The New Demands On DesignAnd Creative Ways To Handle Them

The Future Of Sustainable Products And ServicesEssen, Sept. 28th, 2009

Bernd Draser and David Olschewskiecosign/Akademie für Gestaltung

New demands on design

Sustainability

• ecological demands

• economic demands

• social and cultural demands

Making decisions

• efficiency vs. effectivity

• intrinsic vs. cyclic aspects

• aesthetics vs. technology

• design for developing countries vs. design for industrialized countries

Attractive and up-to-date design

The demand of form and function

Design was a symptom of industrialization. Designers practiced

• pre-industrial craftsmanship

• applied arts

• engineering

The demand of form and function

Form follows function: Louis Sullivan / architect

Whether it be the sweeping eagle in his flight, or the open apple-blossom, the toiling work-horse, the blithe swan, the branching oak, the winding stream at its base, the drifting clouds, over all the coursing sun, form ever follows function, and this is the law. Where function does not change, form does not change.

(1896)

The demand of form and function

Adolf Loos

• radical anti-ornamental position

• raging iconoclastic anger

The evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament from useful objects.

(German 1908 / English 1913)

The demand of form and function

Bauhaus: Aesthetics and Masses:

• design for the social masses

• utopian visions of the „new man“

• political vision of social justice and equality

• design for mass production

• new aesthetics for industrial production

• no reproduction of ornaments from pre-industrial times

• eliminating the gap between artist and craftsman

The demand of aesthetics

A negative view:

• Design is sexing up the surface in order to

• persuade customers

• delude from the true character of a product

A positive view:

• Design can sweeten the bitter pill of sustainability

• Design must find a new aesthetics for the purpose of sustainability

Is design overburdened?

An ethical view:

• Sustainability as a normative value

• Sustainable design as practical ethics

Consequences

• heavy burdens for the creative process

• keeping designers busy with expertise questions

• restraining the options

The precedent: Arts and aesthetics around 1800

Arts before 1800

• mimesis

• Plato and Aristotle

• imitation of reality

• prodesse et delectare

• Horace

• to be useful and to entertain

• function and form

• aesthetic judgements are a matter of taste

The precedent: Arts and aesthetics around 1800

Arts and aesthetics around 1800

• Important aesthetic books:

• Baumgarten: Aesthetica

• Sulzer: General Theory of Fine Arts

• Kant: Critique of Judgement

• Main consequences:

• rationalization of aesthetic judgement

• reason, not taste

• arts in the focus of philosophy

The precedent: Arts and aesthetics around 1800

Hegel‘s aesthetics: the end of arts

• arts functioned as religion

• arts lost relevance

• Christian religion took over

• philosophy took over

Postmodern view on Hegel‘s aesthetics

• a philosophical disenfranchisement of arts

• aesthetic experience takes place in theory and concepts

• beauty is lost as a valid criteria for arts

The precedent: Arts and aesthetics around 1800

German Romanticism

• Only arts is capable of salvation

• religion and arts are not separable

• only arts can redeem a rationalized / industrialized world

Eichendorff:

Songs repose in things abounding that keep dreaming to be heard, and the world shall start resounding if you hit her magic word.

The precedent: Arts and aesthetics in the 20th century

(Post-)Modernism

• exploring new dimensions of aesthetic experiences

• transgressing the traditional borders of arts

• incorporating the theoretical subjection

• defining and defending a new autonomy

Three examples

• Walter Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935)

• John Cage: 4:33 (1952)

• Marcel Duchamp: The Fountain (1917)

The precedent: What can designers learn from there?

• It is not an option to ignore the new demands. Designers must face them.

• On the long run, the challenges will be incorporated into design discourses.

• It is helpful to enforce a vivid dialogue. Experiments are indispensable.

• There won‘t be the one great solution. Diverse strategies are necessary.

• Opposing and competing practices and theories are productive, but not obstructive.

• Sustainable design will not succeed as a purely technological strategy.

• Success is only viable for open, flexible and agile discourses.

David Olschewski

Thank you!

www.ecosign.net

www. davidolschewski.de