W/C 18.02.19
7. Timing is Key |
Weekly Event: |
'Great Design' - a talk by Nicholas Oddy
This week design historian Nicholas Oddy came to speak to us about great design. As something I have been exploring in my other blog posts, it was interesting to hear a new perspective on the topic. Nicholas gave an energetic and entertaining talk, and reviewed objects that we claimed to be great design. Examples were discussed, and, of course, subjectivity was apparent.
Whilst I had seen many of the examples and discussed great design before, this was surprisingly different experience. I think it was because of his background as a historian. I was left with some interesting thoughts... I realised the time and context in which a product is released has a huge influence on whether it can be called great. I doubt a hugely overengineered, resource inefficient structure such as the Fourth Bridge would be celebrated now. But it was culturally necessary at the time (following the Tay Bridge disaster) and has become an iconic Scottish landmark. Perhaps the Reichsautobahn would be considered great, as the beginning of motorway systems, if wasn’t linked so closely to Adolf Hitler. If I saw someone working on an Ettore Sottsass-esque bookcase now, ‘great’ is definitely not the first thing that would come to mind. But his Carlton bookcase is in all the great design books as the defining product of the Memphis group, the epitome of postmodernism. It was very much of its moment – so great design doesn’t have to be timeless? The most interesting thing I found about Nicholas Oddy was his implicit suggestion that great design should be collected and studied. He spoke about product as artefacts. He spoke of connoisseurship, rarity and value. But he neglected almost any references to a products actual use. When Jess presented him with a compostable phone case he was thrown – how could a collector collect items designed to decompose?! To him longevity indicates great design.
I personally thought the phone case was really interesting. Phones are designed to last around 2 years – why do we encase them in plastic designed to last forever? Surely this kind of sustainability can make a product great. Nicholas suggested that it didn’t have good enough aesthetics to be great; although I’m not sure that the 3-pin plug he later praised did either. Nicholas introduced the talk by reminding us who we were listening to. Like when referencing a book, we should note the date of it’s publication. He said that people reflect the attitudes from their twenties for the rest of their life. Perhaps this is why he couldn’t get on board with a bioplastic phone case. More about compostable phone cases can be found here - https://pelacase.com/
|