Some Product

The recent publication of a bunch of books by product designers conjures up an elaborate and sometimes contradictory picture of the contemporary consumer. While Jasper Morrison (Everything but the Walls, 2002) envisages the consumer as everyman - a reasonable person possessed of a clutch of common needs and wants - Karim Rashid (I Want to Change the World, 2001) imagines them as picky individuals driven by a unique set of requirements that must be met just so. Inhabitants of the world of Morrison want to open wine bottles efficiently and enjoy their drinks in comfortable chairs. Those living on Rashid's side of the fence have no time for sitting on mass produced chairs with standardised aperitifs, but crave a position at the helm of the production process, dictating the fulfilment of their every wish: the perfect drink, the perfect chair. As for life described by Renny Ramakers of the Dutch design studio Droog (Less + More: Droog Design in context, 2002), simple routines involving wine and seating are out of the picture altogether. Instead of 'things', Droog's consumers are buying 'mediators' - to sit down with a drink is an activity fraught with the whole history and culture of sitting down and drinking.

The imaginary consumer proves to have an uneven relationship with the designed product. In the case of Rashid, there seems to be an overbearing metaphor at work. The bulbous, fluid form of Rashid's output, be it salt cellar or sofa, suggests something that was unfixed right up to the very moment of its purchase. I imagine Rashid and his customer sitting either side of an endlessly mutating object. The buyer catches a glimpse of perfection and alerts Rashid. A button is pressed and the product is complete. Of course it isn't like this. Although conceived in a flow of digits, curves are as standardised as corners once in production. Design critic Aaron Betsky calls Rashid's designs 'the fleeting embodiment of desire'. Whose desire, he doesn't say. Often rough-edged and a little silly, Droog's products raise different questions. Many of them - a chest of drawers made from discarded drawers strapped together with a luggage belt, for example - are necessarily one offs. Far from pandering to consumers' wants, such pieces are quite aggressive; there is an undercurrent of harshness in Droog's project - they want destabilise our relationship with things, setting us all permanently askew.

In light of these conceits, Morrison's optimistic vision of the relationship between people and their furniture might seem simplistic. It has its own conceptual base, however, a theory invented by Morrison called 'utilism'. As expounded in Everything but the Walls, this theory bears the traces of self-mockery. Defined in opposition to 'uselessnism', utilism means good for something (amongst the things that are uselessnistic are Art - Morrison doesn't see being useless as bad, just different). For Morrison, utilism's greatest triumph was a project for Fisch Platz in Graz, Austria. Here he 'succeeded in removing travel company stickers from the windows of the bus station café, so passengers could see if their buses had arrived, and installing a couple of speed bumps to allow them to get to the buses in safety'. Maybe not ideological, but certainly worthwhile. Where designing beautiful but extremely expensive ur-chairs for Cappellini (the 1999 Low Pad is amongst my all time favourites) might seem complacent, making a bus station more habitable seems commendably humane.

Like all the text in Everything but the Walls, the theory of utilism is spelt out in rounded san-serif type, set square on the page in justified blocks. This creates the misleading impression that the writing, all by Morrison, is unsophisticated; an impression reinforced by the slightly clunky use of pictures. The book is a lovely three-dimensional object - of pleasing size and weight with a playful embossed canvas cover - but it doesn't quite work on the flat. Similarly Rashid's I Want to Change the World isn't a particularly successful graphic venture, although it suffers from appearing to have tried too hard, rather than not hard enough. The book is large and floppy which makes reading the text, printed in narrow columns set horizontal to the page, very uncomfortable. Essays are listed at the front with page numbers, but inside the numbers are ditched for an obscure system of symbols. Of the three, by far the most successful book design is that of Ramakers and Droog by the Dutch studio Thonik. Using only images taken from existing publications, Thonik illustrate the gap between the object and its representation and take Droog's discussion to another level.

It would be satisfyingly easy to characterize the differences between these three books and the stories they tell along national lines: Morrison is a British designer who has worked in Italy a great deal - a bowler-hatted conformist who has learnt to enjoy the Continental way of life; Rashid is an Egyptian-born, Canadian-bred, New York-based product designer - a Western-world citizen who recognises individual desire as the only common denominator; Droog is an Amsterdam-based design studio consisting of an ever-changing network of international designers (buoyed by public money Dutch design is renowned for emphasising culture above commerce). But these stereotypes are far from adequate. To associate the clean lines of Morrison's furniture with British reserve is to ignore his particular ability to make a spade a spade, to create things that look just as they ought. Equally, to view Rashid's project as solely bound with frenzied pioneer consumerism is to overlook his interest in new materials and data-driven design. And, of course, Droog aren't just a bunch of state-funded, theory-heads. They are a lot more fun than that.