Tyler Brûlé
Unable to be in Cape Town due to the pressure of a pitch situation [you know what it's like], Tyler Brûlé spoke to us via a satellite link-up from London. Sounding remarkably like Max Headroom [who probably also had a Canadian accent] Tyler is first and foremost a journalist. His first job aged 20 was as a TV presenter on BBC in Manchester. Since having set up and sold the cult mag Wallpaper, he is both the Chairman and Creative Director for Winkreative with satellite companies Winkorp, Winkraft, Winkontent and Wink Branded Goods and Services. Rattling off a client base of Europe's most elite corporates with consummate cool and professionalism. He acknowleged local brand gone global - Vide e Caffe [who were in the audience] showing South Africans we do have what it takes and limitless opportunities. His prediction for the future amongst others: Real Time media channels that will ensure the ever-growing "Wallpaper generation-on-the-move" will have access to the same news at the same time wherever they are in the world. No prizes for guessing who's going to be one of the big players in the future of global media.
Having moved into a house when he was five years old, that was so overgrown that a tree was growing out of the chimney and vines were pushing through the floorboards to grow up the legs of the furniture, Dan Pearson was lucky enough to discover his passion early. His is the quiet world where natural forms, the play of light and a sense of place are counter to a landscape eroded by commerce and industry. He's done a book with Sir Terence Conran and brought wildlife to the rooftop gardens of one of Japan's largest high rise developments as well as numerous other gardening assignments. Nature is the future too.
The quintessential modern Englishwomen, Ilse opened with the quote from artist Paul Klee - "one eye sees the other eye feels" - to illustrate that we have two brains, the rational and the emotional. "We have too much of everything and nothing is special." There is a trend towards rejection of the overly slick and a recommendation to do something "ugly" for a change. As Ivan aged seven has noted "Cool is not cool" any more. Having founded Elle Decoration in the UK, Ilse understands that we are yearning for content in our environment that is warm, emotional, sensuous, sexy, alive and expressive. Her interiors for Marks and Sparks' new lifestyle stores capture traditional values in oversized homely prints and patterns which evoke memories of comfort and the best of 20th century design values. Having lain dormant since the pared down rationalism of the Bauhuas - flowers are blooming again. The trend to rehash historical motifs will probably last for a while, but in the end the whole world is waiting for a unique modern African style, they are looking to us, whether they know it or not.
It is rare to find someone who talks about things like methodology and models who is also a champion for design. John Heskett is Prof. of Design at Illinois Institue of Technology in Chicago, which has about 130 post grad students and even offers a PHd in design! The objective of the degree course is to give designers the tools to be credible in business context and to present their design contributions to their clients as a business function. To do this there are handy slides with enough charts and grids to please any client. An interesting observation of his, which I alone found quite amusing - clients are often afraid to hand their work over to designers because they fear the designer will fundamentally change their brand, but if we look around we find that 99.9% of brands have hardly changed at all in our lifetime, so radical change is actually an exception. Designers need to be able to take responsibility for articulating the value of their own work and worth - if we can do this, we will, says John," have the power to transform our environment on an enormous scale."
Waiting for David Carson to arrive, was like waiting for your favourite rock band to come on stage, he really is about as big a celebrity as a designer can be, and had queues of adoring students lining up afterwards to get his autograph. Actually, I also got one. I told him that in 1990 I had been trying to teach students at the AAA School about classical typography when all they wanted to do was Ray-gun and Beach Culture layouts. He was suitably sympathetic. But seriously, isn't it amazing to find someone with a such a vast body of work, who still retains as much passion, originality and sheer edgy whackiness as this guy. He has studios in New York, South Carolina and the Caribbean - guess which office is the most popular. "Because something is legible doesn't mean it communicates" is one of his classic lines and after all, he remains, the grandmaster of meaningful white space.
Vince did not like coming on after DC and you can't blame him. Anybody's work looks static after that. But with responsibilities such as Art Direction for The Independent newspaper and signage for the Sydney Opera House it wouldn't really do to go throwing type all over the place, so he needn't have apologised. Actually a brand new literary magazine called Zembla and numerous other art and photography books revealed an amazing variety of beautifully crafted spreads. His sound advice for designers - don't let your work consume you, look after your health, your friends and family, and also involve your clients openly in your processes and in so doing build better relationships.
Coffee is a vice of mine....I've just taken 200 images out of my presentation and changed the speed from 15 seconds to 11. In ancient Egypt an artisan was commissioned by the Pharoah to carve out a vessel and thereafter 20 or 30 others were found to replicate the vessel, this was the beginning of the industrial revolution, design has always been about mass production, cloning is just an extreme form of mass production. Design is an abused word - it is where embellishment crosses over with style , it's how we categorise time, a sensibility in time, we dissect and analyse history through the artefacts of the time, design is a driving force, symbiotic with contemporaneity. Artists are people who are hyper-perceptive of the now. What we are experiencing now is 35 years of hardcore post-modernism, raiding the vaults of everything that has been done before, not in the moment. A phenomemena is something that the minute it happens you feel really alive hence phenomenality, everything was at one time original. In the 1960's there were 625 choices for the colour schemes of cars, now we have cars being produced by digital arms, why can't we just programme in all our specs and get them customised exactly as we want them - call it designocracy or democratic design. Where globalism monopolises, the digital age allows for mass individualism. If the object is evil [who was it that said that?] in that the object is an obstacle to being human, the only reason we still make everything like we used to, is an obsessive nostalgia. Yet we're experiencing a new casualism, the dry-cleaning business is 30% down because men don't wear suits anymore. Last year 60% of Christmas gifts were non-material - video games, software, DVDs, spas and massages. As designers
