What ideals, principles, motto and design qualities might you use to describe and define the next emergent design trend valid over the next 5 years, current to your practices? What name would you give to the design movement?

“Design creates culture. Culture shapes values. Values determine the future.” -Robert L. Peters, designer and author. In essence, Design and Society are two inseparable terms. Everything is designed. Predicting the future of design would be predicting the future of society. The future of society is the future of design. Predicting the future of design would be predicting the future of society. The use of technology in art is becoming prevalent with the introduction of 3D printing, interactive media, Augmented Reality (AR)/ Virtual Reality (VR) (Evans). With this emerging trend of technology being infused and incorporated into the design, it is without a doubt that design works would be produced more efficiently to the masses, so efficiently that there will be no traces of humanity to the products in the future, where products would look so standardised and similar. This would then incur a new design movement, the Individualism movement that rejects the use of technology in design.

 

This movement aims to encourage the pursuit of individualism, originality, and creativity, at the same time, this movement would also build and give rise to more artists than craftsmen. This is evident as we can see from past design movements. For example, in Arts and crafts movement (Fig.1 and 2) (1880-1920) (Art Factory),  William Morris, an artist, poet, social critic reacts to mass production by advocating the return to nature and handcrafted productions, rejecting mass production. (Obniski) This could inspire and spark off similar motivation and ideals in artists to start the individualism movement, to counter future designs that look too similar by rejecting the use of technology.

 

On the other hand, many would argue that advancement of technology in society is inevitable (Hunter), new ways would be invented to increase the efficiency of designing regardless in the future, thus such movement might not be well-received. However, it fails to take into the handicraft industry might be non-existent in the future due to current declining demands for it (KUMAR* and RAJEEV**) and people would start to yearn for individually handcrafted works and such works would probably cost a fortune by that time as well.

 

This brings us to the example of Art-deco which was catered for the high end and exclusive transiting to Streamlining where products were made available to the public masses back in the 1940s, due to the Great Depression at that time where the economy had to be boosted drastically (McCourt). In the future, I foresee comfortable economies would give rise to a reverse of transition, where people in a society of instant gratification and highly efficient production systems, would appreciate and want to go back to the humble beginnings of design with works made without advanced technology.

 

All in all, I agree that technology would be even further integrated into design, however, I feel that the individualism movement would still be popular among artists as handcrafted products in the future would be scarce while products by technology would be so common. The shift from functionalism back to the appreciation of handcrafted design would happen.

 

Arts and Craft Movement (Art Factory)

 

Bibliography

Evans, Thomas. Bare Conductive. 2019. 2019.

 

Obniski, Monica. Met Museum. June 2008.

 

Hunter, Kylie. Implementation Guidelines for the Inevitable. n.d.

 

KUMAR*, MR. DILIP and DR. P.V. RAJEEV**. MARKETING CHALLENGES OF HANDICRAFT RETAILERS IN CHANGING ENVIRONMENT. October 2014.

 

McCourt, Mark J. Hemmings. 29 May 2014.

 

Art Factory. 2019. 2019.