HAPTIC exhibition at RIBA (until 7 June 2008, free entry)
HAPTIC catalogue, Takeo Co./ISBN 4022579315 (RIBA bookshop)
Designing Design by Kenya Hara, published by Lars Muller Publishers/ISBN 9783037781050
For a little while longer RIBA will be showing a selection of designs from the HAPTIC exhibition which originated from the ever-fertile mind of Kenya Hara, Chief Executive Designer, Nippon Design Centre Inc. and MUJI. He asked ‘various creators to design an object not based on form or colour, but motivated by primarily by ‘haptic’ considerations.’
Relating to the sensation of touch the exhibition presents a fascinating selection of designs that are both thought-provocing and (as you would expect) tactile. Kenya Hara’s own Water Pachinko is both thrilling and calming, a ‘water pinball’ that never ends, and has stood (or should that be tipped) the test of time. This is not a fate shared with a number of the other designs. Four years of being shifted about from country-to-country and touched by every other person before you has left many of the exhibits looking a little lifeless and in the case of the Remote Control, not even on standby. The exhibits have examples which visitors can touch and feel, but some of these have become quite worn.
This shouldn’t put anyone off however, the ideas and rigour into this line of sensory inquiry is often brilliant – ‘haptic’ cups, clocks and cabbages among many highlights. They also illustrate just how little designers think about our sense of touch in the mass market, and in a world where the multi-touch display will soon be as common as the keyboard and mouse, the sensory experiments on display here may shine a light on paths of discovery for tomorrows designers in areas we can only imagine now.
The accompanying catalogue looks and feels as attentive to detail to the exhibits. The insightful interviews with the designers expand the exhibition and help understand the processes both of design and production. It also highlights a number of designs that didn’t make the trip, such as Taku Satoh’s fascinating A Tick, A Water Droplet and Wavering which takes the haptic inquiry into the realm of optics.
But it’s Hara’s own book, published last year, that takes centre stage. Designing Design is one of the finest examples of design writing and book production witnessed in recent years. A lucid and thoughtful writer, Hara brings a level of humanity to design that is rare. A wealthy chunk of the book is given to designers that have worked towards a number of Hara’s exhibition projects and this says a great deal about the man and the designer too. The evident respect he shows his peers and the collective ethos that this breeds through his projects explains why they are so very successful.
The chapter on Exformation (‘understanding how little we know’ rather than ‘making known’) demands attention. Here Hara begins to question some of the problems visual communication finds itself in our information rich society: ‘Evading the troublesome working of inquiring into it, we have become devoted to a game of “information catch.” I wonder if this is where the problem of stagnating creativity in communication lurks.’ The project work presented is compelling and rich, worth the price of admission alone.
The quality of the book production is Lars Muller at their very best. The page layout and book design are harmonious and considered, many designers will be secretly rather jealous at the shear restrained lavishness (is that possible?!) of Designing Design, but cannot fail to be charmed and intrigued by the author, his ideas, and evident generosity and spirit.
Peter Saville Estate 1-127
Published by JRP Ringier/ISBN 978-3-905701-66-1
In an interview with Design Indaba Peter Saville discussed his time at Pentagram. While there the late Alan Fletcher had told him the design for New Order’s Republic ’was not graphic design’. Fletcher’s remark and the evidently rocky relationship the partnership had with Saville only serves to accentuate his ‘outsider’ status, even to his contemporaries. Yet what becomes more apparent with the publication of Estate is that Saville is closer to Fletcher than the quote might lead us to believe and that Saville has managed to reach an intriguing place in graphic design that should be celebrated.
Estate is both a look back and a look forward. It exhibits collected ephemera, tests, final works and inspiration that has made up Saville’s work over the years. An eye-opening experience, Estate often feels like an exhibition catalogue, probably due to its publication coming in the aftermath of the Estate exhibition at the Migros museum in Zurich. The production gives the contents the air of fine art, or a retrospective to a glittering career, airbrushes seem to be elevated to artifacts of wonder.
The moods and phases that Saville has been attracted to are either evident or referenced, the acid-Warhol of New Order’s Technique or the Wadsworth-inspired thrill of OMD’s Dazzle Ships which are given context through notes, sentences or paragraphs on the assorted works. Estate fascinates by managing to give so much away but still retaining a sense of mystique, pointers to what could have been and processes that only work due to his belief in totally immersing himself in his projects.
Fletcher’s final book before he passed away was the brilliant Picturing and Poeting, a collection of observations which had been published in various forms over the years. Fletcher’s idiosyncratic and sometimes whimsical illustrations and observations show a more light-hearted, but no less focused and distinguished eye than that of Saville’s post-modern consideration. The beauty of chance and its ability to be defined by both designers is shown in Fletcher’s Wild Flowers and Saville’s True Faith leaf. It is not the different generations they represent or their views on what constitutes graphic design that separates them, rather their highly attuned sense of what they observed and their understanding of the context of those observations that binds them.
Whereas Fletcher continued to work in areas of graphic design for print, Saville’s predilection for fashion and experimentation in less traditional print areas (while assiduously maneuvering through the digital world) has allowed him to begin forging new areas of work, that it could be argued, are no longer definable within the common bounds of ‘graphic design’.
Estate points to this future. Although the recent work shortlisted for the Brit Insurance Designs of the Year is not here, a number of works with Anna Blessmann are. Object Removed for Study Purposes is more playful, but no less biting than any earlier works. In fact, it points to a greater distillation of Saville’s aesthetic while managing to question issues of subjectivity, the boundaries between fine and conceptual art, and the role of art in society.
The production values for Estate are, as to be expected, high. The paper is high quality gloss and the whole book from its type-free cover to its luxuriously wide book flaps begins to take a life of its own as yet another seminal Saville communique.
A number of years ago, in an interview for Arena with Steve Beale, Peter Saville stated that his next project was: ‘The Estate of Peter Saville. Not one big book, a series of inexpensive catalogues, and every so often I’ll make a box to keep them in.’ The book is teasingly titled Peter Saville Estate 1-127, will there be a further book in the future? Is this the first of many? We should hope so…
