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Posted by hipstomp | 29 Jan 2008
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Comments (2)
Pop Matters' editor Rob Horning has an excellent essay up on design-oriented consumerism, referencing everything from Virginia Postrel's The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness to Renaissance concepts of self-styling to Rich Gold's "Plenitude" ideology.
...once mundane products like toilet brushes, spatulas, and ice cube trays are now complemented by design so flamboyant that it’s unmistakable even to the untrained consumer’s eye... No longer a prole with a dirty toilet, one becomes a fledgling design critic and a curator of the tastefully appointed museum that used to be a one-bedroom apartment.
If the superficiality of today's design has been bugging you, Horning hits the nail on the head for you here.
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Comments
Definitely a good read; thanks for posting. Since this site was the source of me finding said article, I'll include my comment here as well:
The case would be stronger if not for the pesky problem of the growth of DIY. Industrial design has democratized access to design sensibility. This has in turn increased demand amongst the newly-design-educated people for well-designed objects. The marketplace often lacks these objects, and so said people turn to the handmade, local, artisan boutiques to sate their prior-to-industrial-design-non-existent desire. What else explains the rise of etsy et al.?
Therefore, sounds like the argument would be a lot stronger if it weren't so, well, reductionist.
I'd rather think that industrial designers have spent the last century writing tutorials for the democratization of rapid prototyping/manufacturing.