charles wu / www.charleswu.co.uk

CRAFT

This is the time to rethink our relationship with product. A time to dig out the dirt and witness how this rhizome of roots has spread around the plateau like wild fire, an esoteric network deep into the core of soil, seemingly impossible to root out.

Capitalism. TINA (There Is No Alternative)

We are built into the environment that produces to replace. Alice Rawsthorn in ‘Objectified’ mentioned that the first mass production was probably the first emperor of China producing bows and arrows for war. What he would like to achieve is that all bows are the same shape and weight so that if a soldier dies, others could pick it up and use them. Mass production has become linked to functionality, design for the ‘average’. However, it is not until Ford Motor Company’s Model T revolutionized automobile mass production did we realise our place in the complex socio-economic chain clearer than ever before.

Fordism has changed every relationship: cost/ designer/ manufacturer/ material/ product/ consumer. It provides the thrust the rides up to today, where technological advancement has brought mass production into the age of ‘brainlessness’. Our over reliance, and pride, in the mechanical procedures of production has led design into a disposable alternative, and then a branding tool. In order to keep up with the productivity that allows governments to print bigger greens, design is used against the human psychology, triggering the eager to possess. In order to achieve that, designers task is to develop a product that cost nothing to produce as carries a ‘designed’ guise. Architects, those bunch who’re always slow to act and afraid to be left behind, jumps on the wagon by screaming slogans of ‘modular systems’ and ‘beauty of the repetition’. They claim that mass production in building modular system has resulted in a ‘mechanical beauty never seen in the history of mankind’ which is ‘so close to the perfection of a machine’.

We have to agree mega corporations hire designers to achieve a task of actualising an aim: to make a profit. The bigger the profit, however it seems today, the larger the sacrifice. We are constantly going to the pharmacy, and if the medicine we buy can make us well, how could the pharmaceutical companies become one of the biggest corporations in the world?

The Indian NHS runs in a different way. Citizens are asked to pay monthly to the NHS while they’re healthy, and once they got ill, they could receive NHS service and from then on, pay nothing. This provides an incentive for the government to ensure that it’s the wellbeing of the citizens which is the first priority. Design and product has to take on the same route before our modes of manufacturing spins out of control.

What if we look at the other end of capitalism, where all products are own by an agent (X). X goes between the corporations and the consumers. Corporations sells a product to X, and consumers come to rent the product from X. X’s role is to ensure, if a product is broken, X would send it back to the corporations, or lower the rent of the product, indirectly punishing the corporations for a bad product. So instead of having corporations throwing products out of their factory regardless of the market need and quality control, it’s a self-regulating cycle that has sustainable, people-oriented and very healthy.

(beauty rocking chair from Gary Weeks, it could last a century I reckon)

Slightly utilitarian, but it has a beautiful aim. Designers are now given a ‘new’ task, the noble task to design a product that lasts, a product the requires little to no repair and maintenance, a product that acquires timeless beauty. Designers now have to pick up their craft, really driving technical prowess to produce an object that is sustainable, responsive and humane. It is not about plastic moulded chairs anymore, it’s about a wooden chair that response to ergonomics, catering all extremes of body dimensions, a chair that is new after generations.

From now on we produce to sustain. It’s more economical then windfarm, more efficient then hybrids, and more human than William Morris. I embrace the new design revolution.

extended reading: OBJECTIFIED and the beautiful The Language of Things.