The Future of Design
According to Deyan Sudjic, if you are a designer you need to be an optimist, and that somehow your design or work can make the world a better place. It’s long been a tradition in design harking back to the Arts and Crafts Movement and William Morris that the job of the designer is to make things better.
This got me onto to thinking about plastics and their history. A century into our love affair with plastic, we are starting to realise it might not be such a healthy relationship. How could this seemingly useful object be so harmful? It’s this friction between materiality, sustainability and the language of objects that my project will be aiming to unpick through both my practice base work and my creative publishing module.
We are a species that wants and craves things. At one end of the scale are immaterial or generic cheap things (single use plastic) and at the other end are attempts to turn design into art. Marc Newson’s Lockhead Lounge has retained its title as the world's most expensive design object, after selling for more than £2 million. This transition from plastic object elevated to art or cult status led to me thinking about the rise of street artist Kaws who is thriving in the art world.
