The combination of dialectics between technology and hand-work will inevitably become a trademark, a distinguishable authenticity stamp on design products of the forthcomings. Future trend development will consider as valuable, those products that create a synthesis between advanced technologies and hand-work. Too often nowadays the conceptualisation, design process and manufacture have been opposed, either by countless repetition of the variation of one particular design, or the strict separation between hand work, design thinking and technology design thinking. In further discussion, authentic design products carry concepts which are able to be scaled up and down: from the smallest scale product, to architecture, up to the biggest scale – the city. Therefore these design concepts should embrace attempts to carry conglomerates of the technology-handmade dialogues. We propose 3 scenarios for Future Design development based on the architect Oswald Mathias Ungers, and his work “The Dialectical City”: Supplementing, Complementing and Superimposing the Ideal Dialectics into the design product of the future.
1.SUPPLEMENTING tactics will consider the level of readability of the designer’s sketch, drawing, diagram idea, ideogram. The readability of this into the finalised product will distinguish the product in a valley of ready made vector files. Translating the hand work into a digitalised technologically manufactured work is a dialectic by itself. On another hand it will set a “different” value of the design product, embracing the strength to influence other designs, processes and techniques. In our studio we have done the tactics of supplementing quite literally. The sketches have been 80% transformed and translated into the design product, which was later manufactured by the latest technological processes.
2.COMPLEMENTING While building architectural models we would often experience the triangulation between techniques of 3d printing, laser cutting and hand finished details. The hand finishing of the details, as an embrace of a “vintage” craftsmanship has applied new meanings to the finalised product. The layering of the possibilities of technologies and handmade into the manufacture of the product is yet another dialectic which will make a future contemporary design distinguishable, determine a higher price, and offer a careful curation of design concepts.
3.SUPERIMPOSING The development of new materials for design products will also rely on the strategies of Complementing and Supplementing. We propose mixing and constructing dialectics: producing hand made materials that could be laser-cut, constructing materials by 3D printing and with hand finished details, sketching directly on materials.. the possibilities are many.
Embracing the dialectics of the hand-made with the technological development into the design product, isn’t just a trend, it is a careful curation of the design essence inside an over-saturating field of design possibilities.
Aleksandra Shekutkovska Dokoska
Images and text are courtesy of Aleksandra Shekutkovska Dokoska***