Apres Planet July 2018

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Breaking
Pointing the way forward
3boundaries
Pointing the way
forward
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Matches made in heaven
Make a bee-line for Cane-Line
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A note by Charles
Dare to be bold
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Objects of desire
Anyone looking for a clear and
unequivocal answer to the question
“what approach will design take in 2018?”
within the context of the great Salone
Internazionale del Mobile di Milano or the
Clerkenwell Design Week would have been
surprised.
There was no one single approach, but
many different, if not radically different,
design approaches. In fact, one could
attempt a play on words, to the effect that
the lack of a well-defined trend should be
seen as the driving trend.
Unless we missed a major part of the
exhibitions where trendsetters all work
around the same theme (as what
happened with height-adjustable desks at
Orgatec a few years back), it is fair to say
that this is an observation that has been
made more and more over the last couple
of years – despite numerous attempts to pin
new “-ism” labels on things, this has simply
not happened.
There have been many and varied styleapproaches
in 2018, from organicism to a
return to the classic, a search for purity or
fantasy and, within each different strand,
there are designers from the most diverse
cultural and geographical contexts. This
sends a clear message that creatives
all over the world are guided by their
“reference tribes”, moving endlessly around
a global market in which localisms appear,
from a creative point of view at least, to be
on the wane. The definitions that attempted
to identify “national styles”, postulating
Italian rather than Scandinavian or German
design, now appear meaningless.
Despite this seemingly “directionlessness”,
one has to admit that the possibilities
that design free from a specific school of
thought is something to look forward to...
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