Formful Wood. Explorative Furniture

CHRISTOPH SCHINDLER
HISTORY
Historical embedding and formal recourse help us not to lose touch while something
new develops. There are different strategies for dealing with design history.
If we think of design history, we usually think of a design history “canon” and
emphasized “key objects,” embedded in an art–historical model that moves from
one “great movement” to the next. 10 If a designer imitates a style or age, we call
this attitude “retro.” A redesign of such a key object is labelled “approbiation,” like
Stefan Zwicky’s redesign of Le Corbusier’s LC2 in concrete and reinforcement.
Together with a team of design historians and in the context of a vintage
design salon, we carried out the module “Memories of Objects and Their Stories”:
the participants chose a historical reference from the living area and placed it in
a contemporary context. The references were not specific designs from known
designers, instead they belonged to a certain type of vernacular, indigenous and
anonymous family of objects, a kind of Bernard Rudofsky approach transferred
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to design. [→ FIGURE 7 and 8]
CONTEXT
A reference to a related or entirely different discipline gives the customer the impression
of moving in a field that he or she can hardly enter otherwise. Such a reference
is the fuel filler cap of all generations of the Audi TT since 1998, which is formally
reminiscent of automobile racing and thus emphasizes the sportiness of the car.
Under the title “Inspired by Textile Objects,” we offered a module that
drew its inspiration from the digital archive of the Zurich silk industry, which was
designed by a research group at our school. 12 We were interested in how peculiarities
of textile patterns—rapport, weaving techniques, patterns, colors—could
be transferred from one design discipline to the other and, practically speaking,
from flat textiles to the third dimension of product design. The openness of the
question allowed a broad solution space. It was hard to tell whether the resulting
objects can still be categorized as product designs, became art, are between
the disciplines, introduce a new field or whether the disciplines have dissolved.
CONCLUSIONS
For our School of Art and Design, design modules based on referencing are among
the most appreciated courses, both internal among students and teachers as well
as external colleagues from our discipline. For most students, this is the moment
in their curriculum when they start to relate themselves to the world. They interact
with practice, disciplines, history and cultures and are introduced to the complexities
of design.
In contrast to specialized courses in any of the chosen fields, a design
module does not set out to give a complete overview of a field. Correspondingly,
students do not learn in depth about the field of their reference, instead they
reflect on its relation to product design. Moreover, they gain an awareness that
instead of just one perspective on the world there are many, depending on place,
culture, profession, as well as ethnicity, age, religion, gender and so on. Referencing
is more of a method than a content.
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