“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.
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Another Guy Who Thinks Design is Alive and Well
By Chief Oddball on April 2nd, 2008 at 2:12 pm
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What was I just saying the other day about design — about how there’s no way I can see it becoming a lost art, despite what the disillusioned Philippe Starck may think?
Today, my pro-design argument received more support in the form of Peter DeLorenzo’s latest rant at AutoExtremist.com. Peter talks about how, despite all the boring focus groups where people regurgitate “safety, fuel economy and quality” as their top deciding factors in purchasing an automobile, the actual reality is that those factors have become the basic ingredients of almost every car out there — and that an actual purchase design hinges more on the vehicle design, and the emotional connection it creates, than anything else.
“As I’ve said before, we should never forget the essence of the machine, and what makes it a living, breathing mechanical conduit of our hopes and dreams,” says Peter. “Some out there may insist that the old saying, ‘you are what you drive’ has become obsolete in this touchy-feely, green-tinged world — but I’m not buying it for a second.”
Read the whole rant at AutoExtremist.com.
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