Only a few of the objects he designed would make it to my home because of their style and larger than necessary presence, but I've always appreciated the archetypal character of his production, his masterful sense of proportions and how he put back feelings, maybe poetry, into modern designs.
Every piece of his work I know of is a lesson ; what a sad thing to learn that the source has gone dry on monday.



Enjoy some words he gave in an interview for designboom.com back in 2000 :

"I truly believe that our duty as an architect or a designer is to design things which attract luck, rooms which protect people...
I don’t design things in any style, even less so in any fashion style,
I design things for life states."

"I think that the future doesn’t exist. What we think of today as the future isn’t the future. People are always afraid of the future, and the future has always been a disaster. Like the present is a disaster. But rhetoric about the future bothers me, because almost everything we do today we say we’re doing for the future. The future is here now, let’s try to get organized now. I don’t care about the future at all."

Q : my soul's present condition.
A : worried.

Q : the faults I can bear.
A : all of them.

Q : my motto.
A : be patient, calm, compassionate, knowing that existence is fleeting.

Labels: hero, ondesign, Product design, rip

This post, where my commentary on the Kindle product design has been described as a "silly attempt to review via photos" made me realize that product designers are actually this kind of guys, they judge products from pictures.

What happens is that we get an idea of how a product could be, given the brief, and we start drawing. Doodling first, sketching, getting more detailed with projected views (front, side, top,...) or perspective views, and eventually we build a model of it. Depending on the budget we have in our hands, we'll be able to build one to three physical models before the presses start pumping. So all along, we are judging products from pictures that are not even close to photography, and to save costs we'd better be good at it (models are very expensive). Thanks to imagination and "mental visualization" (being able to do a flyby around the object with your eyes closed), we are making choices on what a product is worth from reduced representations of reality. Paper or screen, 2D or 3D, it doesn't matter, it's still an image, and this is our fuel to get to the end.
I'm not saying we're all able to do this 100% accurately (at least we try) or that only designers can do this, and certainly not that it makes the evaluation of a physical version obsolete. I'm saying it's a huge part of the design process, and every product you see on shelves come to life through this.
Architects are the real masters in that aspect : every building you get in is built from images and have not been evaluated from a real model.

So, Mr Aaron Pressman, thank you for letting me realize it, but don't call me silly upon this (in my back on top of that : boo). I don't feel bad for evaluating the aspects of the Kindle I talked about just from the pictures. This wasn't a review at all, and I never said that nobody should buy it. I'm close to be jealous that you have one. All I said was it could have been so much better. I've been dreaming for a decent e-ink device since I heard of it in 1998, and it's just frustrating when a company that has built a much more complex object that is Amazon.com doesn't get it where it could be today.

Labels: eBook, ondesign, Product design

Labels: allstar, communication, hero, ondesign, typography

On top of the pleasure to discover Charles and Ray Eames moving and talking, here are two quotes I found interesting, regarding the design practice :

- Is there a basic theory of design for your chairs ?
- There is one that is : the attitude in all of them is really the same, we've never designed for a fashion, or with the idea of fitting in a fashion, and the Herman Miller furniture company has never ever requested that we do pieces for a market (...) the timing is more or less our own and sometimes it's too slow, but we are allowed to follow it through.

Eames desire to move freely in a world of enormous and unlimited possibilities is combined with a very accurate sense of discrimination and taste (...) This is an ability to select among the unlimited possibilities* and return considerable richness to the world.

Discrimination and taste. Wow, right on. I never considered discrimination as being used in a positive way, as it's always associated with "racial" issues. But that's what a designer does, choices.

Nice to see how they hold their hands, when Eames enters the set. Was it common on tv at this time ?

* this word didn't quite passed the "my first language is french" filter, so if anybody reads this and understands it better, I'd appreciate to be corrected, thank you.

Via the Mighty Coudal.

Labels: history, ondesign, tv

About woodworking, the pleasure of building with your hands, and an interesting argument on what qualifies a professional versus an amateur. 5'12".

Labels: artisan, ondesign, woodworking

Jasper Morrison in Milan during the 2007 Salone, discussing the term "Supernormal" with the new director of Domus magazine :

"Supernormal is the synthetic replacement for normal. Because I think we're not innocent enough anymore to make normal. We kind of threw it away, it's gone.
Everything now which is build, every chain store, every restaurant, every chair, every teacup is designed.
The innocence of a product which is really at ease in an atmosphere is lost.
So I think that's really a dangerous situation.
The goal of design has been distorted in a way by too much media attention, you know, too much attention on the designer.
...
So, yeah, I think this is something we need to talk about, at least."

The interview has an overall Borat taste but these words made it worth to look at. Get to the Philippe Starck bit for a live example of what he meant.

Labels: allstar, fingerpointing, ondesign