Let’s first of all consider Industry working without design, what would the result be. Would we have objects which functioned very well? Probably. We’d have efficient objects, we’d have objects which fitted the right price and we’d probably have quite a confusion … For the customers it would become quite … arbitrary which product they took. And the problem with all that might be that the objects which filled people’s houses, which formed daily life, would definitely bring an atmosphere, because every object brings an atmosphere but would it bring a good atmosphere or a bad one, or a dull atmosphere, or an exciting one? For me Design’s role is to improve atmosphere, to improve quality of daily life on the most fundamental level. That to me is the most important issue. And then from that comes a kind of duty to make objects which fulfil that role. And so making objects only for excitement or only for marketing purposes is really a shallow approach to design. Objects have to go beyond that level and succeed in everyday life, and that’s the test, more than sales and more than design praise in a small world. And of course then it becomes a complex issue about what the market is, how sophisticated it is, how receptive it is to that. At one extreme you have people like Enzo Mari who are uncompromising in their offering and don’t give a damn for market opinion or sales figures or anything, but his sole objective and responsibility is to make objects which he considers good objects. While at another level you have designers who are much more interested in mass marketing and selling for one year in a very big way. Objects which might be disposable the next year.
(Source: jaspermorrison.com)
