In co-operation with the Premsela foundation for Dutch design.
Featuring work by: Franck Bragigand, COMA (Marcel Hermans and Cornelia Blatter), IAAA (Jos de Bruin and Remko Scha) and Jurriaan Schrofer.
Commonly held views on design revolve around the notion of progress. Such views are, however, in need of revision. After all, most designers work on products we no longer expect to improve. From last season’s coat to this season’s, from the old chair to the new one, from the previous vase to the very latest – there is no progression. Most designers do not innovate, they alternate: they provide a flow of alternatives.
Photo(s): Leo van Kampen
The view that designers further progress stems from design’s connection to industry. Advancements in industry and technology, it is believed, allow designers to develop useful new products, or to improve on existing ones.
If this notion is reconsidered, if much of design alternates rather than innovates, a number of questions immediately spring to mind. What are the cultural and economic backgrounds to this flow of alternatives?
If the main purpose of design is to devise alternatives, what then constitutes the designer’s particular talent? Or, to be more explicit: what is the difference between the alternatives thought up by designers and those generated by computers? These questions were all addressed in Alternate.
The quest for individuality forms part of the cultural economic explanation for the emergence of the flow of alternatives. Consumers, wanting to make the most individual of choices, demand endless variety. They are prepared to spend vast sums of money on products through which they can express their personalities. Designers, in their turn, aim to turn out products that reflect their artistic authenticity and development. Like artists, designers think of their work as their personal oeuvre.
Not only do people aspire to be unique, they also – desperately – want to be in step with their times, to be contemporary. Products, increasingly defined as they are by their fashionable appeal, supply this need. In Alternate, this trend was illuminated by the COMA agency for design. Their visual analysis of a large number of car designs launched over a single season reveals how little one car designer’s work differs from another’s.
Asking what the differences are between the alternatives produced by designers and those generated by computers, proved equally provocative. In Alternate a collection of actual vases (selected and presented by Jos Holtkamp) was displayed next to a monitor showing the endless array of vases generated by a computer (a project by Jos de Bruin and Remko Scha).
And so a simple object, like a vase, appears to have its own aesthetic grammar. What is more: it is a grammar that can easily be dissected and transcribed into a computer programme. Thus it seems as if design (no longer) is just a matter of innovation or artistic development. It is more a matter of coming up with the right framework (or computer programme) and of the choices made within that framework. Illustrating this, Alternate presented work by designers such as Jurriaan Schrofer (1926-1990). Many of Schrofer’s designs were the result of variations made within frameworks he had first laid out.
Similar procedures are also followed outside the field of design. In art for instance, as Alternate demonstrated by presenting works by Belgian artist Franck Bragigand (1971). But the principle of variation also applies to nature. Butterfly displays set up in Alternate showed how variations occur within animal species – and how only the fittest of those variations survive.
Alternate was designed by Gilian Schrofer
of Concrete architectural associates. In keeping with the ideas developed in the exhibition, her specially designed objects were variations on a framework: a framework based on the chequered floor of De Vleeshal.
Alternate was curated by Dingeman Kuilman.
Alternate marked the launch of the Premsela foundation for Dutch design’s long-term programme on the design of alternatives, comprising (among other things) presen-tations, lectures and debates.
