Hochschule für Gestaltung

Some tags sound better auf Deutsch, oder?  We turn to German for solid - dependable - engineering - think Audi's Vorsprung durch Technik . . . although that slogan was brought to life by an English advertising exec called John "BBH" Hegarty. I learned German for a year in school and built up an impressive vocabulary by obsessive rote-learning - grammar, not so much. I clocked gestalt as one of those words like saudades and hiraeth which fails to translate well into another language; for me it means look-and-feel. Later I learned about Gestalt Psychology which values a holistic rather than reductionist [boo, science] view of the world and our place in it. Gestaltung means Design in its broadest sense.

In Hillary Cottam's iconoclastic book Radical Help, I caught a rec for Hello World: where design meets life by Alice Rawsthorn. This book is a polemic for adopting a holistic view of design. It's not enough to look sleek; things we use have to be handy, and fit-for-purpose; price is important but cheap shouldn't be in the driver's seat. Especially not if cheap requires exploitation of workers and the environment. It may be a deliberate ironic meta-comment but the book is hideous to behold! The gutter margin is a mean 18mm and the page-numbers and running titles are stuck down in there in micro-font. The outside margins are a miserly 7mm. Winnie-the-"bear of little brain"-Pooh would be at a loss, let alone Fermat with his Hanc marginis exiguitas non caperet. At least it is typeset in Helvetica.

Thonet N.14 is an iconic bentwood bistro chair produced by Gebrüder Thonet since the 1860s. It is an engineering / design marvel able to support the most capacious bottoms for long enough to down a coffee and croissant, and yet be light enough for a child to carry. But design threads through the whole life of this product. It was flat-pack 100 years before Ikea: 36 de-constructed chairs could be shipped in a 1 m³ box with room to spare for the 10 screws and 2 washers required for each assembly.

The Braun electric toothbrush, not so much? Braun coming to Carlow in 1974 was one of the early coups of the IDA. At peak, 1,400 people were employed in the town making hair-dryers. One of the reasons for locating there, then, was the establishment of the Regional Technical College RTC in the town in 1970. Braun was famous for the design of its products (shavers, audio-kit, toasters) which owed a lot to the standards and aesthetics of Dieter Rams.

But Rawsthorn faults Braun for an electric toothbrush which wrought a miracle for the maintenance of her teeth BUT shipped in an enormous box embedded in polystyrene and had no sensible end-of-life disposal protocol. Also it took 16 hours to charge the machine so that it could operate for 2 x 2 minutes each day. That's crap design because it's off-laying so many of the costs of production, distribution and disposal on the planet. It is poor design to have all your iAccessories made in the PRC and your shirts cut and assembled in Bangladesh because wages are less.

Shown left is Alvar Aalto's iconic 1933 Artek No 60 Stool. 90 years old and still supporting bottoms - with a little more austerity than Thonet No.14. That's what most of us would consider good design: "form ever follows function" as Louis Sullivan put in 1896. We just need to adopt a broader view of "good" in design generally: cost? exploitation? sustainability? disposal?.

Hello World? Stick with it. I learned a lot about stuff to which I normally wouldn't pay much attention. That's because I affect to be above fashion, trends and stuff. But if we embrace the Rawsthorn hypothesis that design is everything, then how things look becomes integral to how things work and we should accept nothing but the best.