Here is a hard truth about 21st-century Americans: “You have no culture. All you guys do is buy things.”
At least that was the constant complaint that Sarah Waxman, a design student at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, N.Y., heard during her junior year abroad. Contemplating those charges put her in a quandary: Her new field was all about promoting a culture of buying.
The designs Waxman submitted for her senior-year class tried to lock horns with the problem.
She made a cast-ceramic wallet that asks you to consider “the things that you’re consuming in the act of being a purchaser.” Its strange heft in your pocket, its fragility, the unease in its use (you have to pull off a rubber strap to get at your money) makes the act of buying feel vexed. She created a strange cast-ceramic bowl: It looks just like the industrial molds that ceramic housewares are cast in, complete with seams and registration “keys.” The 22-year-old explains that the pieces in her line “are saying that everything you’re taking in is manufactured.”
Waxman, like few of her peers, is selling a radical new credo for design: That an object built on truly novel, conscientious principles ought to reject the old consumerist ones. It can’t look like the high-design objects we’ve been scarfing up for years. In fact, ambitious designers may need to come up with objects that convince us that not buying them might be the best thing we could do.
I came across Waxman and her wares one May weekend in New York, in Pratt’s booth at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF), which bills itself as “a global summit for what’s best and what’s next in design.” The yearly expo is a 145,000-square-foot madhouse of fancy goods — glass-and-steel tables, LED lamps and gleaming CD racks.
Nearly every object could have been designed decades ago, when no one knew a Jetsons planet might include melting ice caps. It’s as though ICFF, going back to the future, still has one word for us: “plastics.”
The polished banalities of ICFF made clear just how far Waxman really is from the consumer-friendly objects made by most of her colleagues — even the most touted of them, such as Philippe Starck and Ron Arad. At ICFF, few designers seemed to recognize that fancy consumables are the last thing this planet needs more of.
Our deadliest problems — environmental, economic and political — come out of the goods we cherish. Huge new houses eat up energy, then throw it back into the air as wasted heat and light. Cars suck in oil and spew out greenhouse gases. Packaging and products gobble electricity and matter when they’re made, then drown the world in trash when thrown out.
The people who designed those goods helped get us into this mess, and now a few are keen to get us out.
Waxman, with her concerned ceramics, might have found company in another roundup of current design that opened the same weekend as ICFF. “Why Design Now?,” the fourth design triennial at the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York, is dedicated to projects with a conscience. There are extension cords that light up to remind you that they’re drawing power, and high-style chairs molded out of eco-friendly flax and botanical resins. There are plans for everything from high-rise urban farms, which are still mostly a blue-sky idea, to the high-speed, high-efficiency, recyclable trains about to be deployed in Italy.
For all of us who care about our planet, this attention to making things better is music to our ears. The problem is, our eyes never get the message. Just from looking, you could never guess the green ideals behind most of these objects. They don’t look much different from the ones that got us in trouble in the first place.
Glancing around at the Cooper-Hewitt, you could almost be at ICFF, or any design show from the past 50 years. Nearly all its objects deploy more or less the same Jetsonian stylings that “new” design has promoted in the modern age. A netbook computer, designed for the world’s underprivileged, is made of glitzy-green plastic. Those high-rise farm buildings might as well be from the cover of “Amazing Stories,” circa 1960. Barely a single designer seems to realize that for an object to make a real difference, it needs to have symbolic as well as practical force.
The symbolism of modern design was all about helping to move product. Designs by Bauhaus masters and their heirs, including those on show in the triennial, help us find pleasure in consumption, with the idea that owning more of the right things can improve the world. Modernism’s glossy, factory-fresh forms dispel all doubts about the virtues of modern technology.
This is just what truly new design, out on Waxman’s cutting edge, will have to combat. It obviously can’t hope to do away with objects — that ascetic, Luddite ideal is as far-fetched and obnoxious as anything embraced by the prophets of technology. What design can do is give us a new sense of the moral weight that every object comes freighted with. It’s what Waxman does with her ceramic bowls. A few figures in the triennial also achieve it.
A Dutch designer named Jetske de Groot designs chairs made from usable scraps of other chairs that have broken. She mates a chromed bottom with a turned-wood top, the base of a bar stool with the back of a task chair. But rather than covering up the awkward moments where two chairs meet, de Groot emphasizes them, by fixing the joints with huge wads of colored epoxy.
This mix-and-match look isn’t just a novel aesthetic — it’s a new aesthetic that talks, as loudly as possible, about the need to reduce, reuse and recycle. De Groote’s hand-glued furniture may have a limited circulation, but it spreads ideas in a way that a sleek modernist chair never could, however eco-friendly its materials. Selling 50,000 seats made of flax and bio-resin does little good for our future if it doesn’t also send the message that buying fewer seats would be a still better thing.
Even ICFF included plenty of “green” materials and objects. But their ecological conscience was being used as just another selling point.
Good contemporary design ought to help us put on the brakes. It needs to have a hint of difficulty built into it, as fine art has since at least the time of Cézanne. A central issue in much of modern art has been the questioning of art itself. Contemporary design could also cast doubt on its field. Design may never really move forward until it embraces the option of an off-putting ugliness
