I like it when Monocle presents little essays on topics — like in the May 2011 issue where 5 short essay on the future of design entertain and educate us. http://www.monocle.com/Magazine/volume-05/issue-43/
The titles themselves are both fun and raise one’s curiosity:
Someone please save us from the tasteless and tawdry (Tyler Brule, Editor of Monocle)
Additive manufacturing and other mysteries (Stephen Bayley, Writer)
Will people ever buy design online? (Hugo Macdonald, Monocle’s Design Editor
Waiting for the epoch of eastern design (Fiona Wilson, Monocle’s Asia bureau chief)
The death of the celebrity designer (Deyan Sudjic, director of the London Design Museum)
Tyler’s piece is a short and pointed critique of the design professions and their clients — especially developers and their designers. A sample quote commenting on One Hyde Park: While the structures are bad enough to start with and represent all that’s wrong with housing developments in London (little outdoor space, dull finishes, and more marketing material than responsible building materials), the interiors are the pinnacle of this exhausted exercise in over-the-top-ness.
Sometimes I feel overwhelmed when thinking about how to combat these types of developments that occur around the world. I guess mega-developments in general are problematic. One response is that we don’t pay enough attention to visual, spatial and experiential literacy in our general education. As a result, there isn’t a high level of awareness of what might be or what works in any designed place for people.
As we attempt to build more sustainable environments, we need to demand the use of responsible building materials and simple approaches. What does “over the top” accomplish except over the top prices?
If you understand how something is made, you understand everything about it. Stephen Bayley is pitching for the importance of manufacturing to our cultures and our economies. I often wonder whether Vancouver’s search for green jobs shouldn’t head, at least partially, in the direction of green manufacturing. One of the lessons I learned in government was the importance of the manufacturing sector in Canada as a whole, and BC in particular. But it needs to be celebrated and we need to educate people who are interested in not just the designing but the making.
And finally a quote from the piece on the death of the celebrity designer:
Design, if it has a future, cannot simply be about branding. It is a way to understand the world around us, to ask questions about it, and to try to find some answers.