Desma 10 Design Culture - an Introduction Meeting 9 (Nov. 14, 2008) Design in the Postmodern Era ***** "Design has taken on its own life, and this raises a problem often encountered in consumer culture. The energy is pure delight. But can we turn it off?” Herbert Muschamp (2000) ***** "Is good design the perfection of an object for commercial success? For the glory of the designer? For beauty? For glamour? For use?" (Philip Nobel, 2000) ***** “Function is Out, Form is In” Time Magazine, March 2000 ***** “We don’t sell a product, we sell a style of life. The Diesel concept is everything. It’s the way to live, it’s the way to wear, it’s the way to do something.” Diesel Jeans owner Renzo Rosso ***** “Brand! Brand!! Brand!!! That’s the message...for the late 90’s and beyond.” Tom Peters, advertising guru ***** Postmodernism - Origins -Origins open to debate; usually seen beginning in the 1960s -Word appears in Charles Jencks: The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (1977) -Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966) argued that modern architecture was meaningless because it lacked the complexity and irony of historicalbuildings -Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Steven Izenour: Learning from Las Vegas (1972): praising the cultural honesty of built commercialism in Las Vegas - earlier despised by modernists as decadent and messy. ***** Postmodernism - features - Plundering of “cultural archives”: anything that has ever existed is potential material for creativity, in almost any combinations. - Focus on the exterior, surface, ‘skin’; culture as an endless play of ”signifiers.” - Humor, play and irony replace (modernist) seriousness; still, there may be anxiety hidden behind the facade. - The obscuring of boundaries between ”high” and ”low” culture, but also between fields like art and design - Simulation replaces representation (representation told us something about reality; simulation only pretends to refer to the ‘real’) ***** Simulation According to critic Gene Youngblood, the word "simulation" has two main meanings: 1) 'fake copy’ (e.g. digital photographs that only pretend to represent something ’real’) 2) 'model of the possible’ (e.g. using computer-simulated models for cars or airplanes to test their qualities before the prototype has been built) . ***** Postmodernism as Anti-Modernism “We look backward at history and tradition to go forward; we can also look downward to go upward.” (Learning from Las Vegas) *****Universal City Walk, Los Angeles - branded city, simulated city, or a world as a city, city as a world, as a “Theatrum Mundi”, conglomeration of cultural traditions, as deliberate simulations. One of the ultimate urban realizations of postmodernism. ***** Features of Postmodern Design Culture - Branding is everything in postmodern design culture. Companies don’t produce objects, they create brands. - Recycling of ideas taken from “cultural archives”; frequent references to earlier design movements in new design products. -Design identified with glamour: "designer as a media star", ‘high design’. Designer as a Brand. - The idea of affordable design objects for everyone (chains of stores like IKEA, Muji, Target): design as a way of life; design everywhere! Again: branding controls the design process. - ”lifestyle shopping", brand awareness (partly as a result mass-production of fakes - ‘fabricated attitude’?), life-style -oriented chains of stores (GAP, Urban Outfitters, UniGlo...) ***** Intertextuality -The interplay and mixing of different cultural ”texts” -Cultural production that constantly refers to other earlier cultural products -leads to endless recycling of cultural meanings that lose their specific referents; however, they can also be used for critical ends ***** More Features of Postmodern Design Culture - "Product constellations": related products as part of a life-style (Rolex+BMW+Ray-Ban) -”branding governs everything”, including places like casinos, even cities! Design canhelp: Geary’s architecture identified with Bilbao: symbolic investment! -”product semantics”: the product as a symbolic expression, as well as an object for use ***** “For years we thought of ourselves as a production-oriented company, meaning we put all our emphasis on designing and manufacturing the product. But now we understand that the most important thing we do is market the product. We’ve come around to saying that Nike is a marketing-oriented company, and the product is our most important marketing tool.” Nike CEO Phil Knight ***** Compare with the statement below. What has changed? Answer: companies now concentrate on creating brands, not products. Products can be ordered from other manufacturers running their sweatshops in Third World countries. This is a moral dilemma contemporary design culture faces. “This is the proposition that the basic and irreversible function of an industrial economy is the making of things...” Fortune magazine, 1938 ***** Designer as Brand “I am not an icon, a star. It’s not a superman thing. Everyone can do it.” Philippe Starck ***** Philippe Starck (1949-): ”Form Precedes Function” - ”The role of the designer is to create more happiness with less” - ”I am very interested in the unconscious, because it never lies - whilst the conscious is always a lie. I work on the commonplace, on the collective unconscious”- ”Everything is only a game that one has to play with the greatest possible respect, the greatest possible sense of responsibility, and at the same time with humour and lightness of touch” ***** More Philippe Starck’s famous sayings... “A Poor Christmas gift designer like me who is obliged to speak out” ”Design doesn’t interest me. I don’t read about design or go to exhibitions about design. I use this vehicle like other people use political discourse, songs or books.” ”Wake up, stand up, stop being a consumer” ***** Artist as a Brand: Takashi Murakami (1963-) Bridging and blending high culture and low culture, art, and design, history and contemporary, East and West. Whatever you think about it, don’t miss Murakami’s exhibition at LA MOCA (Geffen Contemporary!) ***** Murakami’s ambiguous sayings - “I express hopelessness” - “When I consider what Japanese culture is like, the