Manifesto – History of Design

FIND ROME (The Point)

All roads lead to Rome (The Point).

All design should have a point.

Art movements have a habit of subverting their predecessors

They also tend to question and ask “Why is this Rome (The Point)?”.

Is your design purposeful? Why must it be purposeful?

Can design be mass produced? Can it NOT be mass produced?

Why is this Rome (The Point)? Why can’t Rome (The Point) be this?

Interesting well worn roads that have all led to Rome (The Point).

Thus the true question every designer should ask is “What is Rome (The Point)?”

Design is finding new applications and expressions of one’s unique perception of life.

Design is learning how they made it to roam and slowly chipping away at your own road to Rome (The Point)

My point is that the point of design is to point people to the point of perspective, point of emotion and point of experience that is unique to only you. And the whole of the work should cumulate coalesce into that point: Rome.

Because all roads lead The Point.

And all designs should lead to you.

Thought Process

What i think of design: I think design is something that is taken for granted a lot. It makes the world a whole lot nicer to look at that we tend to forget the thought that goes behind making it so. However, I think design now has to be churned out at increasing amounts as the world becomes more and more visual and I think sometimes the purpose of design tends to get lost within all the desire for aesthetics or vibes and original and fresh designs are getting harder and harder to achieve.

What design styles appeal to you the most: Surrealism, DADA, post-modernism. I like designs that question, that leaves people questioning. There’s a saying that art should “comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable”. I’ve never felt it more truly than in these three styles. I think they express the rawer side of humanity that cannot be seen as clearly in more purposeful art movements and styles like Bauhaus and Art Deco.

What do you think design should be: I think design should have a purpose and concept. While I do not think it’s necessary for it to be invisible as argued by Beatrice Warde, I do not think that they should have a certain look or style simply for aesthetics. I think the design decisions should come from a more visceral part within that is directly linked to how we view and perceive the world. Sometimes that calls for a brilliant neon sign with glitter and sparkles and sometimes less is more and the understated makes a bigger impact.

What defines good design for me: Hierarchy. Sounds boring I know. But I think the best design has a clear focus and a point. And its cohesive point from any angle should eventually coalesce at that point.

What makes me happy about design: It’s a chance to express an experience, an emotion or a perception in ways that would have been intangible in any other form.

Professional ethics: I think my one rule is just that I have to be happy with what I churn out, and what I come up with has to be me and a part of me. Not a Frankenstein creation of everyone’s opinions and feedback in an attempt to please everyone. It’s hard to follow this rule all the time since showing “me” means giving “me” up for judgement.

Hyperessay – Voyage

Voyage is an installation art piece that consists of a flotilla of colour changing origami “paper” boats arranged on the water surface with wires connected to the waterbed so that they are able to float in a consistent pattern across any water body. Each boat is illuminated by coloured LED lights that can be controlled via a wifi network. Passersby can simply connect to network and are able to control a boat within the 300 strong fleet creating attractive patterns and colours.

This piece was made by Aether & Hemera, a multidisciplinary art and design studio founded by Gloria Ronchi and Claudio Benghi. Ronchi has a mixed background in Science and Fine Arts and is an established light artist while Benghi is a Architect, specialising in media architecture.

Their combined artistic vision is to “provoke memories, explore aesthetic interactions and elicit feelings of connective human experiences in a required-to-participare audience.

The etymon of the word ‘voyage’ comes from Latin ‘viāticum’ which means ‘ provision for travelling’. The aim of this piece was to allow viewers to travel and sail with absolute freedom to all the places they care to imagine. The use of the nostalgic imagery of paper boats invites the transition from reality to imagination, reliving childhood memories and blurring the lines between real and hyperreal.

Personally, I felt that the impression and the feelings this piece elicited was similar to that of watching the lights on the buildings in the distance while on a high rise. Each light represents someone else life, and from the distance and the scale of everything around, everyone looks small but they do change something in the landscape.

With this piece, the ability to control one boat in the entire fleet is not much, but the choice of colour that someone passing by chooses does affect the entire look as a whole. And with each of the different choices made at once, the fleet will never look exactly the same as in that one moment. The ability to choose a colour as well as the random selection of which boat a person in the network is given is a chance technique that avoids the habitual tendencies of humans. This hands over the control of the piece and it’s outcome from the artists to the viewers thus demonstrating the idea of indeterminacy by creating indeterminate connections between the phones and the piece.

In that way, I felt that Voyage is extremely successful as an interactive piece. In class we talked about the the connectivity of a cybernated society, where a work of art can become dynamic and always changing due to the restless unending nature of of data that is flowing through our screens and devices. By using a wireless network, this art installation has opened itself to a array of data and choices that would affect the piece, limited only by the range in which the wifi network can spread. Also, with the piece being movable, it has already travelled to several countries such as the US, Spain, Australia, the UK and France. As the artwork incorporates the unending flow and restless nature of information itself, it transcended geographical boundaries and has brought about a synthesis of all cultures across borders, playing with the common feeling of childhood nostalgia and self introspection.

This work created a new role for the viewer, rather than being a passive recipient of a work, as with traditional art, the viewer actually helps shape and effect its quality with their choices. While previous forms of art were on order and certainty, art like Voyage tends toward entropy and indeterminacy. This piece is in a continuous state of transformation and is never finished.

I feel that Voyage’s incorporation of wifi is an interesting touch as this is a new form of connectivity in this day and age. First from infrared to bluetooth and now wifi, this is an age where people are more connected than ever before. The world has become both smaller and larger at the same time. People can reach each other easier but the information and feedback generated by everyone is vast and unending. Thus this piece resonates with me as it points out that despite the amount of data, there are things that simplify and brings people together. Intangible but universal emotions and experiences such as growing up and imagination. The use of the viewer not being able to control the whole fleet but only a singular boat not only involves the viewer in the piece but places them in the unique situation where they are important but also insignificant, as is the same with living in this world.

Hyperessay: Artist and Artwork Selection

A E T H E R & H E R M E R A

Aether and Hermera is a multidisciplinary art and design studio producing work that lies at the intersections of contemporary installation, lighting art and interaction design. It was founded by Gloria Ronchi, a light artist and Claudio Benghi a media architect. The collective utilises the medium of light combined with digital media to create engaging spaces that connect people with their environment.

Their artistic vision is to provoke memories, explore aesthetic interactions and elicit feelings of connective human experiences in a required to participate audience.

C H O S E N A R T W O R K : V O Y A G E

An installation in London’s Canary Wharf, Voyage is this beautiful fleet of 300 illuminated boats called Voyage. Each floating light is reminiscent of a paper-folded origami boat that is illuminated from within. There is a wireless network in the vicinity that allows audiences to join with a mobile device and alter the colour of the entire installation.

History of Design (Product ) – Bauhaus

Bauhaus is a school that rose from Modernism and the Industrial Revolution, inspired by many qualities and ideologies found in the movements that occured before and around the same time. Some such examples are the Aesthetic movement, Art Nouveau’s Deutscher Werkbund, Wiener Werkstatte and De Stijl. Primarily it answered the question “how can an artist be trained to take his place in the machine age?”

The school’s purpose was to serve as the link between crafts and industry. However it’s initial conceptualization in the early 20th century was fought harshly against by German craftsman organizations who feared that it instead was a new factor that would accelerate the decline of crafts by tainting it with industrial development ideologies.

This essay will explore some of the ideologies behind Bauhaus, which movements it was inspired by and finally if it was successful in retaining the character in craftsmanship while incorporating mechanized mass production values. Firstly, we shall explore some of the movements that inspired Bauhaus ideologies.

Modernism is a movement that favoured rational critical thinking over tradition, especially when it came to materials and new ideas. Much of the designs that sprung from the movement were inspired by the simple geometric shapes formed by the machine made urban environment and made use of the latest materials. The lack of ornamentation, experimentation with new materials and simplistic designs are key features that are also present in Bauhaus’s design ethos.

The Aesthetic movement was inspired by the abstract geometric shapes and pure uncluttered lines of Japonism. The movement also carries the belief that art as a product should not have any social ethical or moral bearings. Something echoed later on in Bauhaus teachings.

Deutscher Werkbund is often known for its imitating of nature. Most designs have long sinuous lines and curvilinear organic forms that imitate nature. Its designs, such as the Music Room Chair 1899, is designed for mass production at low cost which brought about the ideology of “Machine Furniture” or basically, furniture that is well designed and inexpensive to build and assemble.

Wiener Werkstetter is a movement that promoted the equality between designer and craftsman. Unlike Deutscher Werkbund, this movement focused more on the artistic integrity of the designs, refusing to compromise for affordability. This unfortunately limited their appeal to the masses. However the ideology that an artist could be a craftsman and designer as well to produce the best, most innovative art can be seen being adopted by Bauhaus.

Constructivism developed as a means of bridging the gap between objects and buildings and their relations to the industrialized world.

Finally, De Stijl is a group of artists and architects who wanted to achieve an objective, modern, anti-individualistic art style which is reflected in the art pieces produced by the group. They often featured horizontal and vertical lines and clean primary colours that challenged the use of visual and physical space as well as the use of colours and their effect on spaces. Everyday spaces and furniture were often simplified and reexamined for their forms. While the furniture produced were often non-functional, they are valued and celebrated for their ideas of ratio balance and simplification.

The Bauhaus School of Design was founded by Walter Gropius a german architect in 1919. It was during the time where World War One had just occured and the Industrial Revoloution was picking up speed. Gropius wanted to “create a new guild of craftsmen without the class distinctions” which he felt was primarily the cause for divide between craftsmen and artists. Something brought up before by the Wiener Werkstatte movement. Bauhaus is the Unification of Art, Handwork & Industry, an apprenticeship programme in applied arts of Carpentry, pottery, metalworking, glasswork, stage design, photography, commercial art.

Most of its progressive, experimental curriculum is centered around the innovative teaching practices of their teachers with the likes of Itten, Klee, Kandinsky, Moholy- Nagy and many more. It consist of two main concepts: zeitgeist and Gesamtkunstwerk and three secondary concepts: Rationalistic industrial art, social arts and aesthetic industrial art.

The concept of zeitgeist was the unification and synthesis of all components of arts in terms of a body of work to symbolize a culture. While the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk means a unity of the whole creative process of all disciplines both in design, craftsmanship and mechanical production. The concept of Rationalistic – industrial art was to view art with a greater emphasis on the ratio, collective desires or values, rejecting of tradition, exclusivity and uniqueness. The Social Arts concept sees art in terms of social commitments. The responsibility that art now carries as a functional massed produced product through industrialization. As such, many of the designs produced from the school had favoured functionality over ornamentation, symmetry based on ratio and experimented with new materials.

When Moholy-Nagy succeeded Itten in the school, he introduced industrially functionalist designs in the metal workshops, discouraging traditional materials and handicrafts in favour of technologically produced modern materials such as steel tubing, glass, plywood. Steel tubing was often only seen in bicycles gave furniture instead a lightweight form associated with the vehicle. Something that was very unique at that time compared to many other designs at that time that were often heavy and bulky with hardwood ornamental bases. The experimentation with plywood and it’s pliability also resulted in chairs that were more lightweight and springy which felt softer and more comfortable. Committing the school to new material technology and mass production also reduced the importance of craft specialization and traditional workshop training; on the artist-constructor, than the artist-craftsman.

However, some criticism that came with the Bauhaus school of thought was that in the process of simplifying and rationalizing in the name of functionality and mass production. Some believe that the character behind the “art” produced is lost as most things are stripped of their cultural traces. Others even go as far to define it as robotic. Considering that Bauhaus’s purpose was to find the balance between art and the mass production of industrialisation, I personally believed it did not produce so much of “fine art” but it did revolutionize the concepts of product design which I believe is an art form in itself. While perhaps Bauhaus did is not the exact answer to the balance between art and craftsmanship, as Hans Heiss aptly says “what made Bauhaus was not so much its achievements, but its spirit,” and following the dictates of technology and economics of production, “if they were not the right answers, at least they were the right questions.”

(1080 words)

References

Bayer, H., & Gropius, W. (1972). Bauhaus. New York: Museum of Modern Art.

Collins, N. (2018). Deutscher Werkbund: German Work Federation: Architecture, Crafts, Design. Retrieved from http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/architecture/deutscher-werkbund.htm

Harimuti, R., Wijono, D., & Hatmoko, A. (2011). Bauhaus Ideology, Concept and Method on Architecture.

Schjeldahl, P., Farrow, R., Thomas, L., Farrow, R., Félix, D., & Toobin, J. et al. (2018). Bauhaus Rules. Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/11/16/bauhaus-rules

Wilk, C. (2008). Modernism (pp. 76-126). London: V & A Pub.