The most challenging exhibition I visited during the Furniture Fair in Milan was a stand by Droog Design titled ‘ Make Me.’ Droog are renowned for commissioning innovative and conceptual exhibitions. This is basically the reason that I was drawn to working in Holland with Tejo and Rene who are represented by Droog.
The benefit of this platform for design is that the end user can to some degree manipulate and design there own furniture pieces, it cuts out the large commissions that retail outlets take for furniture pieces, effectively driving the product price down and it reduces the green miles that the piece needs to travel.
- -You are basically limited to very sterile products that only employ cnc/laser cutting techniques in the design.
T They suggest that designers could use 3 D laser printers to create more organic work. However, this technology is so expensive it is not really a viable option.
-T There are a lot of inconveniences placed in the consumer’s hands like… negotiating with manufacturers, transportation issues.
- This style of design does not leave opening for the designer crafts person.
- Maybe it is an egotistical reason this concept from Droog is niggling at me. Basically it devalues the skills that a designer develops over time to create work. We develop the knowledge and understanding of materials and processes. We learn to build relationships with manufacturers to easily translate computer generated ideas into real objects. All of these aspects of design will be compromised for the sake of reducing the products price and making different designers work more globally accessible.
As highly critical as I am, I was impressed that I was challenged on day four of design saturation.
Very interesting, this open source design! The revolution is coming and even huge corporations are letting their software "to be cracked".(crack is cooler than open) This movement will eventually come in some form to 3d environment. You are quite in sync with David Trubridge who think all this "user is a maker" only undermines designer and makers work. I still do think there is a lot to explore in consumers desire to create as they would love to go well beyond the product choice of three colors. I definatelly see no reason to keep designing houses to fit Ikea's global furniture standard sizes.
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