Sunday, October 10, 2010

Design for Life - Episode 1

Philippe Starck addresses in this video that skilful design speaks about life and its effect on one’s life. He believes that as a product designer can change the world with creativity. He has taken on twelve design students to teach them to criticize and challenge design decisions. These students will face projects each week which will result in one student left in the end to be offered to work six months in Paris with him. They all have to inspire Philippe Starck with their creative and visionary approach.

He believes that design should be something beautiful, usable and sustainable, which can be enjoyed by everyone. Design has to be something that is functional and beautiful at the same time, there has to be a reason behind the creation of a new and improved idea for it to be a good and useful design.

Through the competition being set in Paris, the environment and atmosphere of Paris culture will test their ability to cope with criticism. Through hard judgments it will encourage them to achieve high quality designs with good and positive results. This strategy will influence different designs that haven’t been explored before in oneself. It is a way to improve and reach into ones creative nature that hasn’t yet been grasped. It allows designers to question the need of design.

Philippe Starck believes that it is a school of creativity not a school of design. It is meant to be spoken in terms of everything around us, not about design. It is about improving the life of people/society. It is not art in terms of sculptures. Philippe Starck explains that design is more than that, there is more conceptually. Designing anything is very well thought out with strong reasoning’s in functionality and why something is the way it is.
To observe their understanding of design Philippe Starck has sent the group of students to buy two items that reflects gender, functionality and ecology. He believes that something that is simple and only reflects either functionality not marketing is good design. From this he wants to determine the way his students think of design in terms of creativity. He wants them to discover the unnecessary items that are designed and what future designers should design for the reasons of function and sustainability. There is no need for ten of the same item.
Philippe Starck shows that looking at objects in the three areas presented to the students, it gives insight to the reasons of good, bad and useless designs, as well as the influence of design on the encouragement of users to be either sustainable and environmentally friendly or otherwise. A product that has symbolism will influence creativity and innovative thought.

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