physical or not, that isolate our physical presence from our friends and neighbors. Kids play games with their distant friends with headsets and controllers. The unstructured outdoor play, with calling a stick a bat, a tree a fort, or a tire a swing, seems a thing of the past. As a student spends a semester abroad, she or he seems no less present in their social circles. As culture exists, objects will follow; those objects will further the same culture. My spontaneous list would include the iphones, home video games, and the kindles. Consider also Amazon, Fresh Direct, and the home-office. I need not list the social media cults, except for those that boast of meetings featuring face-to-face contact; our own online discussion and the advent and inevitable growth of University Degrees earned from home. The products and experiences of this decade keep us home. What happened to all those designer tents and hiking gear? I will wait for the rebound. Did you know that I played Backgammon with someone from Iran? He seemed like a nice fellow.
Wednesday, March 16 at 10:31pm
Thanks to contributions by Hans Maier-Aichen and Tim Parsons, the conversation has now moved in a more metaphysical direction: rather than negating the object itself they are reimagining potentialities for design objects of the future.
This reminds me of a short writ I posted on my blog in 2009, where I compiled a list of just this kind of “potential” objects. This list partially comes from the old texts by Alessandro Mendini, a visionary Italian master and my one-time mentor, who himself often marveled at design’s limits and possibilities. Here it is:
Tools for cultural work, in cast bronze
Trays and cabinets to put those tools in
Objects to relieve spiritual pain
Objects to provoke thought
Objects glimpsed in a dream
Timeless objects
Sub-objects
Objects my parents could understand
Objects that carry message
Objects that hold memories
Objects that keep a secret
Buried objects
Unconscious objects
Objects to throw into the sea
Objects to leave on top of the mountain
Things to keep in the attic
Briefcase for the Ultimate Journey
Thursday, March 17 at 1:57am
This is a lovely list and one that with a turn of the switch, and a bit of editing would make a lovely poem. (I suspect that’s what Mr. Mendini was up to here.) There’s an underlying sadness that ties each imaginary object to the one that follows and it is heart breaking. Isn’t it odd that we are constantly in such of the ultimate adhesive that will mend objects that once broken can’t be restored?
Thursday, March 17 at 11:29am
Leo gave the Final Word
Lots of good thoughts here.:In some way it touches on what’s beyond the virtual gadget, if the iPhone can connect with both real and virtual, why is it still a standarized and serialized object? Why not a personalized object which can live a life of its own, where scratches enhances rather than ruin, and where companies like Apple sell us the latest technology rather than more waste, a hardware which can be upgraded instead of scrapped. Or is the beyond the implants which will enhance our bodies? Where we go even further into the unknown, into what’s hithero unexperienced by our ordinary senses, like what Marcos Novak and Neil Spiller dreams of? The so called smart phone and the pads seems so oldfashioned in a way, so far away from their content…
Thursday, March 17 at 5:57pm
This new era of design is characterised by increasingly divergent cultural tendencies and trends, therefore it would be almost impossible to pick one object which could possibly encompass all tribes. Objects which have defined previous decades were often the result of technological advances and a manufacturer’s accessibility to that technology (ie plastic chair). As manufacturing has become increasingly commoditized, we become more concerned with the communicative and haptic qualities of objects. Yet at the same time, we are also operating in an increasingly digital and immaterial world.
My feeling is that “ubiquitous computing” (and content — as per Tucker’s comment) will define the 2010′s and it may be as tangible as the iPhone in your pocket or as intangible as “the cloud.” In this regard, I might add that the iPhone is a big lie: It’s NOT a phone, rather a computer with a phone capability, so we are already well on our way.
However, many of the objects on your Mendini-inspired list have a timely resonance! Ultimately, we are still all humans in need of fulfilment (think Maslow’s hierarchy); for some, this fulfilment may come in the form of the latest handbag and for others in the immateriality of an experience.
Friday, March 18 at 12:53pm
“Why not a personalized object which can live a life of its own, where scratches enhance rather than ruin, … a hardware which can be upgraded instead of scrapped?”– Leo, your eloquent words well summarize the desire for the new object of the new decade. What form it will take, and what specific work it would do, is not going to be perfectly clear for a while. Let us re-convene in 2019, and continue…
Friday, March 18 at 4:14pm
Keywords
Selected list of words appearing in this and other conversations.
Leo Gullbring
journalist, critic & photographer
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I don’t believe we will have one single object that will mark this decade. I think that we have already started out with a strong focus on the possibilities and problems with a new type of network culture. The Jasmine revolutions in the Arab world have definitely seen the new social networking apps playing an important role along with traditional media. The smart phones as well as tablets has become a major tool of political communication, as well as of an enhancement of social culture creating new communities and a broad sense of social responsibility. In this context I believe that the design of both software and hardware will play in increasingly prominent role, and they will be much more user-friendly than in the past, in some regards questioning the traditional role of the designer as the solitary creator. One of the big questions for designers will be how to merge and reconcile the physical and virtual worlds we inhabit today.
Monday, March 14 at 12:16pm