By David Sokol / 20-05-2010

“Why Design Now?” The title of the New York–based Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum’s National Design Triennial has the inconsolable ring of a designer turned despondent by the Great Recession. 

It also hearkens a marketplace saturated with design — there’s no point in adding to the noise. “It was meant to be an open-ended question,” says Matilda McQuaid, who curated the exhibition with Ellen Lupton, Cara McCarthy, and Cynthia Smith. The first interpretation that comes to McQuaid’s mind: “There’s lots of potential solutions to the grand challenges of our contemporary world.”

Indeed, this fourth triennial places social design front and center, capitalizing on the popularity of “Design for the Other 90%,” a 2007 show featuring low-cost designs devoted to improving access to health resources, education, shelter, energy, and transportation for the large majority of the world’s population. If the marketplace is design-saturated, then it is the marketplace of upper-middle-class design, both exhibitions suggest.

Divided into themes, “Why Design Now?” spotlights fashion, product, architectural, and graphic design devoted to tapping renewable energy, supporting local craftsmanship, improving the health and economy of underprivileged communities, and consuming materials that promise no guilt. Including such landmark philanthropic works like Armadillo Body Armor and Facemask, One Laptop Per Child, and the Sampoorna Chulha stove and LED replacement for the common light bulb both by Philips Design, the stuff of “Why Design Now?” may not always be seductive visually, but these efforts are desperately needed to prevent the globe from spinning entirely off its axis.

In addition to focusing on responsible design efforts, “Why Design Now?” also is the Cooper-Hewitt’s first triennial entirely open to international participation. Of the many hundreds of submissions and finds considered by its quartet of curators, 134 designs from more than 40 countries were selected. “We vetted not so much designers but projects,” McQuaid says.
To be sure, she notes, American designers are well represented at “Why Design Now?” if only thanks to the accessibility of local information. Designers in their 20s and 30s also enjoy an excellent showing here, thanks to academe’s quick embrace of social design. McQuaid adds that it is the triennial’s job to celebrate emerging studios. Discussing younger talents serving the unfilled needs of social design, she adds, “Someone asked me earlier, Where does the Salone del Mobile fit in all of this? This doesn’t mean that designers are only going to do socially relevant design. I hope they do both.”

Whereas the American presence at “Why Design Now?” suggests a boldness and pragmatism endemic to the States, and Japan’s entries validate those native designers’ attraction to simple geometries and sensitivity to material consumption, the triennial’s Netherlands-originated collateral affirm some long-held characteristics of the Dutch design perspective. Eindhoven-based Lianne van Genugten’s photovoltaic-lined SunShade, a large parasol that tracks the sun and which lights up at night, reflects Dutch designers’ tendency toward humor and community, McQuaid says. “People are drawn to this harnessed light, and it is a way of inviting them to come together at night. It’s done in a very Claes Oldenburg manner.”

What drives this “dry humor” is observation, McQuaid adds, citing MVRDV’s TheVerticalVillage as an example. The project looks for an alternative to the anonymous high-rise construction of Asian redevelopment, instead proposing to vertically stack Hutongs and other wood houses that characterize traditional East Asian cities. The intent is to ensure that the ingredient that makes those historic places such dynamic, socially rich environments informs successful urban life today. TheVerticalVillage “almost codifies a do-it-yourself phenomenon,” McQuaid says.

Such observation usually goes hand in hand with an insistence on reexamining the things we take for granted. The second floor of “Why Design Now?” includes a small (and unintentional, McQuaid says) vignette of work by Jorre van Ast and Christien Meindertsma, based in London and Rotterdam, respectively. While Van Ast rethinks junctions—between lid and jar, for example, or between table leg and surface—as opportunities for innovation rather than as unavoidable intersections, Meindertsma—whose t.e. 83 Hanging Lamp hovers above van Ast’s tabletop—transforms banal flax rope into a chandelier. And those principles scale all the way to architecture, including the triennial submission H2Otel by Thomas Rau, in which water is responsible for all of the hotel’s energy. Combined with passive solar design and other sustainable strategies, the prospective Amsterdam building should be carbon-neutral.
    
Not every selection is characteristic. Witches’ Kitchen Collection, the cooking tools crafted by South American artisans, that Artecnica produced through its Design With a Conscience series, features none of the florid ornament and little of the whimsy of designer Tord Boontje’s oeuvre. This lack of signature proves that the stars of “Why Design Now?” are willing to, in McQuaid’s words, “release a little bit of their own aesthetic to work,” especially when it’s for such a good cause.

And another surprise? McQuaid and her colleagues knew they had to include a bicycle as a carbon-reducing commuter option, but did not choose any Dutch mainstay for this triennial. Instead the IF Mode Folding Bicycle, designed by the British-Taiwanese team of Ryan Carroll, Michael Lin, and Mark Sanders, got tapped.

Main image: Energy and Mobility room featuring SunShade, prototype by Lianne van Genugten, The Netherlands, 2009–10. Aluminum, polypropylene, flexible solar cells, nylon, LED light, acrylate
Image 1: Gallery 206, featuring the All Media wallpaper and paintings by Mieke Gerritzen.
Celebrity wallpaper. 2009. Paintings left to right: The Computer, Everyone Is a Designer, Space, Apple Man. 2006–7. Canvas, oil paint
Image 2: Introduction Gallery
Exhibition photography: Matt Flynn
Image 3: TheVerticalVillage© by MVRDV, Taipei, Taiwan, concept model. Courtesy of MVRDV
 

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