Philippe Starck Says Design is Dead
“I was a producer of materiality and I am ashamed of this fact,” Starck told Die Zeit weekly newspaper. Starck, who is known for his interior design of hotels and Eurostar trains and mass consumption objects ranging from chairs to tooth brushes and lemon juice squeezers, went on to say that he believed that design on the whole was dead.
“In future there will be no more designers. The designers of the future will be the personal coach, the gym trainer, the diet consultant.”
AFP Report
As a designer myself — admittedly of graphics, user interfaces and advertising, rather than consumer products — I’m afraid I’m having trouble understanding how anyone could possibly claim that designers will not exist in the future. Will every man, woman and child on Earth suddenly become blind? Will the concept of aesthetics suddenly cease to matter to anyone? Will people suddenly and completely stop working and interacting with devices and equipment of even the most rudimentary sort?
I ask these questions because design — and art — can be found in all of these things, and is in fact integral to them.
Because Starck spent much of his career designing consumer-oriented pabulum and now regrets this fact does not mean that design, as a whole, is or will become irrelevant. More than that, the fact that any person could be so arrogant and egomaniacal as to claim that his personal revelations equal an inevitable paradigm shift in human perception simply disgusts me. Maybe Mr. Starck’s shame is not entirely misplaced.
Tagged as design, Philippe Starck, Rants + Categorized as Headlines, Rants
I like how he contradicts his entire point with that last quote. Unless he means that only designers can design. But then why say what he said about “designers of the future”? Doesn’t that imply that there will be design in the future…?!?!
I feel like NOMAD trying to figure this stuff out. Jackson Roykirk! Designers! Non-sequitur! Lemon squeezers! Your facts are uncoordinated!
“You are flawed! And imperfect! Execute your prime function!”
I read it as the lamentations of a guy who just realized he spent most of his life designing inconsequential things that no one will care about when he’s gone, and now he wants to make himself feel better by proclaiming that people like him won’t even exist in the future. His statements are borne out of an emotional reaction whose function is to override all logic and reason.
It would have been one thing if he’d simply said that he’d never design again and left it at that. But no, all the individual, rational thought present in the other six billion inhabitants of planet Earth are apparently not enough to override this man’s astoundingly cyclopean ego.
I guess I’d be sad if I was known for designing lemon juice squeezers too. But you’re right in that he has to have some massive ego to think that design will die with him.
Hey, I just realized — no one will care about my creative endeavors after I’ve died either. There will be no artists in the future! No authors! No web sites!
Yeah, I doubt anybody’s going to look back fondly at my websites in sixty years or so and say, “A great man designed this.” Hell, by then nobody will probably even remember what a website was, or have the equipment to access one. How much longer before it’s going to be difficult to even play a cassette tape?
I can’t say I blame the man for feeling a bit like he’s wasted his talents designing crap, like those designers who lend their names to eclectic-looking telephones at Target and Wal-Mart. As you said, it just seems presumptuous to claim that means design as a whole is dead.