By Gabrielle Kennedy / 12-03-2009

"Tangible - high touch visuals," Gestalten’s follow up to "Tactile" is a book packed with projects that rip at the impersonal nature of contemporary design.  The Dutch, lauded for their conceptual approach to creation, figure prominently.  All the included projects uniformly avoid the sleek and over-produced sheen that too often characterizes high-end design that exists on the precipice of art.

Anti-digital and anti-machine, "Tangible" looks at democratic design that gives power back to its audience and satisfies that very human desire to touch and to have haptic, dimensional experiences - experiences that are limited, albeit in a positive sense meaning they do not unravel into millions of binary opportunities.  

The first chapter, Out of the Box, breaks down the border between graphic and spatial design and gives materialization to an otherwise fanciful and inconvenient set of ideas.  The handcrafted texts and signage come to life with footprints or palpable proof that a designer – a real person - was actually there – not at the end of a mouse, but physically cutting, pasting and arranging everything together.

Corriette Schoenaerts presents the word Karakter made from blocks of random woodcuttings, and a map of South America fashioned from colourful pieces of clothing laid into the shape of the continent. In an even more powerful sense of human existence, Underware and Typeworkshop use books lined up as dominos and bodies to spell out the word Liberté.  The result is a kinetic sculpture tinged with the sort of old-fashioned and analogue possibility that can be directly and tangibly controlled by man.

Uneven and imperfect, the graphic design reproduced in "Tangible" possesses an authenticity that no modernist machine-set font could recreate.  The fonts are more integrated into the communication process, which infuses them with, what at least feels like, more responsibility.

In Altered Identities, bodies blend in or are catapulted through sceneries for surreal effect.  Human Life fuses with its environment in Desiree Palmen’s  Interior Camouflage Bookcase.  Has the person become a book or are books people?  Have we literally turned into fictional characters or is it just that we are what we know and we know what we see, think and read?

All Palmen’s work challenges by transforming predictable characterizations and materializing what might usually be considered the fantastical into static realities. There is a sculpted couple embracing on a park bench evenly stenciled with the same white planks that make up the bench, and the back of a man studying a map wearing a coat that is printed with the same map making it difficult to decipher where the person starts and ends.

In the Object and Application chapter reality is provoked and questioned.  Ideas are what's being celebrated here allowing familiar shapes replicated-but-distorted to reveal new and unexpected properties.  G+N team up with Ontwerpatelier fusing fashion and graphic design in a series of silk screened pin cushions that strap onto the arm.  Helmet Smits uses a lampshade that can only look “normal” if held up manually by a person. In this and other of the Object projects, viewers are taken on a journey into an unrealistic but tangible situation that they are forced to reckon with.  

These sorts of challenges to a person's and an object’s purpose and identity are further explored in the final and most intriguing chapter, Public Intervention, which challenges our perception of the public realm and our role within it.  What happens when unexpected designs disrupt the normal course of life?  When Florentijn Hofman painted a strip of row-houses in Rotterdam bright blue, she turned the predictable and dull into something so startling as to be indescribably confusing.   

One of the final contributions to this chapter is the “Obsessions make my life worse and my work better” installation Stefan Sagmeister created last year during FreeDesigndom in Amsterdam. Sagmeister used 250,000 eurocents to spell out his motto only to have the police clear up the work almost immediately.

"Tangible" leaves readers with an exciting sense that so much is possible and reminds us that neither art nor design should ever be divorced from the everyday.   Real and immediate experiences can and will exist in even the most digital of worlds - not because they make money or improve the speed of communication, but because a life on autopilot can be unfulfilling.

Every so often design that disrupts our rhythms can be just the thing to jolt us back to life.

"Tangible - High Touch Visuals"
Editors: R. Klanten, S. Ehmann, M. Huebner


Images courtesy of Gestalten.  Top page: Underware and Typeworkshop spell out Liberté, main picture - Florentijn Hofman, followed by from top Karacter by Coriete Schoenaerts, Desiree Palmen’s Bookcase and Parc Bench, Pincushion by G +N and Ontwerpatelier.

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