Emerging twenty-first century design trends
A number of developments in the way designers work, in information and communication technologies, and in socioeconomic opportunities, has altered the practice of design at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Professor Anthony Dunne, Head of Interaction Design at the Royal College of Art, London, has claimed that: “New hybrids of design are emerging. People don’t fit in neat categories; they’re a mixture of artists, engineers, designers, thinkers. They’re in that fuzzy space and might be finding it quite tough, but the results are really exciting.’
Critical design products
Critical design, as defined by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby is an alternative approach to established product design practice that challenges and reveals the current situation by producing artifacts that embody alternative values and ideologies. One of the key aims of critical design is to provoke reflection on cultural values that might involve the process of design, the actual object produced, and the reception by an audience of such an object. Critical design products are not intended for mass-market; critical designers are free to pursue their individual goals and not those of a client.
In this sense, the concept of critical design is closer to conceptual art. Dunne and Raby, however, dismiss the notion that they are producing works of art when they say: “It is definitely not art. It might borrow heavily from art in terms of methods and approaches but that’s it. We expect art to be shocking and extreme. Critical design needs to be closer to the everyday, that’s where its power to disturb comes from.”
Robot 4: Needy One, from Technological Dreams Series: No. 1, Robots, by Dunne and Raby, 2007. Over the coming years, robots are destined to play a significant part in our daily lives. This series asks how we will interact with them, rejecting commercial solutions andinstead aiming to spark a discussion about how we would like our future robots to relate to us. Do we want them to be subservient, intimate, dependent, or equal?
Ross Lovegrove
Ross Lovegrove (1958–) began his design career working for the design group frog design in West Germany, where he designed products including Walkmans for Sony and computers for Apple. He moved to Paris and worked with Knoll International, where he designed the highly successful Alessandri office system. He was a member of the design group Atelier de Nîmes, which included Philippe Starck, Jean Nouvel, and others, and designed work for Louis Vuitton, DuPont, and Hermès. Upon returning to Britain, Lovegrove initially set up a design office with Julian Brown in 1986 before establishing his own design practice, Studio X, in 1990. He has since completed projects such as the Figure of Eight chair for Cappellini and the Supernatural chair for Moroso. Many of Lovegrove’s designs are inspired and influenced by the natural world and his interest in state-of-the-art materials and manufacturing technologies. Study for the Eye Digital Camera, 1992 (right).
Bokka table lamp, designed by Karim Rashid for Kundalini, 2005. This is a classic and iconic expression of “blobism.’
Blobjects
A blobject is a colorful, mass-produced, plastic-based, emotionally engaging consumer product with a curvilinear, flowing shape. This fluid and curvaceous form is the blobject’s most distinctive feature. The word is a portmanteau of “blobby” and “object” and was coined by design critic and educator Steven Skov Holt in the early 1990s. Blobject designers have produced a wide range of work, including typographic fonts (Neville Brody), furniture (Karim Rashid), clothing (Rei Kawakubo), buildings (Future Systems), and sculpture (Hadeki Matsumoto).
Blobjects can be made of any material in any size or scale for the home, office, car, or outdoors, but the most common materials used in fabricating blobjects are plastic (especially polycarbonate, polypropylene, or polyethylene), metal and rubber, with the aim being to give a more organic and animate feel. Karim Rashid was an early leader in creating blobjects, along with the likes of Marc Newson, Philippe Starck, and Ross Lovegrove. Advances in computer-aided design and manufacture, information visualization, rapid prototyping, materials, and injection molding, have given designers the chance to use new shapes and to explore transparency and translucency without significant extra production costs. Blobjects are the period objects of our time. They are the physical products that the digital revolution brought to the consumer shelf and were impossible to create until the early 1990s. Blobjects have even been divided into a variety of blob categories such as “proto-blobjects,” “kandy-kolored,” “fluid,” “cutensils,” “bio/exo/derma,” and “chromified.”