M E S H
ISSUE 003 SUMMER 2014
FEATURED david bynum finn magee studio banana things andrea zittel tanner bowman allon kapeller-libermann
MESH is a publication that aims to critique the three-dimensional form, who makes it, and why they make it. We strive to erase the walls between mediums and focus on the ideas rather than the end object.
In issue 003, MESH explores the rebellious side of design: found object versus creation, re-designing systems that shape our surroundings, the anarchy of information displays, and limited architecture. Any physical design that questions the contemporary is explored in the following pages.
SUMMER 2014
Creative Director Cassie Stepanek Writers Taylor Kigar Raine Blunk Astoria Jellett Cover Photo // Photography Pat Bombard Copy Editor Raine Blunk Layout Design Charlotte Croy Hudson Special thanks to: Mary Roberts Without you we would be lost. Thanks for keeping us on track.
Information MESH Magazine is a quarterly design publication founded in 2013 in Savannah, GA. The magazine is on the web at www.meshmagazine.co and on Facebook. Submissions MESH considers submissions of unique design projects year round. Please email us at info.meshmagazine@gmail.com with project details.
contents issue 003
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an introduction from the director
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social distortion
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creating critical objects
017 what do bananas, ostriches and kangaroos have in common?
021 andrea zittel
025 tanner bowman
029 the new rule(s)
An INtroduction From
For our third issue, we wanted to touch on the misunderstood aspect of design, the anarchistic. Objects and spaces that push the boundaries of what already exists. Initially inspired by the Japanese practice of Chindogu, this issue uses “freedom to challenge the suffocating historical dominance of conservative utility.� o The archetype is dead and the world is moving in a new direction. In today’s culture, change has become exponential and society must adapt to the rapid growth of products. In order to do that we need to rework the way that we think - not see, touch or feel. The layperson must accept this truth, the designer must abandon the preordained rules if we intend to reorient ourselves.
The designers in this issue have done just that. Each of the designers featured rethinks concepts that have existed since the human race began: lonliness, time, light, sound and thought manipulation. One designer questions the purpose of the camera and uses the existing form to distort the concept of capturing images. An artist, who was never trained in design, uses architectural space to test the human condition in regards to what is possible during times of solitude. A student in Chicago completely redefines the way in which people measure and calculate information. Every article in the following pages rebels, contravenes and honestly just raises hell. ominance of conservative utility
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design photography article
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david bynum pat bombard astoria jellett
social
distortion It is the Saturday night before St. Patrick’s Day in Savannah, Georgia. Brick historic buildings house charismatic bars with doors open, bright lights and brighter smiles, eager for the wads of green that tourists are about to unload on their countertops. The sky is clear black and every street from Broughton to Bay blocked off, pedestrians only. They take the advantage. The mass moves like a river through the streets, splitting into channels, following paths and paces less by choice and more by instinct. They all converge in Ellis Square. Inebriated strangers stagnate on ledges like algae on rocks, open containers in hand. They wear lime felt hats, plastic beads, kitschy t-shirts, sunglasses at night. Drunk frat boys yell gracelessly, high heels falter on cobblestones, and the whole thing reads as some half-baked Dionysian farce in fifty shades of green. Moving articulately, cutting swiftly through the throng, is David Bynum with his retinagraph. “Excuse me. Do you want a picture?” People have to yell over the pop music, eyes wide in the dark. The couple sitting on the bench is skeptical, but the woman
says, “Sure.” “You have to look in here. It’s a new kind of camera.” “What’s it gonna do, squirt water on you or somethin’?” “No, no, absolutely not. It’s gonna give her a picture.” He holds up the retinagraph, the lady puts her eyes up to the device, and there’s a bright flash. “Oh, shit!” she cries as it prints out a message. Bynum hands it to the man and the couple’s friends gather around to look. “Where’s the picture!” “It’s in your eyes,” Bynum says. “It’s developing right now.” He moves on, cutting through the crowd like a shark through schools of lesser fish. He is poised with squared shoulders and windblown hair, scanning the crowd through his glasses, asking politely. “Excuse me, would you like a free picture?” A frat boy, clearly shitfaced, throws his fists up. “Free pictures!!” A brunette girl copies him. “Free pictures!” “This is a new kind of camera though, it takes a picture of your eyes, like a reverse camera,” Bynum explains. “Is it gonna give me cancer?” the guy asks. “No, it won’t. Wanna try it?” “Is it gonna suck my soul out?” the brunette 008
cries as Frat Boy, with a glowing green necklace, leans into the retinagraph Bynum’s holding up. Frat Boy steps away, looking back and forth between the retinagraph and his friends, as if waiting for their go-ahead. “You just have to look into the eyepiece and smile.” He does, it flashes, and he leans back, eyes closed. “Woah.” Bynum’s professional field was born out of the early 20th century urge to combine the tradition of art with the novelty of mass production. Design is, in its most basic form, creative problem solving; industrial design (ID) is the solution of products. The Industrial Designers Society of America defines the purpose of ID as to “optimize the function, values, and appearance of
in the latter, graduating from the Savannah College of Art and Design in early 2014. “At SCAD I tried to push my skills into what seems like a typical industrial design skill set,” he says, “but I don’t really fit into that. The idea that we as designers are always trying to improve the world and make things better.” He found his fit with Chindogu, a Japanese concept of product design that completely rejects consumerism. As the invented word translates, a chindogu is a “really weird tool,” one that seems to solve a common, everyday problem, but would be impossible to actually use. Either it is impractical (a small broom affixed to the toe of a shoe so you can sweep on-the-go) or socially embarrassing (the all-day tissue dispenser: a
“I’m not a political anarchist, but I think I’m a social anarchist.” Bynum says. “Manipulating the sociality of an environment.”
products and systems for the mutual benefit of both user and manufacturer.” Industrial designers synchronize function with form, all in the hopes of making it easier for human beings to exist in the world. Different schools of ID range from a complete rejection of aesthetics to borderline sculpture. Bynum was educated
hat with a roll of toilet paper on it). “Inherent in every Chindogu is the spirit of anarchy,” reads rule no. 3 on the official website. “Chindogu are manmade objects that have broken free from the chains of usefulness. They represent freedom of thought and action: the freedom to challenge the suffocating historical
dominance of conservative utility; the freedom to be (almost) useless.” It is ID anarchy. “I’m not a political anarchist, but I think I’m a social anarchist,” Bynum says, “manipulating the sociality of an environment.” He spent the last ten weeks of college investigating “the dark side of design.” His purpose: to challenge unspoken codes of conduct, to disrupt the flow of the everyday mundane – essentially, to burst your personal bubble. That is how an awkward encounter begins:
with a destabilization of the social order. Picture yourself in a café, calmly clacking away at your computer with your mocha latte frappe venti double shot whatever. If a stranger plopped down in your lap and started petting your hair, you’d be a bit put off, wouldn’t you? Bynum wants to be that stranger. But first, he needed to learn how social awkwardness works. Disguising his study as a human factor survey, he built a working prototype for a hyperphallic soap dispenser. The user grasps the device and
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pumps the mechanism to eject foamy soap from the top. Awkward. Upon realizing how the soap dispenser worked, one guy, whom Bynum describes as a “dude-bro male” type, “just got really weird, he got all, he got chichi, and he wouldn’t look me in the eye anymore. He receded inside of himself, and I’m just sitting here.” Passive regulation of an awkward encounter means simply sitting and allowing the awkwardness to fade, resulting in a heightened sense of time. If Dude-Bro Male wanted to alleviate the tension, he could have made a joke about it: active regulation, laughter. Instead, he steeped in social mortification. It gave Bynum an idea. “If you insert yourself into these situations and start making these changes, you realize, ‘Oh, wait. I have control.’” Part of that control is the ability to embed information – specifically, visual information. Advertisers do it constantly, and this kind of subliminal messaging has always interested Bynum. He wants to see if he can embed information through product design, and in doing so, distort the social order. Bynum’s retinagraph is essentially a Polaroid camera, a thermal printer, and a viewmaster. Inside, there’s an Arduino
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program and a 70 ground number of camera flash circuitry. Think of an afterimage -- a bright picture flashes and when you close your eyes, you still see it afterward. That is what the retinagraph does to you. I ask if I can try it. We’re outside, in a café courtyard, and the daylight is broad. It may not work as well, since my pupils are small and letting in little light, but Bynum says at night it would make an imprint lasting at least ten minutes. We’ll see. I put my eyes up to the viewmaster part, looking into blank screens. Bynum presses a button and a bright light flashes in my eyes. I see it. A triangle, a circle, a square, and some lines in between. “Now if you close your eyes-“ It’s blue -- then it’s purple -The retinagraph prints something out of its Polaroid component. “Not sure if it prints very well outside,” Bynum mumbles. He hands me the receipt-paper printout. You are the circle. North is the triangle. Go to the square.
FINN MAGEE
creating critical objects design article images courtesy of
finn magee taylor kigar finn magee
With the state of design in a throttling consumerism standstill, it’s nice to see some breaths of fresh air—some designers embracing the wistful, the do-it yourself, appreciating design for design’s sake. We need people to solve problems, to shake up the milieu, to reconstruct the world in a new off-kilter process. Finn Magee is one of those people. Currently based in London, Finn was first trained as a product designer at the Royal College of Art. He’s one of those designers that’s very mindful of the current rift opening up in his field. He knows a creative appetite cannot be fed by advertising work alone, and that design is something deeper, something much more essential and substantial. Finn defines himself as a creator of critical objects and is endlessly interested in their theory and consumption. His most recent creation was a sweep of three giclée print posters, one with an image of a desk lamp, another with the image of an old-school nightstand clock, and the last of a speaker. They are named, respectively, Flat Light, Flat Time, and Flat Sound—and each one of them works. The lamp poster will light your bedroom. The clock will tell you the time, and the speaker hooks up directly to your iPod.
Why, you may ask? Why the hell not. Flat Sound is probably the most impressive out of the three, just because skimping space shouldn’t mean skipping sound quality. This poster was the last installment added to the series, made in conjunction with Warwick Audio, and it’s the thinnest commercially available speaker, measuring just barely 4 mm. All three posters are for sale, with a limited edition of 50 per design (the lamp available in several different colors). Flat Time is already completely sold out, and the other two are quickly following down the same path. The posters are 420 x 594 mm, and have a minimal background, simply a photograph of each object, sitting on the wall, waiting to be used. But how do these products fit into the bigger picture? Put simply, Finn’s approach to design is refreshing because he embraces how design affects life. How it changes our environment and how we can utilize it for so many different purposes. On his website he has a page featured to all the design hacks he happens upon on a day to day basis—from a fisherman’s rope repurposed as a lock at a pub by the sea or a mudguard guerilla-jointed over a bike tire with cling film—this is a designer in it
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purely for the love of solving problems. The simplest ideas are almost always the best, and he knows it. Summed up by Finn himself: There are only two rules: 1. If it’s supposed to move, but doesn’t; use WD-40. 2. If it’s not supposed to move, but does; use duct tape. This is the spirit that we need in design—a hands on, whimsical, no boundary approach. We need to get the theory off the screens and ads and into our streets and living rooms. The techniques of advertising can be used in this process, and Finn does it well. His
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products are humorous and unexpected, but he instills in it the soul of real purpose and action. He’s inspired pretty heavily by this Steve Dunn quote about advertising, and I think it perfectly encapsulates Finn’s balance between heart and ad work: “I started wearing suits and talking about brand values. And presently, like all reforming addicts, I’m gradually taking every day as it comes. God knows, I still try and find value in it. But it should only ever be a small part of any creative life. Creative enrichment can be found in so many activities and places, so my final words of advice are: do advertising, but don’t let advertising do you.”
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DESIGN studio banana things ARTICLE taylor kigar IMAGES COURTESY OF studio banana things
What do bananas, ostriches, and kangaroos have in common?
Studio Banana began as a small start-up in Madrid and is now an international pool of connected departments covering services in communications design, environment design, and process design facilitation. One of their many initiatives called Studio Banana Things is internationally known for their fun, whimsical approach to problem solving and design thinking. What first put Studio Banana Things on the map was their product the Ostrich Pillow, which went viral on media everywhere, featured on numerous websites, talk shows, and blogs all over the world. Called a napping revolution, the Ostrich Pillow is an all around head cushion that acts as a pillow,
eye mask, and noise reducer—perfect for long flights or when you need to get some rest at the office. The product was so successful that quite a few companies started making knock off versions illegally. We all know that imitation is not only the finest form of flattery, it’s also a great indication of a brilliant idea. After another successful Kickstarter campaign and collaboration with the Innovation Quarter at Bangor University in the UK, Studio Banana Things is back with their next product, the Kangaroo Light: an inventive, playful personal LED light that can be used anywhere. Because of its flexible hexagonal joint design
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it’s design for the sake of solving problems, and design for the bettering of our lives.
Even if it’s just to show us a little more fun.
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made with a silicone exterior, it’s soft, foldable, and bendable, perfect for finding things in your bag, using as an ambient or personal reading light, a nightlight for small children, or simply to take portably on a long drive or while camping. The light is also splash proof and its 24 built-in LED lights are Arduino compatible, allowing you to completely customize and program it to flash in patterns, to adjust the intensity, or to just have it randomly flicker for a more ambient effect. The battery is Lithium-Ion powered and runs for about 2.5 hours, rechargeable by an included USB Port. Studio Banana is an exemplary design company, and every day they’re proving that it’s possible to fuse together creative, passionate design while still solving problems. True to their mission statement, the studio recognizes that in our increasingly complex world, these problems can no longer be solved with
fragmented tools and ideas. Solutions can only be arrived at with “transdisciplinary methods” in order to truly innovate and design for tomorrow. By working at the intersection of all creative disciplines, Studio Banana operates with an equal participation between clients and partners to create novel products, but, above all, they acknowledge that creation and collaboration is really based on trust. Not only the trust between a designer and their client, but the trust that a designer has in their own intentions. It’s apparent that in every one of their products, the passion of novel design stands above all else. This is a company keeping the art of design paramount to any client ‘s whims or search for profit. It’s design for the sake of solving problems, and design for the bettering of our lives, even if it’s just to show us a little more fun.
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Andrea Zittel
Indy Island, 2010
design article photography
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andrea zittel raine blunk courtesy of andrea zittel
You have just emerged from your Wagon Station at A-Z Encampment, a subspace of Andrea Zittel’s A-Z West community just outside of Joshua Tree National Park. For one month, you will live in a pod set against the dusty horizon, sharing a compost bathroom and communal cooking area in the middle of desert with eleven other like-minded creators and makers. You will build sculptures between cacti in the High Desert Test Site. Your notebook will fill with sand from exploring and drawing and scribbling on pages nestled between stone outcroppings in the sun. As the days pass, you will start to reevaluate what it really means to “need” something -- you have the entire desert before you, fellow artists beside you and the bare necessities at your back. What else could you need? Before A-Z West was even a glint in the sand, Zittel dedicated her personhood to understanding the “social construction of needs” as described on the Zittel.org website. In the early 90s, Zittel launched the Office for A-Z Administrative Services in a 200-square-foot apartment which doubled as her home. This would be the space in which she would create her first experimental projects, including “A-Z Living Spaces,” a set of modular furniture that, as it’s namesake claimed, included all the amenities (from A-Z) one person needed to live with limited space. Since 1992, Zittel has been creating clothing to wear throughout four to six month periods
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New Raugh Furniture
in an attempt to understand the stigma surrounding wearing the same outfit twice. For Zittel, isolation its variety of forms has been both comforting and challenging. Back in Joshua Tree, 14 years has grown A-Z West from a temporary autonomous zone to a functional and active community. Zittel’s original A-Z office in Brooklyn has become A-Z East, and as A-Z West continues to grow, Zittel has begun renovations on a not-so-secret secret cabin. On her blog, Zittel explains the need to re-isolate herself in an already isolated world by saying that A-Z West is “an amazing place to work, and to meet an incredible group of people who are constantly passing through – but for someone with slightly anti-social tendencies, such a public life can at times be a bit rough.” mesh mag
So what does “public life” look like to Zittel? In a 2013 lecture at Boston University, Zittel described the inability for her to “A-Z” her boyfriend (who would break all of the A-Z furniture he’d sit on). In 1991, after six months of wearing the same outfit to work every single day, her boss ironically asked her if she’d worn the same thing the day before. In 1998, she continued, her installation “Raugh Furniture” was covered with nude models to discourage people from sitting on it because it was so fragile. Instead, Zittel quipped, the showgoers took off their own clothes and joined the models on the sculptures. She spent years paying off the gallery for the destroyed work. Even after so much time embedded in the artistic community as a maker, Zittel’s “public life” that is so deeply fused to her
“real life” just doesn’t translate efficiently for others. She explains this disconnection in relationship to “A-Z Living Spaces” and the collectors who’ve purchased them: “These experiences were heavily mediated — [A-Z Living Spaces] didn’t work for other people the way they worked for me. There was something artificial. When somebody does an art experiment and someone tries living in it, it’s a novelty. Someone will do it for a day or two, and then they’ll use it as a guest room or an exotic experience, but it’s not a life experiment, which is how they functioned for me. My own experiences are the only ones I can control.”
expanding the program at A-Z West, artists have the opportunity to unearth their own “social construction of needs.” But the one month period residents can stay at the Wagon Station hardly compares to the lifetime of work Zittel has built around her own experiences. In that sense, it seems that Zittel hopes A-Z West can reach far beyond the constraints of time and space to impact the experiential processes of it’s visitors long after they’ve left the desert. What do we need as humans -- as artists -to survive the heat of the real world? Can we integrate our experiences and interactions into our ever-present desire to create? And what, if anything, can fuse the gap between the two?
Thanks to Zittel’s work building and
Wagon Station Encampment, A-Z West
Tanner Bowman design article photography
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tanner bowman raine blunk courtesy of tanner bowman
Before Tanner Bowman ever set foot on A-Z West, he had already tried reevaluating his needs. He needed a place to sleep, and sleep isn’t easy to come by, Bowman thought, when you’re susceptible to claustrophobia and have to spend a week sleeping inside a tiny camper.
with foam balls. To say that “Primary Comfort” is complex in and of itself might be an exaggeration. The sculpture/interactive work is so much more clearly defined by the human experiences attached to it -- which is why it seems fitting for Bowman to gain inspiration every time it’s form changes.
“Before I knew that I had the opportunity to live at the Wagon Station for a class at SAIC, I initially felt so much anxiety about living in one for a week,” Bowman admits. He had already begun developing “Primary Comfort” as a way to satisfy his needs as both a self-proclaimed hoarder and designer.
“I was trying to place with this balance between the most minimal thing I could bring for someone who needs to collect and have their space personalized,” says Bowman, who discovered after his time at A-Z West a lot of his anxieties “aren’t worth it.”
Like some sort of cyclical bacterial chain you’d see under a microscope, “Primary Comfort” is twenty feet of red, yellow, and blue cylinders of varying sizes made of knit alpaca and wool blend yarn filled
After arriving and experiencing A-Z West with “Primary Comforts” in tow, Bowman wholeheartedly accepts what he learned about Zittel’s mission as an artist emulating life. “One of Andrea’s things that she really believes in that I think is 026
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really true is that limitations create freedom,” says Bowman, who has tried to incorporate that ideal into his pursuits. “I have to limit those things in order to feel like I have a space and not feel consumed and then claustrophobic.”
the experiences of others who haven’t been a direct inspiration to the work. That’s why Bowman doesn’t always enjoy design exhibitions -- because they often prohibit works from becoming a part of the human experience.
Since his time at A-Z West, Bowman has started to break down the ways “Primary Comfort” can be utilized in a sleeping space. “I feel like the object I’ve created right now could be used for sex and wellness,” says Bowman, who has experimented with different materials and shapes to expand “Primary Comfort’s” usability. “There is potential to maximize the sexual drive, like shoving a dildo in a hole at the end, or for wellness -- making it out of something more firm so you can prop yourself up in bed or sneeze and cough into it.”
Despite his personal relationship to “Primary Comfort,” Bowman seems motivated by the idea that people have interacted with the piece, saying that “it now has all these other people’s sweat and spit or energy on it. It has changed from something highly personal to something universal.”
Similarly to Zittel’s process as an artist, Bowman knows his experiences with “Primary Comfort” are very different from
As Bowman continues to dissect his own necessities through the human experiences with “Primary Comfort,” what was once created as a necessity to fulfill a singular need through an object has become a desire to fulfill multiple needs as simplistically as possible. And if limitations create freedom, “Primary Comfort” might be all Bowman needs.
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w e N
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design article photography
allon kapeller-libermann astoria jellett courtesy of allon kapeller-libermann
“Sometimes I just got to say fuck usefulness,” writes Allon Kapeller-Libermann. “Usefulness is an always-challenged term and I don’t want to be too rigid in my definition because I am always breaking my own rules and redefining my own thoughts.” It’s good to hear a creative person say something like this: that they’re open to change, not stubbornly sticking to whatever their current philosophy is – in short, that they’re aware of the transience of their own beliefs. They’re willing to break rules – even their own rules – in order to make better ones. The New Rule was Allon Kapeller-Libermann’s answer to breaking the laws of industrial design by focusing on color. Usually color is left up to the consumer or art director – a mostly arbitrary decision without real
consequence to the product or its function. For the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s brand What Not, professors last year decided to switch things up: students would consider color first. The New Rule is pretty simple, at least theoretically: the desk ruler from your school days, with Metric on one side and American Standard on the other. At first, Kapeller-Libermann tried integrating color on it in whole blocks, but instead of clarifying the measurements, it only obfuscated them. He returned to line. “I went back to lines realizing that color alone is not enough. Shape in relation to color is what creates the visual hierarchy.” He considers the Roman numerals above the first inch most successful – the fact that one can read 13/16ths easily. Still, he says the New Rule “requires a certain level of memorization and practice, much
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like an abacus.” In other words: a usefulness you have to get used to. So maybe… not that useful? Utility is completely circumstantial, Kapeller-Libermann argues. For example: his glass coffee table design, with legs made from large rocks found along the coasts of Martha’s Vineyard. “It’s meant to be an expensive limited edition piece, but I give no real praise to it,” he says. “If it is made at all I don’t know if I could defend its utility. I imagine its placement in a room without a name surrounded by mostly furniture that is more accommodating to the practical aspects of daily life. I guess the utility of the coffee
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table beyond serving as a tray is to contrast the versatile shelving system, the foldable lounge chair and mix use work/dining table. Actually, now that I think about it, it’s really useful in its relationship to other objects.” It’s utility in context. When asked in what context the New Rule would be used, Kapeller-Libermann answered, “This may be strange to say but I don’t think I accomplished my goal of making a more useful ruler. I don’t think my crazy lines and liberal use of colors improve one’s ability to quickly read the ruler even though that is what I had intended. If anything I need to clean up the design.
Use color sparingly and pay more attention to what shapes can do and mean.” But if utility is contextual, it also depends on the user. One person may value craft and design; another, accessibility and affordability; another, versatility and ecological construction. So can you really
design for a mass market? “I think a useful product does all of the above, in a broad sense,” Kapeller-Libermann writes. “But in reality it is hard to account for all these criteria and most of the time it is not up to the designer.” What is up to the designer: breaking the rules. Making new ones. And then breaking those too. 032
M E S H issue 003 summer 2014
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