Fast-realized design ideas challenge mass-produced industrial designs

This post is a quick English translation of an article I originally wrote in Turkish, which was published by Radikal Newspaper's monthly Design supplement on 31 January 2010.

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"Always go to your customer with at least three alternatives" is perhaps the most well-known advice given to design students as they prepare to embark on their professional career. The initial stages of a typical design process indeed witness a quantitative variety in alternatives. But as the process draws to a close, the number of ideas in consideration gradually decreases, eventually falling to one. Quite naturally, this decrease is quantity assumed to give birth to an increase in quality: after all, the commercial world's first and foremost expectation from designers is unique and flawless designs that are apt for being manufactured by the error-intolerant process of mass-production.

While a typical design process displays the above characteristics, a number of recent examples of practice suggest that some designers choose to maintain a contrary approach. These designers are not interested in providing the 'customer' with a single flawless design idea that is to be mass-produced. Instead, they are in pursuit of realizing as many of their design ideas as possible, with or without flaws. This is precisely why they strive to finalize their design processes as quickly as possible. They steal the notion of 'rapidity' away from the industrial context, where it typically connotes a 'systematic efficiency' and 'perfection.' Fostering an affection for intuitiveness, they bestow this notion to the studio-workshop realm. Thus they shift focus away from working for industrial mass-production toward fast-realizing their design ideas.

The first project which I believe exemplifies this recent trend is ”speed-furniture” by the Israel-based design studio Godspeed. These designers conceive and finalize each of their furniture designs within a duration of only one hour. They use scrap pieces of wood reclaimed from carpenters in Tel Aviv as raw material for their designs. A similar example from the field of furniture design is Martino Gamper's "100 Chairs in 100 Days." The London-based Italian designer maintains an approach akin to that of Godspeed to create brand new chairs using material he locally reclaims. As part of his design process he uses some pieces just as they are, while he subjects others to radical changes according to new roles he conceives for them.

The cover of Şerifcan Özcan's Ten Plus One project portfolio

For diversity's sake I now want to mention an example from graphic design: The New York based designer Şerifcan Özcan's ”Ten Plus One.” The project comprises eleven different design ideas, realized from scratch in eleven hours. Özcan says what led to this project was nothing but the pressure exerted by a school deadline. Upon realizing that he was short of projects for a thick enough portfolio, the designer came up with the idea for ”Ten Plus One.” Ironically, the designer was even contacted by one customer who was interested in buying one of his 'one-hour' designs.

As suggested by the above examples, the approach that I have called 'fast-realized design ideas' follows a process which ensures the full execution of design works within a short and/or limited time frame. As part of such process, the traditionally distinct phases of 'design' and 'production' merge into one another, blurring the distinction between the notions of 'prototype' and 'end-product.' It can easily be argued that these works compromise on the characteristic of 'flawlessness,' which is essentially assumed of the end-products of a conventional design process. In fact, the very flaws caused by these unique fast design processes often serve as a positive quality; an 'added-value' of sorts. It is this phenomenon that places such works somewhere in the intersecting worlds of arts, craft and design.

A packaging design from Şerifcan Özcan's Ten Plus One project portfolio

Are these designers influenced in any way by a specific stream of critical thought? At first glance we can suggest that designers have, with the aid of the recent crisis, finally acknowledged their historical role as consumerism's driving force. In the light of the above examples, could we not suggest that designers have realized that the relentless demand imposed on them by the industry for creating 'flawless' and 'unique' designs has turned their creative process into a vicious cycle? It is possible to argue that by hacking those two key notions of 'flawlessness' and 'uniqueness', these designers aim to break the creative bottleneck and the above mentioned vicious cycle. More cynical views may suggest that these designers instrumentalize the prestige often attributed to 'designed' objects. Some may go even further to argue that they exploit this prestige, not unlike what their 'star designer' colleagues have done throughout the last few decades, this time through a more underground manner; with a touch of 'planned imperfectness.' Whatever perspective we may maintain as we look at this trend, what all of its examples boldly underline is that we are witnessing a reversal of the traditional hegemony of 'product' over 'process,' whereby the latter is on the rise as the more valuable asset compared to the former.

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