Toward a Design Dialectic

Page 1

FEATURES

Toward a

Design Dialectic

TEXT BY SHIRLEY SURYA IMAGES COURTESY OF MARCEL WANDERS STUDIO, KARIM RASHID INC., MAD AND MADA s.p.a.m

Media coverage of the following design figures may seem saturated and hyped up to some. But iSh believes that Marcel Wanders, Karim Rashid, Ma Yansong and Ma Qingyun must have more than enough substance to feed the hype and to reveal much more to us. Since they were the cause of much anticipation at the Singapore Design Festival and Archifest in 2007, iSh was bent on peeling off more the multiple layers of these well-endowed minds through uncharted questions. All four are known for their extremities and have received their fair share of the design community’s flippant criticisms such as “I don’t like his style”, “he’s just too commercial”, or “he’s hardly built a thing”. But these conversations prove that even if their work may not fit our rules and preferences, each has undergone a rigorous thought process and challenging socio-economic realities to form the basis for their convictions and decisions. They are bold visionaries of humble confidence, with no sense of complacency, relentless in their pursuit of personal and professional growth to contribute to the greater public. By comparing the viewpoints of two product mavens of the West (Wanders and Rashid), and those of Ma Qingyun and Ma Yansong, two of China's new prominent breed of architects, we hope the dialectic and parallels that emerge will make you look beyond their forms into their motivations; not singularly, but in the context of their peers, and of the process, means and ends of design, locally and globally.

On capturing the contemporary zeitgeist versus the sense of history in one’s work MW: It’s not so much history that I consider important in my work. But the fact is that there is the past and the future. Design is not just about the future but also who we have become and who we are together as a group of people. A big part of culture is the collective thing that we’ve done in the past. I think we’ve tried to push it away for a very long time. That’s a loss and a pity.

KR: The ideas I have synthesised into reality are very much based on navigating in this highly communicative digital age. At the end of the day, it’s about doing work that is more relevant to the age that we live in if you are perceptive in working in the present. Of course, we have to hold on to a lot of things in history. We use it as a platform, a springboard. You can’t recreate history, reproduce it or make derivations of it. We should take advantage of history and move from there. There’s no need to repeat it but there’s a lot to learn from it.

On developing a personal language of design MW: I’ve always wanted a type of design that is more romantic and warm. It’s strange that we create designs that are so distant from the understanding of people without visual education and from what normal people think is beautiful. Since school, I have realised that there is this strange notion of design that’s only going forward. I’ve been thinking of why that is and have increasingly formed my conclusions. In different stages of my life, I wrote about this "baby-face fixation" (the syndrome of making products that bear no reference to the past) and how to create durable objects that are more in tune with culture while being respectful of the past. Pretty

108

fast after that, this idea came to be an integral part of my work, and the conscious knowledge of it has grown over time. KR: Honestly, it really came about in my 40s. It was in the last seven years that my language turned mature. How we learn is by copying others. There’s nothing wrong with that. The traditional school of painting is that you’d copy a master, like you’d copy a surreallist painter and learn about surreallist painting. It’s inevitable. Some people find themselves at a younger age, some older.

"If you cannot make it a fantastic idea for someone else, you probably can’t make it for yourself. So I challenge the idea that you can be a designer without a business sense because you are creating a business." 3 things to know about MARCEL

WANDERS

• Tossed out of Design Academy Eindhoven but roped into the famous Droog design collective in the 1990s • Adores Philippe Starck • His Airborne Snotty Vase is based on transforming a 3D-scan of a sneeze into solid form using a microtech imaging device


Turn static files into dynamic content formats.

Create a flipbook
Issuu converts static files into: digital portfolios, online yearbooks, online catalogs, digital photo albums and more. Sign up and create your flipbook.
Toward a Design Dialectic by Shirley Surya - Issuu