Milan malarky

With a few notable exceptions, Southern Europe is not the place to go looking for the answers that ‘design thinking’ can serve up – we don’t need new chairs just because the old ones are so last year...

And the best thing of all... nobody mentions anything about the “environment”. HALLELUJAH!! For goodness sake, everyone knows that making anything new, especially plastic chairs, is never going to be eco friendly. Magis, like your style.’

This is a quote from a ‘fan’ of Magis, on the DesignBoom blog’s preview of the Salone Internazionale del Mobile, and thoroughly depressing it is too; almost as thoroughly depressing as being in the exhibition itself.

Because of the Volcano Effect I lost a day of looking at what was supposedly more interesting than the Salone – the ‘Fuori Salone’ exhibitions in Zona Tortona and elsewhere. So my first visit to Milan in 10 years was seriously lopsided. Thanks, Eyjafjallajokull.

But numerous post- Milan reports haven’t yet turned up a great deal in the way of interesting work that tackles the issues facing design in particular and the world in general. I missed something, that’s a given. But my suspicion is that if you want to get a sense of the most radical thinking and practice in the industry, the sort of brain work that analyses and devises design responses to the most apocalyptic trends and events in human history, then southern Europe, and Italy in particular, is not where you go.

‘Design thinking’ is gaining considerable ground in the boardrooms of the world’s corporate giants, but the corporates which talk about design thinking are only talking about it, and to a greater or lesser extent doing it, because they think it will sell more of their products. But somewhere in there, there must be the inkling that the old walls are coming tumbling down and global capitalism needs a new act.

Wherever that somewhere is, it isn’t Milan. Or more specifically, the vast ‘new’ showgrounds in Rho.

I’ve lately acquired the habit of looking around me and thinking: ‘What will all this be like when they realise?’, and when a city has built itself an exhibition complex on that scale, it’s pretty clear that it isn’t planning to give up on the getting and spending just yet.

The Rho fairgrounds are a demonstration of Milan’s commitment to feeding the insatiable appetite for the new; new products out every year, throw away your old ones, you must have new. This madness is what used to excite us before the Millennium; Ron Arad reveals some sinuous new invention for Moroso or Driade or whoever, and we’d fall over each other in our rush to get the pictures to publish. Look, it’s new, isn’t it great?

Not any more. I shouldn’t feel smug that Alice Rawsthorn, in her New York Times /International Herald Tribune column the week before Milan was asking the same question I asked 10 years ago – viz: ‘Do we really need another chair?’ – because she’s asking that question in a world where it is obvious that we don’t, while I was only grumbling about the waste of materials and resources, and mental and creative energy.

Anyway, the conclusion is still the same; these days, desi needs to be doing something other than committing the numerous resources of industry to producing stuff we don’t need.

I quote Rawsthorn: ‘The sort of stuff on show at the fair just isn’t as interesting as it once was, at least not in terms of design. First, technology is now more important than furniture in product design. (Odds are that the most drooled-over objects in Milan this week will be shiny new Apple iPads, not chairs.) Second, design’s intellectual focus has swung away from producing tangible things, like furniture, toward the abstract process of applying design thinking to ethical issues, such as social, environmental or humanitarian problems, and developing sexy new technologies, like data visualisation.’

Dream on, Ms Rawsthorn. On the evidence, few designers showing at Milan knew anything about that new intellectual focus. Not many designers would know intellectual focus if it bit them on the shin. They just do what the client wants. What Alice Rawsthorn means to say is that there are reasons to be cautiously optimistic about the way design’s intellectual focus is changing.

But it’s not there yet. For that to happen and designers to be able to keep themselves in Ray-Bans, a new commercial structure has to be devised – designed – and built; one that accommodates clients who have worked out how to put the emphasis on the social and environmental aspects of what they’re doing, and still make money. It only needs a quick spin round the Rho fairground – an exhibition venue the size of a small country – to realise just what a tall order that is.

So, jaded and frustrated, even without the help of Eyjafjallajokull, I find myself traipsing the halls, muttering: ‘For God’s sake, where’s the Idea?’. And I come to Moroso and Vitra, pretty much next door to each other, where, thank that same Lord, I find one or two.

Vitra, bless ‘em, fulfilled Rawsthorn’s prophesy by having iPads in its ‘Chairless’ enclosure, and if it hadn’t been such an entertaining and provocative idea, the iPad would definitely have won.

Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena came across the Ayoreo Indians, who live on the border of Paraguay and Bolivia, and their method of supporting themselves while sitting hunched up on the ground – a strap. You sit on the ground, hoik it over your back to rest more or less at the waist, and hook it over your knees. Bingo. A balanced and comfortable way to sit on the ground for long periods of time.

Aha, I say, still a little jaded but now with the anti-capitalist bit between my teeth, Vitra has killed the chair. What is it going to do with all its buildings and factories now? Of course it isn’t a substitute for a chair – it’s useful in specific circumstances – but mid the Eames re-issues (it’s produced a Lounge Chair, same only bigger) it showed refreshing evidence of… design thinking. And – more evidence – some of the proceeds also go to Foundation for Indigenous Communities in Paraguay (www.indigene- paraguay.ch), which directly supports the Ayoreo Indians.

Similar refreshment was to be had at Moroso. The M’Afrique collection, with pieces by Dominique Petot, showed the company’s grasp of the lure of the developing world, and gives Senegalese craftsmen work into the bargain.

There’s no doubt that the decorative trend in companies with their finger on the world pulse is cued from Africa. Philippe Bestenheider’s Beth chairs are made ‘using 100 per cent Italian-made reconditioned, ecosustainable rubber from used tyres, and polyester flock from recycled bottles’, it says; but their multicoloured, mixed-pattern appearance owes much to African textiles.

Patricia Urquiola produced a sofa and chair collection called Silver Lake, inspired by Californian Fifties’ modernism, which indubitably falls in to the ‘do we need this?’ category; and resident bonkers Japanese designer Tokujin Yoshioka came up with Memory, a ‘chair without a shape’. It’s covered in an innovative techno-textile, cotton fibre with an aluminium core, which can bashed into any shape you like.

‘Memory is a seat that completes its own design by changing shape,’ says Yoshioka. ‘For this project I created a special fabric from recycled aluminium, and worked to make a chair that transforms and memorises its shape. This chair seeks to echo the beauty of nature, with its ever-changing expressions, giving the idea that the design doesn’t even exist.’

Almost like the Chairless chair – a chair that isn’t a chair, that questions the need for chairs – Moroso’s young man inadvertently suggests that the best design is design that doesn’t look or feel like design – or indeed that the best design is no design at all.

Whether you applaud or abhor that ‘no one mentioned the environment’, you can’t get away from the fact that this kind of ‘design thinking’ – self-defeating though it may appear at first – is the kind of thinking we all need. Italian furniture manufacturers more than most.

This article was first published in FX Magazine.








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