Form follows Foam

“Can I skip the signature of the star designer?” The designs depend fully on the properties of the basic, hard to control construction material.

Design can be seen as the vehicle of the established aesthetics of our time. But it is a car stuck in the slow lane, constantly being overtaken by other media in popular culture. A state of indifference has turned the design industry into a gathering of narcissistic cowards, a club that also includes myself.

This project is an investigation into how design could be more vital, more challenging and less predictable. It explores different possibilities to confront and attack the obsession with perfection. Perfection – the drive towards an aesthetic that lives beyond an object’s function and meaning – is considered in this project as a kind of fascism. It is an ideology, resulting in design that is mute and autistic, ignoring design’s power to speak about subjects
beyond the superficial.

This project also asks why the ego of the designer dominates creativity, why ‘process’ is the new essence of design, and why a designer cannot rely on an object finding its intended context.

The culmination of the thesis is a design proposal, a series of objects that will arouse curiosity by their being and making. They question rather than answer, balancing between insanity and tolerance, friction and flux.