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Trends and anti-trends in industrial design
The art-design find shelter in the interests of curators who search for new
tendencies for expositions, besides the typology established in the form of
paintings, sculptures, installations and digital arts. Elevating the cultural status of
the products, their price rise. In the end, a replica of Duchamp’s urinal – the original
one is gone and has never been exposed again – has, nowadays, a commercial
value estimated in 3 millions of Euros. As happens with art works, design has also
become an investment good.
Another critical point in design is the excessive academisation of the teaching.
On one hand, there was a quantitative rising in the offer of master’s degree and
doctor’s degree courses, in a great part as a result of the institutional pressure of
adapting itself to the current criteria of academical excellence and remuneration
of docents – and also for providing a new source of income for the universities. The
industry of master’s degree and doctor’s degree is a not an insignificant business.
On the other hand, this offer, in general, has accepted uncritically, the criteria and
traditions of other fields of knowledge, already established, that are different from
the design field. In general, it is necessary that a doctor’s degree candidate defend
a thesis based on a research work, showing his own dose of cognitive innovation.
It is about a text, a discursive result.
The area of design, in the contrary, is characterized by non-discursive results. It
is in that point that Design goes out of the traditional patterns, formulated by the
main normative organs of superior education. If there is not a reorganization in
the patterns of the master’s degree and doctor’s degree courses, adapting them to
the design disciplines, the area of design may get weaker, suffering design atrophy.
Going back to the list of tendencies previously mentioned, we may perceive,
nowadays, besides the main ones, some accompanying tendencies (the list is not
exhaustive, serving only as an exemplification). I do not refer to tendencies of style,
but tendencies of focus:
- first: the socially responsible design, that is, the design with unity, that facilitates
people’s daily life, in many fields: work, transport, habitation, education, health
and leisure;
- second: the ecological design, that imperiously requires an interdisciplinary work,
due to the extreme complexity of the theme, and that should not be treated in a
Cadernos de Estudos Avançados em Design - design e humanismo - 2013 - p. 131-139
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