Tom Inns - GSA Director

The new director of GSA came down to visit us this week. A brief introduction of his experiences was very insightful especially relating to the impact of the designer on innovation in small businesses. It was unusual to think of how the skills and abilities we have as designers can have such an impact in other fields. The ability to look to the future and play with things that do not currently exist is a skill I think most designers will see as commonplace.

 Tom Inns at GSA 

Realising the impact these transferable skills can have in various environments led me to see how unrestricted designers are in the work they can do. There was a self-reflection session in an attempt to understand the meaning of various corporate terms and what they really represented.

Strategies of various brands were analysed. Alessi, a very well-known design company seems to have one of the most interesting – creating random and crazy plastic shapes which are really highly finished and fulfil simple functions. These products sell as high end quality product but as essentially made from plastic, a relatively cheap material. They make so much money simply because people like owning them and they are fun. Working for Alessi would be ideal as their products can become iconic and they are the essence of playful design.

These quirky bottle tops and egg cup are a small selection of typical Alessi products. Personally, I really like the simplicity and character of them.

These brand strategies are key in how the business operates – but does it have any impact on how good the designs produced are? It probably has a negative impact due to the tendency for businesses to want to maximise profit margins. With many measurements of success resting on whether a product delivers financially, risk management may also play a role in why some great products are never brought to the general market. 

Biomimicry

Biomimicry is a method where essentially designers attempt to copy elements of the natural world and bring them into our everyday lives in a useful way Bio-mimicry surrounds us; our turbines are based on the fins and tails of sea creatures and we can thank bees for the honeycomb structures in new composite materials.  Nature is full of good design, it is still a mystery to us how bees can fly despite their weight.

Seems like bees are pretty clever!

I believe nature and design are highly linked: compare evolution to the development process. They are both a logical progression that is done for the good of a species, maybe our ability to innovate stems from our need to thrive and adapt.

Biomimicry has applications in many areas of design; it emulates functions and is a big challenge for robotics. Many programmers have attempted to give robots seemingly natural movements by mimicking those of plants or animals.

This approach to design is one I am keen to investigate as I feel it would be challenging and I believe most of the work we do already has hints of this as we cannot help but be influenced by the world that surrounds us.  

Arne Jacobsen

Arne Jacobsen (1902-1971) 

Arne Jacobsen was a Danish designer, famed for the Egg and Swan chairs as shown below. These were designed in conjunction with Fritzhansen, a Danish furniture design company, for the Royal Hotel in Copenhagen. The look of these designs was very modern for 1958 and this was a major contribution to the Scandinavian design movement. 

Despite the fact Jacobsen was first and foremost an architect, he is most famous for the products he created for these buildings. A firm believer in architectural functionalism, Jacobsen's buildings are unobtrusive and many are still in use today. 

Jacobsen is famed for his sense of proportion and this stems from his architecture background. His products include cutlery ranges, lighting and furniture. He even created a cocktail kit for his son-in-laws company Stelton. Jacobsen envisioned the entire experience of the buildings he created as he believed the design of every element was equally important. 

I would classify Jacobsen's work as a good design method due to how well rounded the final designs are and how everything has been considered down to the smallest details.

Jacobsen's work can be found in some interesting places, for example his cutlery designs are used in Kubrick's 2001 A Space Odyssey. The provocative image of Christine Keeler on a copy of his No.7 chair became famous in exposing a political scandal.

An interesting (and difficult to pronounce) word I discovered during my research was : Gesamtkunstwerk  

It translates as ‘universal art,’  total work of art’ and in architecture, is the idea of the architecture encompassing more than just the building. It tends to include the shell, accessories, furniture and even the landscape.