Adding a narrative: art in design

With a classical education in Letters and Philology and seemingly un-related Product Design degree, I consider myself an artist even if we live in a society where specialisation is narrow and high, and mass-production is promoted for its social and high profit values.

As a Product Design student a poetic or artistic vision of a product was perceived to be of a lesser value by the engineer minded. I could understand this point of view but I couldn’t agree with it.

After immersing in apparently absent minded doodling and smudging, a loose structure emerges. The process might seem spontaneous or careless.

However there are aspects and choices aware or sub –conscientious to be made all this time. I feel there is a curve going back to childhood when doodling wasn’t about the knowledge but about freedom. After mastering tools and mediums to express out, the inner child wants to go back to that fearless state.  The knowledge is left at an unaware level and the freedom of gesture is confident, manifesting as driving energy. Imagination is not constraint by required data.  After all, is easier to find a way to materialize that fleeting dream than to add a ‘poetic’ element to a design. Adding value through embellishment it is an over-used practice starting to be resented by the contemporary buyer. So why not just go back to dreamt products. To something with soul.

Exploring design from a humanist perspective is not so far-fetched even if the ‘humanist’ is seen as lacking the mathematical, scientific skills and ‘practicality’ that come as a must for a ‘realist’. But more and more poetry, sensitivity and story-telling attached to a product makes it desirable, to be kept and cherished and more than anything, used.

Literature and Philosophy, Design, Architecture and by extent any creative area have loosely speaking realizing products. All good ones have a common significant, an evolving and more and more definite shape that reveals itself.  As if ready to be born. 

Interrelating areas of knowledge cohabitating and occasionally clashing make the creativity applicable in tangent spaces: 3d of interior design or product reflecting philosophy, paintings reflecting structural awareness, writing evocating levels and time frames and why not the occasional chaos.