Droog Hammers Out A New Design Niche

"Modernism is only form and function," Ramakers explains. Whereas Droog products combine "form and function and emotion; form and function and a story." If an iPod's design stirs immediate emotions, and Ramakers admits it does, it's because of its look. Whereas the emotions stirred by Droog -- usually surprise and delight, but sometimes shock and even repulsion -- are about how an object works, and how its look is born in an idea.

Those lamps that drown their light bulbs, Ramakers says, have "a fantastic shape. What you see is very appealing." But their true force comes from a kind of backstory that they also deliver to you. Their effects come from "what is happening. And not because of a certain style."

Droog rarely generates its own in-house designs, since that would inevitably come to reflect only the ideas and stories cherished by its founders. Instead, the firm scours the world for designers full of all kinds of stimulating thoughts, then produces or promotes their designs under the Droog umbrella. Ramakers and Bakker think of themselves as curators and marketers as much as designers and of Droog as a cross between a brand and a museum without walls.

Those cow benches and water lamps and stomach lights on display downstairs in the gallery at Droog HQ aren't even officially Droog products. They are innovative objects snagged on recent trawls through Britain's design scene, where they were conceived by tiny firms such as Wokmedia (the water lamps) and Studio Bec (the benches and stomach lights). When Ramakers and Bakker discovered them, they had such strong hints of Droogish attitude that they seemed to deserve exposure in the exhibition space in Amsterdam. Some of them may even win the firm's imprimatur and a place in its catalogue.

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Rody Grauman's chandelier of 85 light bulbs.(Hans Van Der Mars - Droog Design)

Compared with the high turnover of ideas in the fine arts, with at least a dozen nameable movements over the past 40 years, high design has been half-asleep for decades. Crisp modernism has ruled, with just a few minor interruptions, since about the founding of the Bauhaus school in 1919.

What Droog has done, really, is to look for the radical energies and idiosyncrasies most typical of recent fine art and push them into design -- an emphasis on politics and process, on ideas over craft and mind over matter, all features borrowed from avant-garde art that make Droog stand out from its competition.

Even a full 13 years on, few have caught up to the Droog ideal: to take the radical approaches of fine art, which Ramakers describes as "autonomous" from most everyday concerns -- a sculpture or a video projection doesn't have to do anything, except excite its viewers -- and make them work in the function-filled world of design, where a chair, however artful, also has to cradle a rear end.

There are scattered precedents for Droog's approach, and Ramakers happily acknowledges them. She insists, for instance, that most Bauhaus designs started out having a powerful conceptual component: All those first right angles and chrome tubes spoke about industrial processes, about new ideas of hygiene and efficiency, about rejecting the design ideas of dead Greek and Roman guys. They became sleek and superficial style only later on, when they worked less to provoke thought than to caress the eyes and mark the status of their owners.

Ramakers cites the dulling and diluting influence of big, moneymaking furniture companies that, to this day, "are more interested in style than in the concept itself." Those companies want to make once-innovative products into safe commodities rather than work to preserve the edge such objects had when they were first designed.

Concept-filled products had another minor revival in the 1960s, and Ramakers sees that era as the immediate prehistory of Droog. There was the famous Toio floor lamp, designed in Italy in 1962 with inspiration from the everyday: A Toio has a bare transformer base, a fishing-rod stem and a car headlamp shining at the top. A few European and Japanese designers of that time were playing such pop games. But their haphazard attempts at forging a "conceptual" design never had much impact overall.

Now, by curating lots of scattered but like-minded colleagues' work into a single, branded collection, Droog has almost cobbled a movement out of them. There are even cheap Chinese knockoffs of Droog products -- an accolade that may be more significant than all the cheering and prizes coming from design insiders.

"One of the outcomes of our activities is that we find a lot of designers all over the world working in the same spirit," says Ramakers. Not simply riffing on the look and feel of specific Droog products, the way knockoff artists do, but understanding that design can be about more than a look. "We give lectures all over the world, and they're packed with young people. And after the lecture, they come to me and say: 'Oh thank you, I'm so inspired.' "

Which, eventually, should help feed new and radically different products into the hungry Droog machine -- products that will surprise even Bakker and Ramakers, and which they hope will take the firm to places they could never have foreseen. Said Ramakers, "I can feel that we have influence on those young designers . . . and then it comes back to us."