Pierre du Bois
You’re shooting down the ski slope, comfortably perched on the seat of your bright yellow “fun” snowboard. One eye is watching where you’re going while the other is following your progress on an electronic map in your metallic grey personal digital assistant headset. Despite the rough course, you will not lose your funky green-and-blue “sport” hearing aid, securely clasped to your ear.
Welcome to the world Professor George Teodorescu of the State Academy of Visual Arts at Stuttgart, Germany, and his students are dreaming of.
Teodorescu plans to radically change the development and design of new products to bring you gadgets you haven’t even dreamt of. Not only consumer goods, but larger-scale and more ambitious projects like trains with glass walls are among the ideas of his students.
Teodorescu’s aim is to combine scientific disciplines and available technology to find holistic solutions for human problems, needs, or just desires.
He points out there has been a massive increase in product designers over the past 20 years. The profession is steadily spreading in influence, even in countries that have not traditionally considered design important in manufacturing. Design has grown “to a real global profession”, as Teodorescu puts it.
Design has to be flexible to cope with the influence of changing technology and also to respond to increasing mobility. Yet it also has to cope with the new economic paradigm, which has essentially remained the same since 19th century industrialisation.
Teodorescu says that the prevalent economic doctrines have seen capital locked up in the control of large corporations. This, combined with unemployment, cut-throat market segmentation, dwindling resources and market saturation, has led to market stagnation and has curbed innovative development. Teodorescu criticises the “me-too mentality and lack of major innovations”, which he says arise from people being afraid to take risks.
“Paradoxically enough, design could be perceived as an alibi of stagnation,” the designer says with a hint of irony. He says that design is mostly used in branding to facilitate identification and also to diversity products by reworking them. Teodorescu calls for designers to become innovators instead. He says that they must also escape the restrictions placed on them by “me-too” producers.
Fortunately, Teodorescu believes that such radical changes in design are already under way as evolving technology forces revolution from the molecular level up. New materials are being designed, “making the volume- and mass- orientated mentality obsolete”, he writes.
“A world of qualities, not that of objects, is coming up.” He believes this would be the first real revolution in the approach to problems.
Most people, however, seem to be blissfully ignorant of the current revolution in design, viewing it as a craft that just makes things look pretty.
Teodorescu says that traditional designers must “give up the exotic, glamour touch” and instead solve “emerging problems of life quality”. There is a large gap between using design to solve real problems and merely using it as a marketing tool. Teodorescu wants the designer to become a problem solver.
To attain this ability, special education and training are needed. “Design studios and industry are pointing out the growing discrepancy between the actual education profile in the design schools and the rapidly changing expectation about what the design competence, hence design education, should be.”
The position designers hold in society is difficult, “oscillating between that of a superstar and that of a marginal beautifier,” as Teodorescu puts it.
Even in areas with a long design tradition, the status of designers was not equal to that of an architect or an engineer. “Moreover, it is not possible to get a doctorate as a designer.”
He says designers have to create their own working domain to enable people to understand them better and to improve their status.
To realise these dreams, Teodorescu is offering a master’s programme in integral design for graduates in science and engineering. The course would equip them to create original products “far beyond consumer goods or any goods at all”.
Solving problems and focusing on quality of life is the goal. Even design in abstract areas such as liberty, challenge or security could be possible, says Teodorescu.
“There is more need for design outside the crowded field of consumer goods,” he says.
Teodorescu says his experience at the State Academy of Visual Arts at Stuttgart in Germany, where he lectures, has shown him that designers can create completely new categories of solutions, such as “emergence” and “security”.
Teodorescu calls the outcome of the course “spectacular”. Instead of merely dispensing standard global solutions to problems, graduates learn to find solutions tailored to suit different cultures.
Teodorescu wants design to move towards creating “better concepts for emergency situations, more efficient ways to satisfy the life necessities”. This would lead people to see design as crucial to life support instead of merely a luxury, he argues.
In other words: away from the fancy coffee kettle and towards a more effective desalinisation plant. “Design in need is design indeed,” he says.
Professor George Teodorescu will be presenting four case studies on harbour logistics, land-mine detection, emergency equipment and high-tech equipment as part of his presentation at Sasol SciFest. He will be talking on Sunday March 17