Priscila Lena Farias / Anna Calvera Marcos da Costa ... - Blucher

Vernacular design: a discussion on its concept
FINIZOLA, Fátima / Doctoral student / UFPE / Brazil
COUTINHO, Solange G./ PhD / UFPE / Brazil
CAVALCANTI, Virgínia P./ PhD / UFPE / Brazil
Vernacular Design / Popular Design / Formal Design
This article presents a review of the literature that covers the specific
area of design denominated ‘vernacular design’, and proposes
a discussion and comparison of the different viewpoints regarding
this theme, from the twentieth century until today. It also presents
a discussion on the forms in which formal design has appropriated
vernacular design, together with its positive and negative aspects.
1. Introduction
By observing the artifacts of design, which make part of our daily
lives, it is possible to identify several spontaneous manifestations
that go hand in hand with official design, and that sometimes become
lost in their transience because they have not been registered
or recognized by the academy or the market. The value of
these artifacts is attributed, not through major design awards,
or articles in specialized magazine or as successful items on the
business market, but by the recognition of being built by tradition,
a tradition that has been consecrated by the daily use of these artifacts
in a particular place or region.
For those with an eye more attentive to their surroundings, these
elements, which often go unnoticed in the constant dynamic
rhythms of large urban centers, may reveal certain peculiarities
of the habits and customs of a people, their desires, their needs,
their ideas, and still express something from the periphery and its
counterculture.
In this manner, Dona Nice, seamstress from the Lemos Torres
community, with an urgent need to promote her dressmaking
business, also finds herself taking on the role of signwriter, capable
of making her own advertising signs. Those who sell mangos
on the beach at Tamandaré need to pack their products in order to
distribute them to their customers, and so they make bags from
coconut palms. The gardener at a small shopping arcade in the
district of Parnamirim discovers that a perforated plastic bottle
attached to a hose is able to distribute the water more evenly on
the grass and thus creates a new gadget. In most cases, it is the
law of necessity that leads to the construction of these devices,
often simple in shape, naive, and made from materials easily at
hand (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Vernacular artifacts: sign, basket and sprinkler (Recife and Tamandaré,
Brazil)
After the first schools of Industrial Design – or Design – opened,
and the profession had been formalized, especially in those countries
where industrialization represented a break with the old
artisanal methods of production, and not the result of a natural
development, many craftsmen were either forced to the margins
of the professional market or went on to work in an informal manner.
Since then, there has been a constant dialogue within the
market between the production of Formal Design, originating from
those professionals who have generally been through some kind
of specialized training or academic graduation within the area, and
the production of what we call Vernacular Design, i.e. spontaneous
design produced on the edge of mainstream design. In this
category it is also possible to include inventions of popular origin,
such as utilitarian objects, packaging, signs for itinerant market
and homes, as well as artifacts for popular communication - banners,
signs, murals, amongst others
Since the 1990s, however, these artifacts have been through a
continuous process of revaluation and reinterpretation, boosted
by post-modernism and by new digital technologies. Once the
new work tools had been mastered, ‘handmade’ design, handicrafts,
gadgets, popular, also became an object of projectual interest
and have also become incorporated, simulated and mixed into
elements produced through digital means.
In parallel to the arrival of postmodernism and its questions regarding
modernist precepts in arts and society as a whole, the
phenomenon of market globalization as well as the globalization
of communications through the internet, has also stimulated con-
Design Frontiers: Territiories, Concepts, Technologies / Proceedings of the 8th Conference of the International Committee for
Design History & Design Studies - ICDHS 2012 / São Paulo, Brazil / © 2012 Blucher / ISBN 978-85-212-0692-7