Profit and Gloss
Only a Few Stars Sparkle at Design Triennial

By Blake Gopnik
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 11, 2007

NEW YORK -- There's an impressive trade fair now on in uptown Manhattan. Designers from every walk of life are showing off the latest in high-end product.

There's a splashy display about the sleek interiors of the new Boeing Dreamliner passenger jet: "For the first time in aviation history, the airplane has been redesigned with the passenger's comfort in mind," says a gushy text nearby.

There's fashion built around pared-down, "futuristic" shapes straight out of the 1960s, flatware that looks like something from a Klingon battle cruiser, circa 1979, and a system of giant sci-fi lighting panels that turn on as you walk by them up the stairs. (A bank of cooling fans, tucked out of sight, gives some idea of how much energy the lighting units use -- or waste -- just to get us up a staircase.)

This trade fair isn't at a convention center, and it's not -- at least officially -- organized by industry. (Though it is sponsored by Target.) It's at the Cooper-Hewitt, the Smithsonian's museum of applied and decorative arts. It's called "Design Life Now: National Design Triennial 2006."

It might as well be called "Cool Stuff That Sells." Many of its 87 projects don't question the design world's status quo or move beyond it. They just rehash the slick lines of modern design -- now almost 100 years old -- to make another consumer product for us to buy, then throw away when something newer comes along. "When we think of 'design objects,' " writes co-curator Brooke Hodge in her catalogue essay, "many of us think of things that are sleek, smooth, sensual and perfect." But she and her three colleagues don't do all that much to push back against such habits or to deter designers who encourage them.

The Triennial doesn't seem to offer any kind of take on what might matter in today's design, or a view toward some new future for it. It feels like an evenhanded survey of what happens to be out there and is currently hot.

The show includes the animated figures of Pixar. And the iPod, in all its incarnations. And the latest "space-age" office chair that, like so many of its predecessors, claims to be uniquely suited to the human form. And there's also a recent running shoe from Nike: The "Free 5.0" may -- or more likely, may not -- be the absolutely final word in bipedal locomotion. But do Boeing, Pixar, Apple and Nike really need a museum's help to spread word of their designs?

The exhibition also presents a few objects that depend less on style than on performing important functions well: a storage unit for transplant organs, NASA's Mars rover, a new kind of underwater "plane."

Yet can a design museum afford to celebrate pure, style-free function? To the extent that the designers of the Triennial's organ box or submersible flier care at all about the way they look -- why should they? -- they never escape from the cliched gloss of "modern" design.

To have a mission that makes any kind of sense, the Cooper-Hewitt has to be about the coming together of form and function. It has to be about objects whose new looks give them a new role to play, or whose designers have new ways of doing and thinking that come across in how the objects look.

Here are a few of this Triennial's truly winning designs that do just that.

Barking Up a Green Tree

Natalie Jeremijenko, from the art department of the University of California at San Diego, takes the essentially functionless robot animals sold in toy stores and turns them into what she calls Feral Robotic Dogs. By reverse-engineering the toys -- doing "some gentle amputation," she says, to lower their centers of gravity, giving them a touch of brain surgery, adding on a new artificial "nose" -- she gets them to sniff out polluting gases in the environment. Jeremijenko teaches high school students to strip off all the decorative gunk that the toys' original designers saddled their robots with, and to turn them into mean machines with a green mission -- motorized Saint Bernards out to save our century.

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.

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.

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.