If your values were a product, a piece of furniture – what would they look like? Fringe Furniture 2014 just might get you thinking.įringe Furniture runs until October 5 at the Abbotsford Convent, Melbourne. “As soon as there is form, there is message”, wrote Pasztory in her 2005 book Thinking with Things.
The living art furniture tv#
Tess McAuslan-King’s and Niamh Minogue’s, TV Dinner Table. My favourites, which I would have in my home, are pictured below:
The designers manage to articulate a great fragility within their products – partly due to the materials they have used, and partly due to the forms themselves – and yet it’s obvious that people have not been absent from the processes needed to make the work possible. The delicacy of the designs reflecting this value is striking. The designers at this year’s exhibition have used materials that either derive from the environment – clays, twigs, leaves – or materials that can negatively affect the environment if they become part of it. Anna Lorenzetto Maintaining a balance between people and the environment Anna Lorenzettoīrigit Ryan’s Banana Lounge. Jonathan Ho’s Yi chair won the Most Market Ready Design Award, sponsored by TAIT. The first, Max Harper’s Corker pendant lights, won the Sustainable and Waste-wise Design Award, sponsored by the Banyule City Council. My top three that best articulate this value are pictured below. These designers, who are mostly locals, ensured their designs were honest, authentic and unambiguous. In some, materials were left as they were or only ever so lightly varnished. The idea of transparency as a value was articulated through products that exposed or made features of fastenings, joins or assemblies. The products reflecting this value were softly spoken, humble products: lights, lounges and chairs with nothing to hide. Two values stood out: transparency and maintaining a balance. In reviewing this year’s exhibition, I was interested to discover what cultural values were held among the collection of furniture, lighting and interior accessories created by this group of designers. It implies that among designers, makers and larger society, the processes and outputs of design are a current interchange of projection and reflection.
This year’s theme, Living Traces, speaks to this idea that products can help us understand who we are. In fact, it’s possible to know what a product says about a culture right now if we embrace art historian Ester Pasztory’s idea that everything is a cognitive aid with which a group thinks through and articulates its social, political, ideological or economic values.įringe Furniture is an annual fixture on the Melbourne Fringe Festival program, and has been going for 29 years. And we don’t need to wait until a product has built up a history to analyse what it says about the values of the culture that made it. The idea of “reading” a product is not novel, of course. The processes and outputs of design – or put another way, material culture – reflect our cultural values. Every product is a blabbermouth it has a tendency to answer every question – and then some – Del Coates.Ĭoates, an American industrial designer and design academic, is right.
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