a  =  v  /   t

Acceleration (a) equals velocity (V) divided by time (t). This is the formula used in physics to describe the phenomenon, which has been defining our reality for several decades.

The visual formula for acceleration could correspond to the logo of a certain global concern, whose corporate culture was defined by its CEO Phil Knight, who in the 1990s coined the slogan “It’s the BRAND, not the product,” serving as the starting gun for the race whose consequences have altered the logic of economic processes.

In spite of the initial hopes – which were not unfounded – today we can clearly admit that the area of human activity known as design has become a victim, rather than a beneficiary, of this process. In the good old days when not everything was being manufactured in China yet, business strove to give people what they wanted. Today, it focuses on having them “need” what it produces. The universal drive for branding the communal consciousness means that competition today consists not in the comparing of the products’ qualitative parameters, but in the bidding of their advertising budgets. Marketing, i.e. the ability to recognise needs, is slowly becoming redundant, replaced by branding – the ability to create needs. It is no coincidence that James Bond now drives a BMW, discreetly but noticeably glancing at his Omega watch before every action, while his enduring fondness for Martini is undoubtedly not without an ulterior motive either. In this way show-business slips “product placement” into the public consciousness, a mechanism which is especially effective, because it affects the subconscious. As regards the area of design which I myself represent, i.e. jewellery – this process has been taken to the extreme. Today, no one appraises products’ esthetical values anymore; the media are excited only by discussing how many millions of dollars the necklace which Angelina Jolie wore at the Oscars ceremony cost (never mind that jewels of such value are usually never bought, but only lent by jewellery fashion houses for a one-off occasion for advertising purposes, to be later deposited in the safes of banks or insurance companies). In this context, it is worth citing another suggestive example – the scene from the film Casino, where Robert de Niro gives Sharon Stone not a box, but a suitcase full of jewellery with the Bulgari brand name in brazen view – which is interpreted today – just as in feudal times – as a spectacular attribute of belonging to the contemporary establishment. From the designer’s point of view this direction in the evolution of design is becoming a difficult-to-accept process of reducing design to a component of little importance in the “myth-making campaign” meticulously planned by advertising specialists. If someone still naively thinks stylistic trends are created in the design studios of Milan, they should give up their illusions. The centre of everything has moved to Beverly Hills, and contemporary design has been infected with the mechanisms of manipulation used in advertising. The outcome of this process does not only amount to superficial observations that toothbrushes are starting to look like ball-point pens, ball-point pens like lollipops, and lollipops like toothbrushes. The core of the problem consists in that the general unification of esthetical models destroys local traditions, deprives us, the consumers, of the possibility of choice, and perhaps even – as the alterglobalists say – is a threat to democracy.

Our subconscious is populated by scores of contemporary not just super-, but megastars – who advertise disposable shaving razors, credit cards or canned beverages with varying success, in the process advertising their own perfectly formatted, metrosexual image – a point of reference for trendhunters, who immediately digest every visual impulse into a self-perpetuating, seasonal re-styling of signs, symbols and images, which human perception is not only unable to systematise, but even register anymore; for even if acceleration and speed are variable values, then, after all, the random time unit in which they take place invariably remains constant in the conditions of earthly gravity. Design has become impersonal. Instead of laboriously developed manual skills in the fields of drawing, sculpture and spatial imagination, we have at our disposal 3D rendering, their computer substitute, from which we can always “generate a path” in STL format– as IT specialists would poetically put it – and then the entire arsenal of means, conventionally referred to as “rapid prototyping” will serve to perform the most laborious, operational part of the process of creating a new product. We do not need to understand any of it ourselves; it is enough that the digital record is understandable to the numerically-controlled devices – electric die sinkers, multi-axis milling machines or laser stereo-lithographs and all those technologies which are still on the drawing board and may soon radically revise our own idea of the essence of the creative process and the artist’s unique role in it. Today, the only barrier which still stands before this inevitable – or if you prefer gloomy – vision is the still relatively high cost of the said technologies, but certainly in a few years, what is now just play station VR will become reality for good – not only as a stylistic reference point.

Without judging the degree of the innovativeness of a product or its visual artistic value, we should assume that the justification for its creation is self-evident insofar as it fulfils certain needs and can be taken advantage of in marketing terms, which are increasingly and ruthlessly limiting the room for design experiments. Usually, the basis for creating new visual art solutions lies in a detailed analysis of market needs, and a recently popular definition of the so-called “creativity” boils down to the ability to efficiently provide solutions which strictly correspond to these needs – which in practice means the need to avoid risk anywhere it can be avoided. This does not mean, of course, that contemporary designers have lost their penchant for treating their profession responsibly, even if today’s market conditions (not only in Poland) seriously limit the possibilities of experimental design and systematic work on innovative solutions, forcing designers to react only to immediate demand. To use a science analogy – it is easier and more convenient for manufacturers and investors to use ready patents and practically tested outsourced solutions than create and develop their own research laboratories. Why should one invest in manufacturing, when one can make a quicker return on investment by speculating the shares of the manufacturers. This mechanism has been tailored to perfection by the Nike concern referred to above by allocating jobs and therefore transferring all the related costs and problems to subcontractors in Shanghai, Jakarta or Bangkok, just so to concentrate energy and capital on branding not only sports footwear, textiles and every accessory imaginable, but also sports events to begin with, then urban spaces and finally communal conscience. Thanks to this, the world-known logo is a perfect example of a self-reflexive message, testament to a disproportionate overestimation of any product branded by it, in keeping with the philosophy that “It’s the brand! – not the product.”

Of course, we would all like to believe that experimental design will never be dominated by superficial “styling” conditioned by specific demand, that art as a visual language of communication has not exhausted itself and that not all has yet been said, and the theory of the destruction of art which has been repeated since Marcel Duchamp, always ends up being yet another artistic manifesto, paradoxically confirming art’s vitality. Recently, however, reality is providing fewer and fewer reasons to confirm these hopes. It would seem that thanks to globalisation the world has seemingly become more open, people know much more about each other, much more is being written about contemporary experimental design in the form of substantive analyses, there are more opportunities to obtain specialist education and more places and opportunities to present artistic efforts. However, if we were to look into the details in depth, it turns out that in practice it is often quite the opposite. The world has become hermetic, while the benefits of greater access to information apply to a very limited circle of persons. All this causes making one’s debut to be increasingly difficult, while achieving success requires far greater determination and takes much more time with no guarantee of fulfilment, no guarantee that the effort invested in achieving the goal will yield the desired effect. Of course, this rule applies not only to Łódź, Poland or Europe and not only to design – it is part of a much wider process in which a = V / t.

Just to think that Umberto Eco, the distinguished Italian semiotician, could write over 30 years ago that: “One of the reasons for the crisis, which the affluent society is going through is that the average human being cannot defend himself against the system of accepted forms, provided to him from the outside, which are not the result of any individual discovery of reality. Social diseases such as conformity or giving into someone’s leadership, the herd instinct, yielding to the mass, are the result of the passive reception of standard ideas and judgements which are identified with so-called “good form” both in morals and in politics, in nutrition and in fashion, in the sphere of esthetical tastes and in the area of pedagogical principles. Multifarious suggestions and impulses, affecting the subconscious, be it in politics or advertising, lead to the passive adopting of “good forms,” the surfeit of which allows the human being to avoid any effort. We can therefore pose the question whether contemporary art – by inducing us to constantly break models and paradigms and by raising the impermanence of models and paradigms to the status of a model and paradigm – plays an educational role, meaning that it shows us the way to liberation? And if so, then its discourse rises above the level of artistic tastes and aesthetic structures and is situated in a broader context, indicating to the contemporary human being that his or her autonomy can be regained.”

 Unfortunately, in the part concerning the direction of the evolution of art, this brilliant assessment of the situation still sounds like an unfulfilled prophecy. Perhaps, however, the hope for its fulfilment is not unfounded after all, albeit considerably delayed. The foretoken of this process is appearing where - perhaps in the context of the above examples - we would least expect it. Witness the advertisement of the Puma company, for which Philippe Starck designed a footwear collection in 2005.

 

Philippe Strack > Puma

Referring to primary archetypes, the production introduces an intriguing preview of an aesthetic code which is not based on superficial simplifications. Are we dealing here with another symptom of branding, albeit much more refined, synergically supported by the recognisable brands: Puma > Philippe Starck / Philippe Starck > Puma ? Surely, that too, but the subsequent proposals by the French designer allow us to assume that his employer perceives design somewhat differently than Nike in their development hierarchy.

Then maybe we have “It’s the product! – not the brand” after all, or at least “the product first, then the brand, based on the product’s quality.” Such a placement of accents would allow us to retain well-founded hope that consciously and systematically developed design will recover its status, and the author of the design – their personality. There is one more important reason for the future designer not to see their professional future in a defensive manner. This reason is provided by a legend of the Milan postmodernist design scene Alessandro Mendini – who prophesises in the catalogue of the exhibition presented last year at the National Museum in Poznań – a return to uniqueness, craftsmanship and the historical tradition of applied arts. It is highly likely that what today – in the era of disposable products – is often seen as an anachronism doomed to extinction, will soon become a manifestation of a new avant-garde and will win back its exclusive nature.

 

 

Sławomir Fijałkowski