Philosophy of Chairs and Interfaces

This counts as a rumination

Furniture Designers Are Shifting Focus

In the course of reading my daily dose of news I came across this article on whether the world needs another chair, or a review of the Milan Furniture Fair. The review takes a pretty hard line against frivolous design and ornament without a justification for existence. Adolf Loos made a similar set of observations in 1910 (thank you industrial design reader) In Loos's essay "Ornament and Crime," he makes an argument that equates ornament with crime. among many sensationalist ramblings on tattoos and the criminal mind, Loos observes, or remarks first:

Woe betide the writing desk that has to be changed as frequently as an evening dress just because the style has become unbearable.

and

A consumer who owns furnishings witch become unbearable to him after only ten years and who is therefore forced to buy furniture every ten years is preferable to one who only buys and objet for himself once the old one can no longer be used. Industry demands it. Millions of people are employed because of this rapid change.

The NYT piece descibes a shift where instead of making furniture look good designers have moved on to new approaches:

As for tackling the emotional challenge, one approach is to design products that are unique, or seem to be so. ...he edgy Belgian design gallery, is to exhibit a series of objects, whose form alters according to where they are and how they are treated.

Perhaps this is the beginning of a trend toward the reconsideration of the interfaces of objects via technology. An interesting future indeed.