The Design Overdose
Design everywhere, on paper, via voice, via web, via TV: all we needed was whole year of it, every day of every week in 2008
Virginio Briatore
There, I’ve said it. It was a rapid, instinctive thought. Nothing scientific or academic, more of a cry. Not a Munchian scream, but a cry of bewilderment, like when you arrive alone in an unknown city and you feel that combination of excitement and trepidation.
Is there really any sense in talking, reading, writing, filming and blogging about chairs, lamps, strainers, bumpers and iPods every day?
Have we all gone design crazy?
They always say that ‘sex’ is the most searched word on the net. I put it to Google and these are the results:
Results 1 – 10 out of around 1,960,000,000 for music.
Results 1 – 10 out of around 1,540,000,000 for love.
Results 1 – 10 out of around 1,320,000,000 for design.
Results 1 – 10 out of around 640,000,000 for sex.
Results 1 – 10 out of around 192,000,000 for freedom.
Results 201 – 210 out of around 47,600,000 for design school.
Results 1 – 10 out of around 501,000 for ‘scuole di design’ in Italian.
Design beats sex 2 – 0.
Design beats freedom 7 – 1.
In Italy in 1994 there were ten schools of architecture, 4 ISIA art schools and three important private design schools. Now there are around 100 faculties, schools, courses, degrees and masters, where ‘design’ is taught.
The magazine Domus, I think it was in 2006, mapped more than 600 universities and schools dedicated to design all over the world. In actual fact there are more than a thousand and, like museums, a new one is launched every week.
I see myself as a life designer, basically someone who tries to understand what on earth humans are going to do with all these ‘things’ in their brief lives
In itself this is a great thing: hundreds of thousands of young people no longer have to work in factories or banks or hospitals like their parents, but can engage in creative disciplines.
These are subjects for which failed school exams mean little, but where the trials of life look to be getting harder and harder.
In 1999 at the opening of the Accademia di Design in Bolzano (an experimental school which led to the development of the Art and Design Faculty of Bolzano University) even I commented, in the words of Hans Hollein “Everything is design!”.
Was I wrong?
I continue to believe that design is something that regards all living beings, from birth to death, but nowadays I remind myself that the same is true of water, blood, food, hot and cold, freedom, dreams, and toothache, but without the hype. Apart from the financial newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore, which still has columns on numismatics, antiques and fine arts, all the papers, including the free press, have pages on design.
La Repubbica even produced a history of world design in 10 volumes. Ulisse and Riflessi, the house organs of Alitalia and Trenitalia, publish pretty good articles on design and are almost always on-trend.
In Europe in the last ten years at least 50 new publications on the subject have come out. In Asia even more, but we don’t see them. One of the four sides of the classic newsstand kiosk holds only design mags.
Then there are the hundreds, or rather thousands of books about design. I myself have written seven or eight, all of which apart from one, luckily weigh less than a kilo.
Given the amount of books obviously we have dedicated libraries, specialized bookshops and those inviting ‘design bistros’ with reading rooms.
I don’t know how many TV channels dedicated to design there are, but I have come across three or four Italian ones while channel zapping.
The number of websites on the them is anyone’s guess, place your bet.
If you’re on holiday or a business trip you can do no better than stay in a design hotel, while the less well-off can make do with a trendy design container, while visiting a design-oriented city.
All self-respecting cities put on at least one design week; so far Moputo has yet to do so, but it’s in the pipeline.
And the breaking news in 2008 is that now there is even a world design capital, on for all the 52 available weeks!
Industrial design, interior design, graphic design, web design, information design, interface design, fashion design, transportation & car design, design sketching, sound design, food design, textile design, glass design, garden design, yacht design, master in Biodesign!
Help! Stop design, I want to get off!
One of the gurus of the digital era once said that in this century only two things will matter: the net and objects.
Does that sound like good news to you? I’m not sure.
I love design, I make a living from it, and after twenty years observing it I am starting to distinguish things.
I see myself as a life designer, basically someone who tries to understand what on earth humans are going to do with all these ‘things’ in their brief lives.
At times it all just seems confused, excessive, overwhelming.
Design noise.
My hearing isn’t so good any more.
All I know is that at a certain point this year I was hit by a design overload and suddenly understood that I want to start writing less about chairs, tables, lampshades, funnels and iThingies, and only talk about them twice a year maximum.
