Monday, May 11, 2009

March 11 - The Language of Things

On By Design today Alan Saunders interviewed Deyan Sudjic, the director of London's Design Museum, about his book " The language of Things".

Deyan writes about what things say and how and why they say it. He was driven to write the book to make some sense of the sheer number of useless things in our lives today. He says we buy, collect and consume a great number of things and do so sometimes without really knowing why. People have never before been more burdened with things than they are now.

The idea of consumption started after the Depression when it became the duty of advertising to convince us to buy more stuff to get the economy going. Objects made by crafts people were moved to mass production and this was when design first appeared. Deyan refers to design as a "curious artful thing" that is trying to make world a better place.

Designers have become so important in our consumer environment that we have pursuaded ourselves that some things are very special because of the person whose name is on them.

Design speaks of the culture that produced it. When the Russian and US space rockets were next to each other it was obvious to which country they belonged. The US one was not just functional but streamlined to look good at the same time.
Some things have become archetypes of design. For example the symbol that we use to denote a telephone is still the image of an original handset, the sign used to mark a train crossing is that of a steam train, and a speed camera sign is of a bellows and lens camera.

In the 1980's and 90's design was more flamboyant and that's been replaced by a much quieter style. The original definition of luxury was about things being handmade in small quantities, but now the idea of luxury includes objects made in an industrial process. eg mobiles being studded with diamonds. These days objects have a much shorter life span so we tend not to build a relationship with them.

With these current economic times we may be on the verge of a trend against consumerism, which I think is not such a bad thing.

2 comments:

Chrissy Foreman C said...

Food for thought Lena. Isn't it wonderful how things go in cycles and come back to meet themselves with a new vantage point?

Lena said...

Yes indeed!