ENGLISH

TRANSCONCEPTS
by KARIM RASHID

BIRTH
Moving from city to city as a child I am nomadic; lacking cultural roots or heritage or at least a conciousness of my ancestry. I am not alone. This is a prevalent American phenomena, where history, existence, religion and family tend to bifurcate. It will be a global phenomena. So if we are not steeped in history, why are we not a free egalitarian society that should be able to celebrate the now? or at least be open-mined to try? In the 50's, the maturing of the industrial freedom led to a contemporary context where adolescent America shaped the new design frontier. Everyone celebrated change, progress and the future, especially in the home. I learned from an early age to celebrate change, the engagement and endorsement of newness and the love for inspiring neoteric things. Although change does not have to be necessarily new, it can be a FLEXIBLE SYSTEM that is perpetually re-configurable, resulting in new scenarios.


OBJECT
The world is changing. Its new objects which shape our lives are transconceptual, multi-cultural hybrids. These objects can exist anywhere in different contexts. They are both natural and synthetic; inspired through telecommunications, information, entertainment and behavior. Object culture can capture the energy and phenomena of the contemporary universal culture of this digital age. The birth of new industrial processes, new materials, and new global markets inspire ideas and paradigms that shape our lives. New culture demands new concepts, forms, materials and style. As we shift into the post-industrial age, products become more personalized as varied expressions of specific cultures, corporate identities, and tribes. Throughout history, the shaping of objects has shaped culture. Currently, industrial design has a responsibility to redefine objects in society as a celebration of value and meaning, not as a celebration of surface. Designers develop forms and concepts that are informed through broader issues of changing cultural, social, and political phenomena.

BETTER DESIGNED OBJECTS EDIT THE MARKETPLACE
As we approach the millennium, the most controversial design dialogue concerns excess, sustainability and market seduction. The inevitable necessity to create new objects conflicts with the plethora and platitude of objects already existing. Many of the arguments instill a guilt and insecurity that drives young designers to switch from fields that deal with material production to the new lucrative opportunities of the digital and virtual market. Ironically, the momentum of industrial production is irreversible whether or not a designer contributes. Therefore the designer is more necessary than ever to ensure the quality of manufactured goods. Without quality products, the likelihood only increases that products will be knock-offs. Intervention in the manufacture process results in well thought out objects that could replace three existing ones. In an untamed world of eclectic choice, of various stylized programs, of supernatural endless variations, from the perfect seamless product to insatiable languages and functions, products require sophisticated manipulation.

WE HAVE RESOLVED MOST OF OUR PROBLEMS
When designing a chair, we are not attempting to solve a need to seat people. Instead we design furniture that strives for meaning and establishes its place in time. The object must be perpetually reexamined; variations of all that is new must be considered in the creation of another object. Many utilitarian objects are not to be reinvented. Improving the original is difficult, considering some objects have never changed greatly in centuries. The idea of starting with a simplified "first order" point of entry in the design development, where we do not start out with the intention of imitation, keeps the subject contemporary.

RAPTURE
Objects should not be obstacles in life but raptures of experience. They should bring enjoyment, simplify tasks and increase our level of experience and of beauty. We also need egregious proposals, radical ideas to counter the world and the things we live with. To challenge the creative process I endorse heresy, where a multitude of values, beliefs, styles and ideologies can coexist in a plastic, biomorphic world. It is fortunate that currently there is no prevailing school of thought. Yet how do we still entertain the human curiosity for change and newness and losing this undefined moment? How do we show a love of difference?

One hypothetical model for a brave new world is based on a scenario where no product exists for more than five years. Every object would have to be perfectly cyclic as not to collect as waste. Generations would not be able to pass down anything in its original form. Simply the idea of antiquity would be a simulation.

DESIGN VS ART: (The mass-produced versus the unique.)
The argument is not about the physical process, it is about the result. Not crafted, but mechanistic. Both employing an intellectual didactic, or an empirical heuristic process with aesthetic, cultural and experiential results. If art asks questions, can design also question/radically contradict, redefine, and communicate messages?

Design is learned through interaction. It is accessible, allowing us to experience all its aspects on an every day basis. But can design question the status quo as art does? Does art need to be unique? In design’s case, the original is the prototype. These are unique developments in a process in which the object is intended to be produced in quantity; it will be developed into a serialized replication of itself. The tool, the computer controlled machine, the mold, and the industrial material produce numerous identical units. These same industrial processes are becoming more and more tools for artists. Artistic interests have shifted to industry and objects of our daily lives. Works by such artists as Jorge Pardo, Julian Opie, Donald Judd, Roxy Paine, and Andrea Zittel are addressing a shift into our industrial system. Jorge Pardo works in the arena of mass design. Roxy Paine proposed a robotic painting machine that with digital random control would dip a canvas into paint for a random amount of time and pull it out of the paint for a random drying cycle time. Barry X Ball works with Corian and although based on renaissance architecture he uses CNC Industrial machining in order to render unique sculpture. Experiments with rapid prototyping machines and short-run injection compression casting are defining a new, Post-Industrial Art. Can we let machines produce or re-define art? New typologies of art are ready to emerge. As art shifts towards the serial, design ironically shifts towards small batch production with such methods as random numeric computer control.

DIGITAL CRAFT:
The design process is changing due to new software and new digitized production technologies. As computer technology becomes more sophisticated, it promises higher levels of refinement in design that will compensate for the craft guilds that have declined since the Industrial Revolution. Traditional, these crafts sought for the same identical "replica." In some sense, the repetitive "hand-crafted" object was not craft anymore but a low-tech hand labor assembly line. Craft was interested in reaching a perfect state of identical nature.

The mechanization of the 20th century left no choice for craft but to diversify its serialization. Society could no longer accommodate or afford the lengthy apprenticeships that trained mastercraftsmen in producing highly refined works. The hand-made may be forever valued but the cost of labor precludes production that relies exclusively on it.

Mass production had become very sophisticated in the name of identical perfection, efficiency and cost-reduction. So craft became more involved in the "one-off" as a middle-class leisurely profession of self-fulfillment. Ideal "Craft" should express variance: each piece altered from the next by human intent, error, or human incidence. Contemporary craft is produced out of the autonomy of will and self-pleasure and not as a trade steeped in labor. In turn, diversity was also increasing in mass production during the early part of this century. Simply surfacing the product was the fastest and simplest way of giving a consumer choice. Diversified products increased sales, and eventually it allowed the assembly line workers to be exposed to different jobs to "diversify" their tasks in order to render a more productive and interesting position.

I propose Digital Craft as a new concept, to produce non-serial objects ad infinitum using mass-produced production methods. The idea is that one can produce objects in a very fast cycle using software programs that randomly change the tool path geometry creating unique objects. These products can take on new personalized meanings through their greater differentiation and diversity. They can address new markets as well as re-define and literally re-shape universal industrial commodity.

TECHNO-LIFE
Art embraces contemporary myth, with contradictory results. Design also celebrates contemporary myth, but solicits less value. As soon as the art object shifts into the role of utility, or implies a functional role, the value shifts to "things of everyday life". Why should commodity of everyday life carry any real value, especially as cultural artifact or preconsiousness? The ubiquity of produced goods does not necessarily de-value their presence. As Duchamp’s ready-mades shifted our view of the banal object, and questioned art, mass consumer goods today shift our view of art from sacred to kitsch. Examples of such being Warhol wallpaper, Cocteau dishes, Munch’s Scream as an inflatable doll, T-shirts with Van Gogh on them, screensavers, etc. Disposability, change, and new technologies all speak of a vast inertia of consumption, of less value. Eames chairs, although considered critically important to American history, have distant perceived value, yet millions were produced, hence why there are so many in circulation. It is equivalent to finding Saturday Night Fever vinyl LP’s in Salvation Army stores.

So how is it possible that design can infiltrate into the context of Art? And can Art exist within the realm of hyper-consumption, of multitudes of new models, as the machine of fashion, trend, and consumption? Should it? What is art’s real contribution, and how does art distinguish itself, from all of the imagery we see everyday in the media? Is real art now part of the commercial world where real art pushes greater boundaries and higher aesthetics, and has a greater amount of experimentation at a belligerent pace?

Periodicals have revolutionized font, layout, and image. The images that surround and inundate our consumer lives today are more beautiful, more seductive more content laden. Desktop publishing afforded us complete autonomy with image and font. Now desktop manufacturing will revolutionize our physical landscape. With desktop manufacturing we can design 3-dimensional models in front of us, design customized, personalized three-dimensional objects. Technology is bifurcating art and everyday life. Its speed and sophistication is immediately embraced by businesses to market goods, film, television and other media. Artists tend to lack the resources, the funding, and the knowledge needed to be able to embrace these new technologies. Hence, they are not able to keep up with the digitalia of our technological world. Many video artists show us the equipment with passion, (look at this great technology) as their eye sees beauty in cables, mechanisms, and digital tools. Meanwhile, the artwork is lacking in content. We are already familiar with technology on an every day basis. We have it in our recrooms as well as in our offices. People in their private and public lives are digitally documenting, printing, telecommunicating, infotaining, interacting, surfing, morphing, manipulating, and transforming the real and unreal. The boundaries between fantasy and reality blur. We have seen Hollywood, in all its non-art filmmaking, develop amazingly abstract imagery and effects. We have gone beyond the scope of art via our media, our digital existence. The inertia and momentum of high-technology in contemporary consumer goods and culture reinforces the speed at which technology ages. Whether highly technological or low-tech and mechanical, artists and designers must generate concepts to develop relevant and intelligible ideas, that will endure the coming and going of passing technologies and heighten our everyday experiences.


A designer may be the "artist of real issues", of everyday life who mediates between industry and the user. Today Industrial Design governs the framework for every part of our being. We interface with objects perpetually. As social beings exist in a world of material goods, material dreams, and material obsessions, design becomes not only a creative act, but a political, physical and economic act; a socially interactive process that is greater than the physical form itself. Its result is manifested in aesthetic forms, the content inspired by all the possibilities of our contemporary conditions. Design, art, image and fashion coexist in cross-pollination. Art is relegated to images on mass-scale, few actually fascinate. Design’s ubiquity is physical and made of real experiences where performance, material, texture, color, and form are engaged by everyone. Therefore, to experience Art is to experience a "designed" experience, a program, a pre-determined condition. Artistic expression in design is the study of alternatives and possibilities of commodity that interface with society. Design is the profession that not only alters our environment but impacts social behavior and affects the evanescent public memory. The shaping of the future deals with an understanding of the eloquences of the past, being highly responsive to the issues of the present, and perceptive of the changing landscape of the future.

As consumers we embrace new technologies. The latest styles, the most progressive sports equipment: in fact, we walk around in very advanced, sophisticated running shoes and sunglasses that look like they belong to the future world - like the 40s science fiction movies predicted - we would all be wearing jump suits. The casual future is engineered with track pants, sweatshirts and runners. Yet when we go into our cozy homes, we revert to some time warp, sitting on divans that resemble a lost century. We live in two diametric worlds; one is the need for universal sameness and nostalgia and the other is for an individualized, personalized, internet like freedom of expression, choice, and creativity. Art and design and everyday life, can they be co-injected?

CONSISTENCY
Why do I shop when I travel? It seems like the only reason is to search for the more rarefied local goods that are not available elsewhere. At this moment even art in all its authenticity does not operate this way because everything is available anywhere via the web or via large networks or ubiquitous conglomerations. We can access everything visually but not physically. So it is the physical experience that will continue to bring us together. Without new experiences in life comes death; the too familiar is death. Convenience and reliance of what already exists is numbing and blind repetition creates dullness, where banality equals routine. How can anyone be bored today? Routine equals lack of the experience of time. We like routine because it is easy, comfortable, and accommodating. It takes great effort to break of it and have new experiences. Generally when one experiences change it becomes a moment of living, of life, of being. Objects found outside of the expected, phenomenological elevate our lives when we experience beauty, comfort , luxury, performance, utility, sensorial motivations.

BEATITUDE
WE ARE NOT AESTHETICALLY BANKRUPT.
Our lives are elevated when we experience beauty, comfort, luxury, performance and utility seamlessly together. Beauty is a deeper inseparable relationship between the inner and the outer, an osmosis of aesthetics. Beauty is not a question of taste, or personal likes and dislikes but a learned appreciation, an experiential process. This underlying depth of beauty means that content plays a primary role. Paintings, objects, art, architecture, space, all manifest their aesthetics through their content. The visual and the conceptual are one. Something beautiful has content. I call this Holistic Design; design as the whole experience of living.

I am always amazed that if I meet someone whom I do not think is physically attractive at first introduction, by getting to know that person, they become more and more beautiful to me. I see their features as a complex relationship of mannerisms, cognitive and spiritual, and the physiological connectivity of the senses. Beauty is epitomized through the combinatory arrangement of all these factors, and hence beauty is more than surface, more than skin. It is a deeper inseparable relationship between the inner and the outer, an osmosis of aesthetics. This underlying depth of beauty means that content plays a primary role in the beauty of things : paintings, objects, installations, art, architecture, space, all manifest their aesthetics through content.

NIRVANA
We do not need many things. In fact all that is necessary are simple objects that have meaning and memory and are sacred to our lives. They are few and personal.

I see the future of our aesthetic world crossing all the aesthetic disciplines so that design, art, architecture and fashion fuse together to increase our experiences and bring greater pleasure to our material and immaterial lives. Our motivations should focus around our conscious collective memory and a desire to fill it with ideas that are seamless between art and life, as art takes its ideas from everyday life and I hope that everyday life will take its ideas from art.

In this digital age of information, I want our world to embrace total robotic mechanization, removing tedious hand labor, and to strive to create a cosmic sense of well being as the next millennium nears. Design can intensify reality. It can provide and maintain our enjoyment of living and nurture a direct experience with the energy and Momus of the time. I hope that in heaven I can find a chair that I like, not necessarily one that is comfortable.