7 Days in the Design World
Sarah Thornton's book Seven Days in the Art World takes the reader on a journey through the contemporary art scene using seven different scenarios — or days — as a framework. This became the premise for a class discussion: Is there an equivalent seven days within the design world? DWC students developed a list of seven broad themes they felt underpinned design. Then, the task was simple: interpret a theme a week in a 500-word piece for class discussion.
Well, simple in theory.
Process, Innovation, Community, Showing, Review, Market, Everyday
Here are a few of our favourites.
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ALEX CAMERON - REVIEW
The review - in the sense of a reflective process, critically engaged in the graphic design field - takes place in multiple forum through a variety of media. For the purposes of this short essay I will look at magazines both online and in print.
The very nature of the review is such that one should not expect that it alone would break new ground in either ideas or innovative practice - it is after all - Post factum. Nevertheless, its role regarding such things would be to take a lead in highlighting and indeed promoting new or interesting ideas and techniques, offering a place where such ideas can be debated, discussed and challenged.
The review nestles between the worlds of criticism and show & tell, playing just as important a role. It is more journalistic than academic and tends towards individual acomplishment and impact - wheather commercial or cultural. While it is more likely to consider current practice as individual accomplishment, it offers, over time an accumulation of knowledge and trends that is an invaluable resource for the practitioner and the design historian. It provides an visual snap-shot of a particular moment from which the reader can add and so offer, potentially wide ranging lessons.
The review takes shape through the skillful use of a combination of the written word and visual illustration. The medium through which it can be mediated is the print magazine and the online zine. While print offers a longer historical library and a near literal reproductive quality, the E-zine gives the review more immidiacy and a potentially wider audience.
While there are excellent examples in both medium of the challenging, purposful review there are more examples that offer less. In the last 10 years we have witnessed a relative explosion in the publication of the review - well expressed in the opening of the design bookshop Magma.
This begs the question, if, as discussed elsewhere, we are in a period of crisis in terms of design criticism, how do we explain this seeming contradiction?
Throughout this period the review, as a collective whole, presents us with a historical document which allows insights into the changes that have taken place in design ideas and practice. Furthermore, it offers us an opportunity to begin answering this question.
While on the surface the feature content of print magazines such as Eye and grafik remain familiar - identifying individuals, showing their work and offering critique - their seems a significant change in the substance of the review. One question that demands more time than can be given here is the move to consider indirect influences on the practice of design over those that speak directly of the practise. In critical terms it has become a question of whether designers are sensitive to and driven by outside ideological influences or are expert in or add to the sum total of graphic design as a discipline.
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XANTHIA HALLISSEY - MARKET
Two women in the world know how it feels to sit down in a dress made of meat. Canadian artist Jana Sterbak, who first exhibited a meat dress called; "Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorexic" in 1987 (now available to view in the Pompidou Centre, Paris). And pop star Lady Gaga who wore a similar ‘outfit' to the MTV Video Music awards 2010. Lady Gaga transported the concept of wearable meat into the sphere of popular culture, and the pages of magazines that cost less than a pound. The meat dress ‘idea' now available to seemingly everyone.
What was Lady Gaga trying to say by wearing a dress made of meat? The media onslaught came from all angles; the BBC ran an article detailing five different interpretations of the dress, from a feminist perspective to an ecological one. The Guardian online released an article telling readers how to recreate the look for Halloween. Speculation grew as to whether the outfit would be made into jerky. No one talked about the smell, or the genius of the attached fillet steak to Gaga's head. How did it not flop off?
From a one-off fashion statement to the costume section of Amazon, the market moved quickly when it came to the second showing of the meat dress. A ‘version' of the dress is now yours for only £100, including a blonde wig dip dyed blue and ‘Meat Style Shoe Covers' for true authenticity. Of course, this edition is not made of meat. Instead the meat effect has been created using brown faux leather, the fat detailing hand painted with white acrylic. The dress is also fully washable, which I can imagine comes in handy after all of the use it will get. At the time of writing it hasn't received any bids. However, that isn't to say that a fake meat dress won't sell. There is a demand for celebrity inspired outfits, buyers want to be included in some kind of superstar narrative.
Kate Middleton's engagement dress is another recent example of the fandom that can surround an outfit. It's a Sapphire coloured, not blue, Issa dress, to match the sapphire engagement ring that is a family heirloom. British Vogue reported that the dress had sold out within 24hours of the televised engagement announcement. MSN used the word ‘iconic'. The dress was called, ‘versatile,' as if that explained the surge in popularity, but the high street is full of versatile dresses fit for money minded people during the recession. It's not the dress people that want to buy it is what it signifies. In this case a Royal Wedding, success, happiness, brand Kate.
As long as people are famous, the fashion market will no doubt operate in this way; celebrities spearhead trends, and the rest of us follow because we like the association. Speaking of which, a copy of Kate Middleton's dress is now available to buy from Tesco for £16. There aren't many supermarket dresses that will make you feel like the future Queen of England.
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SARAH HANDELMAN - MARKET
At the intersection of St. Martin's Lane and Cecil Court, I steal glances inside a shop where tightly bunned heads, framed by amber-lit windows, gracefully bob up and down. Slender arms lengthen into arabesques. The lithe limbs belong to ballet dancers of all ages - nine-year-old girls in pink tights who've not yet lost their babyfat, and women in their 20s who roll onto their toes with the ease of a prima ballerina. They've all come to Freed of London to buy pointe shoes.
I duck inside, attempting to nimbly weave between agile bodies, maneuvering past Christmas-themed displays of black leotards and heeled character shoes. But no one notices the displays or me. They are looking at their feet.
Freed of London has handmade pointe shoes since 1929, and in 81 years, the methods have barely changed. Each shoe is constructed, uniquely, from the inside out. Each pair is made by one of 34 shoemakers. And each year, Freed of London sells more than 250,000 pointe shoes - more than any other manufacturer in the world. As official shoe providers to companies such as the American Ballet Theater and down the road at the Royal Ballet, Freed has a close relationship with the professional dancing world. But they aren't only for the pros. If the shoe fits, any girl can own a pair.
Back inside the shop, all of these dancers want the shoes to fit. A clerk thumbs the wood block that surrounds a dancer's foot. "Are you sure? You seem to be sliding down when you roll en pointe," she says.
"No, no," the dancer insists, furrowing a brow pulled taut by her slicked-back hair. "These definitely fit. They've got to."
Because of the one-off shoemaking process and the who's who-type list of dancers who wear them, Freeds are synonymous with beauty, and dancing in them is foreshadowing for the rest of your ballet career: If you can fit into Freeds, you have an ideal foot. Slide them on, and from the knee down you stand a chance at looking like Sarah Lamb in the Royal Ballet's Giselle.
Still, it's not just about pretty feet; pointe shoes are tools of a rigorous trade. At the height of ballet season, a principal dancer averages one pair per performance. So if a ballerina is lucky enough to find the perfect pointe shoes, they must be replaceable.
All of Freed's shoemakers bake a mark into the sole of every shoe, allowing dancers to identify what they need simply by looking. When a ballerina leaps on stage, an unspoken partnership blossoms at her feet. The Freed shoemakers - some of whom have made their mark for 40 years -are dedicated craftspeople who represent the role design plays in the performing arts. Theirs is a supporting part that exists in the basements of shops like the one on St. Martin's Lane, where timeless methods are used to make the pink satin icon most girls dream about and few are lucky enough to roll up into.
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EMILY HIGGINS - COMMUNITY
Day one of my internship began crouched in a doorway awkwardly fumbling with an iron bolt that locked the heavy metal doors. The studio was impenetrable. April shower drizzle soaked through my sodden parka and in retrospect, the day grew even worse comprising mainly of standing in Post Office queues and replying to never-ending emails.
As days passed by, I grew to appreciate the ink stained floors, bask in the red glow of the dark room light and find melody in the hum of a print bed's vacuum. The technicians' faces became familiar and they would accompany me at lunch, informing me of their exciting commissions and projects. It all seemed so grown up compared with my undergrad lifestyle.
Relationships blossomed. Just as the technicians had taken me under their wing the studio members began tentatively requesting a pot of emulsion, or enquiring as to the whereabouts of their paper stock. I listened in awe to their stories from the front line of illustration, textile design and graphic art, whilst obligingly mopping up their spillages and memorising their chocolate requests. No longer was I the elephant in the corner.
One particularly grey afternoon, a frantic courier rushed into the studio with dozens of heavy-looking cardboard boxes. They filled the entire studio entrance. In what seemed like a millisecond, a super squad of interns and technicians had assembled, dressed in ripped jeans and paint-splattered aprons. Nikolai warmed up the exposure unit; Patrick conditioned the screens while the rest of us encircled the boxes. Awaiting urgent printing lay hundreds of jiffy bags, and a note marked ‘next day delivery please'.
Another time, the studio's atmosphere buzzed with a different excitement, there was a slightly nervous air. Inky hands clutched at squeegees, unrecognisable faces transfixed by Fred's demonstration. Synchronised cooing and excitable gasps echoed throughout the studio as they waited for their turn. The group divided, and I welcomed two illustrators, two textile designers and a typographer. Ten eyes descended upon me, urging for instruction.
Looking back now, my encounters with the professional community provided a different notion to the one back in Winchester. There my communal support came from fellow students within a group crit scenario, where we would hug our Fairtrade coffees and openly discuss our progress.
So here I am, mingling amongst the prints that entered this world in front of my eyes, as their creators whose screens I had stripped, clasp their cheap chardonnay and chat nonchalantly. They had swapped their ink stained aprons and tatty Converse for private-view chic, but they remained the whimsical, thrilling people whose words I had clung to just one year ago. Having exchanged my degree show business cards and made my promises to keep in touch, I left the gallery on Brick Lane and wandered amongst the heckling Arabic restaurants and down towards Aldgate East tube station.
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PRACHI KHANDEKAR - EVERYDAY
I am a black mock-turtleneck. I led a pleasant, common life until I was ordered online on a particularly ordinary day. I remember leaving the warehouse with giddy anticipation. My new life would be different; they said I was headed to cling to a man of great influence. I arrived and waited in the darkness of my box until finally, it was opened one morning. That's when we first met, his name was Steve Jobs.
I performed my duties without attracting much attention until the launch of the iPhone at the annual World Wide Developers Conference in 2007. The journalist, Steven Heller, had waited many years to pin down this meeting, but his interest lay in the brand of Steve Jobs, not his revolutionary new gadgets. The interview lasted just 10 minutes during which, Steve repeatedly diverted attention away from his wardrobe towards Apple's accomplishments, only to be met with another question about me and my partner - Levis Blue Jean. Ultimately, Heller walked away with no answers but his questions were provocative. Could I really be more than just a piece of fabric? Was I also being used for individual branding? I existed as an object of no extraordinary appeal until this startling discovery. And, the thought of being a uniform conferred more responsibility than I could handle. I committed myself to research.
Uniforms conjure up images of discipline and conformism. But there are instances where the uniform has lead to the creation of an icon through this very effect. In 2009, Sheena Matheiken quit her corporate job to start raising funds for the Akanksha Foundation, a non-profit organization which provides education to children living in Indian slums. She founded The Uniform Project and designed a little black dress, which she donned everyday for the next one year in a variety of combinations. The outfit was documented on the website everyday so that fans could comment, vote and donate. Ultimately, she managed to raise $103,374,which is likely to put 287kids through school.
The project explains the function of the uniform as a ritual. Like an alarm clock or hairbrush, the uniform is an everyday design object. However, with the uniform there is a higher degree of psychological interplay between object and person. It has a deep-seated communicative function that operates in an inward as well as outward direction.
People usually wear uniforms to indicate membership to an institution. In this case, it is directed towards the other to aid recognition. An individual's uniform, on the other hand, has the opposite function. Each morning, the act of donning the familiar personal ensemble is a way to instate one's identity. So in effect, when Steve wears me every morning, I simply reflect his image back onto him.
My research on this subject has just begun and I have yet to conclude if I am, in fact, Steve's uniform. Levis advises me to stop the fruitless mulling. "After all," he says, "clothes aren't built to deal with existential crises."
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KATE NELISCHER - SHOWING
A single red chair stands on a white pedestal, on a white floor, in the middle of a white-walled room. It is clean and obviously unused, no scratches or worn out paint spots - it is the newest product launched by the hippest design studio. Crowds of important people are standing around the chair, looking at it but not touching it and certainly not sitting in it.
The chair has materialized from months of dedicated time in the workshop. Sketches on grid paper, heaps of Styrofoam, rough cuts from X-acto knives and piles of sawdust floating around the floor - all this messiness left behind as the now pristine chair sits with a lone spotlight shining down on it. It has been given a name too, typed in Helvetica on a small white placard below; the only few words that the designer can employ to tell about the object.
This distant observation of the Designer chair is in stark contrast to the ‘show and tell' sessions I remember from elementary school. Friday was an important day in the second grade, as each student was asked to bring in an object to present to the class. They were passed around the circle, touched, weighed and smelled by each of us. While we pored over the object, the owner was allotted a focused ten minutes to telling us just how ‘awesome' and ‘wicked' the Mighty Morphing Power Ranger figurine really was. During this speech the owner also had the opportunity to show the class why it was so ‘cool'; it would be held up high for everyone to see as the owner dislocated its arms and legs with swift precision and transformed it into a brawny robot that could knock out a Barbie doll with one quick punch. It was awfully impressive to a crowd of eight-year-olds and most were already planning how to ask their parents for one of their own.
During this year's London Design Festival I visited the studio of product design duo Barber Osgerby, expecting to enjoy a ‘show and tell' experience similar to those of public school. Although visitors were invited to the studio where all of the touching, weighing and feeling of products takes place, Baber Osgerby had arranged the space as a gallery. Visitors were led to walk in a circle around the finished products, artfully displayed on white podiums complete with accompanying ‘do not touch' signs. The designers were not present to explain the pieces and we were unable to pick them up - all of the information about a product was given through its appearance.
Moving on from the ‘show and tell' classes of their childhoods, designers develop the ability to create their own objects to show and lose the opportunity to tell about these pieces. As users are not always available to sit cross-legged in a circle and listen to lectures, design must tell for itself. Designers strive to ensure that their work embodies and exudes the meaning they have attached to it, so it can stand all by itself in a white room and show viewers just how ‘awesome' it really is.
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KRISZTINA SOMOGYI - INNOVATION
The tea cup is just an ordinary product of the Zsolnay, a ceramics factory founded in 1858 in the southern part of Hungary. What makes this object special is its decoration: a black typographic pattern runs through the cup and the saucer while the bottom of the cup is a golden disc. Seeing this in a catalogue, it takes some time to realize the trick: the image is constructed from fragments printed on different parts of the set, so the flat image appears as if projected on to the object surface. The overall effect is really diverse, the image in the catalogue can only be perceived as such from one given point of view. Besides the ‘readable' version there could be many others happening created by accident or by users. The creation was suggested by Zsolt Czakó, a graphic designer and typographer by formation, as part of a new program looking for innovative ideas for the Zsolnay outside of the ceramic industry.
The creative rebranding of the factory was initiated by István Komor, director of the heritage program. He was right to point out that the manufacture once so famous for its innovations is now buried in its own past. The glamorous era was the period of 1860-1930 but Zsolnay was making interesting tests with material and design even when turned into a socialist factory. Unfortunately that was over by the 80s: the quality of the products lost their speciality and high quality. Production for the building industry and for the handmade fine china collections was declining. The multiple changes in the ownership did not help the situation. A big part of the factory was sadly abandoned; only a few craftsmen are still working there.
The rehabilitation of the huge area of the Zsolnay factory is imagined in different ways: first of all there is a new cultural centre and a university campus opening in the empty buildings in 2011. The factory was reorganised in one corner of the place, there production is restarted. Ceramics workshops are organized with the students of the local fine art university and new working places are offered to international artists to insure the future of the factory. The invitation of non-ceramic artists to design for the Zsolnay is part of the rebirth plan.
From many points the initiative shares ideas with the projects of Alessi. The Italian factory invited famous architects to express their thoughts in ceramics and then one cannot fail to identify a similar marketing motive behind the Zsolnay program. However the aim there is not only publicity but also rebranding: the redefinition of the identity is an urgent necessity. The 3 year long cooperation had been imagined as a way to renew the portfolio of Zsolnay with the help of unusual ideas. Based on the list of invited artists, the factory is more interested in one-offs and art pieces then in design for the everyday.
The first reaction to the project was very positive. Showed around Europe by Komor, professionals from the industry were enthusiastic to see the first outcomes of the program, they were happy to learn that Zsolnay is heading for innovation. It was taken for granted that the products would be in the market very soon. Unfortunately it seems that this logical next step is not happening. As for now, many of the works only exist virtually. To take the typo cup as an example many of the objects used in the new collection were in everyday production in the 60s and prototypes were successfully made for the request of the designer, the process was never completed. It seems that the mentality of the factory still lacks that enthusiasm and zeal that made Zsolnay win First Prize at the World Exhibition in Paris back in 1878. After two decades of neglect, finally something has changed in the Zsolnay: new ideas emerge, they already serve marketing purposes, but that is not enough to call it a real innovation.
