Profit and Gloss

It's not so much that Jeremijenko's dogs will actually change our polluted world, one tail-wag at a time. Instead, her project sets out a larger, alternative model for what design might be, and for how consumers can interact with the objects that industry wants them to buy. As the Triennial's catalogue puts it, "Whereas most consumer robots are designed to dance, yap or vacuum the rug, the Feral Robotic Dogs are equipped with a social agenda."

Weirdly, the very dancing, vacuuming, resource-wasting bots that Jeremijenko sets out to question are also included, even celebrated, in this Triennial, along with the slick vision of the future their modern forms evoke.

All Bent Out of Shape, And Better For It

Okay, so Ron Gilad makes luxury objects for design connoisseurs. At least he takes that rarefied aesthetic brief and gives it some conceptual heft.

Eschewing forms created with industrial precision: Ron Gilad's "Run Over by Car" vases.(Designfenzider Studio)

Gilad, an Israeli who co-founded the New York firm Designfenzider in 2001, has a series of projects he dubs "design through destruction." His chrome vases titled "Run Over by Car" . . . have been. And the different forces of each collision result in a different form for each object. Rather than deciding on a final "ideal" shape to be repeated with industrial precision, Gilad has come up with a procedure for generating an infinitely large family of related forms. Objects that start out as plain metal cylinders, in classic high modern style, become a postmodern paean to accident and process. Their tortured surfaces warp the modern world that gets reflected in them.

Redemption for Refuse? Don't Trash the Idea!

In 2001, Berkeleyites Shoshana Berger (trained as a fine artist) and Grace Hawthorne (a journalist) founded a magazine called ReadyMade -- whose principles and history are also now packaged in a book of the same name -- that is dedicated to showing how consumer trash can be reused as high design. It gives a "recipe" for taking discarded bottles of Voss, Norway's minimalist spring water with a maximalist price, and turning them into a stunning, and thoroughly witty, chandelier. ReadyMade also suggests making bird feeders from chipped stemware, a CD rack from FedEx tubes and a Bauhaus-simple storage unit from abandoned Pepsi crates.

The funny thing is that the modest homemade objects that result have more visual and conceptual punch than the sleek design "treasures" produced by the Philippe Starcks and Karim Rashids of this world. ReadyMade's objects and ideas have some of the impact and staying power of serious contemporary art, rather than the landfill-swelling presence of so much of what passes for design.

An Unlikely Font of Ingenuity

The designers at a tiny graphic-design firm called Coma, based in Brooklyn and Amsterdam, were invited to design the typeface that's used on all the Triennial's wall labels and text panels and throughout the exhibition catalogue, also entirely designed by Coma.

Graphic designers at a firm called Coma created this font for the Design Triennial.

Coma's typeface is so smart and effective, and based on such a simple idea, that it must have other designers green with envy: Coma has simply taken the world's two most popular fonts, Times New Roman and Helvetica, and mashed them up to make a new family of letter forms called Clash. In Clash -- shown at right -- Coma founders Cornelia Blatter and Marcel Hermans print all of a text's vowels in Times New Roman, the classic typeface based on models at least 250 years old; it ends all the swelling lines that constitute its letters in a little flourish called a serif. Coma then sets all the consonants in that same text in Helvetica, which is the great example of a sans-serif font, where the modern lines that make up letters are uniform, muscular and entirely undecorated.

Two cliches of type design are combined to make a new font that's perfectly legible yet deeply unsettling. A phrase like "deeply unsettling," for instance, becomes just what it says it is: The double "e" of the first word stands out as a moment of decorative irreverence, guarded by the foursquare sentinels of the Helvetica consonants to either side; the double "t" and "l" in "unsettling" stand tall as the orderly heart of that word, which falls apart to either side in a ransom-note mess.