Friday, April 8, 2011
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Commentary: Key Forces in Design Today - published in the Providence Journal 4/9/10
There are two key forces in design today: the growth of digital media in developing and producing objects and communication; and the impact of environmental-sustainability issues on the production resources of new work, ranging from buildings and factory goods, to periodicals and industrial systems.
The 2007 Corcoran Gallery of Art exhibit, “Modernism: Designing a New World 1914–1939,” demonstrated the broadest contours of design influence at the beginning of the 20th-Century, some of which are still with us and much that is not. While many projects and objects of the interwar period projected an aesthetic of “hands-free” mechanistic production, some of the pieces exhibited, such as a set of Bauhaus prototype kitchen devices and hardware, were actually handmade to simulate a factory production system that did not quite exist.
After World War II that all changed, with the upheaval and the supremacy of consumer products. Today, we inherit the projected paradigms of what was once a brilliant future, albeit now somewhat quaint, in a world ceaselessly reinventing itself.
Now we live in another time of cataclysmic change. However, the paradigms being born today are in many ways the opposite of the ones a century ago. Rather than faith in the collective ability of mass production to raise social standards, there is a concentration on sustainable design. Graphic designers now care as much about paper-stock recyclable content and the chemical-based environmental impact of printing inks as they once did about the precise contours of the tear-drop figure/ground in the Helvetica font letter “a.” They still care about typography. But today, prototype fonts are more likely formed in vector-based software.
Add to this the rapid exchange of Internet-based content; the individualization of media through blogs, Facebook or Twitter, and consumer products made for just-in-time delivery among an onslaught of myriad competing choices, and you have a new world.
The impact of digital culture on current methods and practices in design comes from advances in rendering and production software that have let designers advance rapidly to a convergence in form-making and problem-solving that has less to do with the preponderance of a “style” and more to do with an exuberance of shared expression permitted by the speed of digital media.
Design language is now truly international as images and product development are globally disseminated in real time. The ability of American firms, large and small, to compete in global marketplaces is due in no small part to the Internet, with its File Transfer Protocols, and overnight renderings in far separated time zones. With that comes a broadening of design culture in America.
So, while the design field today has a rich tradition of issues stemming from a period of equally critical change a century ago, we face far different templates of social concern and cultural manufacture, notwithstanding the present nostalgia for a return to the principles of early 20th-century Modernism. Leaving aside the now largely irrelevant tropes of “Post-Modernism” and misguided calls for reproducing antique classical idioms, design-form-making today is more likely to be the product of impulse, concern for the environment and methods of production.
The 2007 Corcoran Gallery of Art exhibit, “Modernism: Designing a New World 1914–1939,” demonstrated the broadest contours of design influence at the beginning of the 20th-Century, some of which are still with us and much that is not. While many projects and objects of the interwar period projected an aesthetic of “hands-free” mechanistic production, some of the pieces exhibited, such as a set of Bauhaus prototype kitchen devices and hardware, were actually handmade to simulate a factory production system that did not quite exist.
After World War II that all changed, with the upheaval and the supremacy of consumer products. Today, we inherit the projected paradigms of what was once a brilliant future, albeit now somewhat quaint, in a world ceaselessly reinventing itself.
Now we live in another time of cataclysmic change. However, the paradigms being born today are in many ways the opposite of the ones a century ago. Rather than faith in the collective ability of mass production to raise social standards, there is a concentration on sustainable design. Graphic designers now care as much about paper-stock recyclable content and the chemical-based environmental impact of printing inks as they once did about the precise contours of the tear-drop figure/ground in the Helvetica font letter “a.” They still care about typography. But today, prototype fonts are more likely formed in vector-based software.
Add to this the rapid exchange of Internet-based content; the individualization of media through blogs, Facebook or Twitter, and consumer products made for just-in-time delivery among an onslaught of myriad competing choices, and you have a new world.
The impact of digital culture on current methods and practices in design comes from advances in rendering and production software that have let designers advance rapidly to a convergence in form-making and problem-solving that has less to do with the preponderance of a “style” and more to do with an exuberance of shared expression permitted by the speed of digital media.
Design language is now truly international as images and product development are globally disseminated in real time. The ability of American firms, large and small, to compete in global marketplaces is due in no small part to the Internet, with its File Transfer Protocols, and overnight renderings in far separated time zones. With that comes a broadening of design culture in America.
So, while the design field today has a rich tradition of issues stemming from a period of equally critical change a century ago, we face far different templates of social concern and cultural manufacture, notwithstanding the present nostalgia for a return to the principles of early 20th-century Modernism. Leaving aside the now largely irrelevant tropes of “Post-Modernism” and misguided calls for reproducing antique classical idioms, design-form-making today is more likely to be the product of impulse, concern for the environment and methods of production.
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