Thoughts on design and its aesthetical functionality nowadays

Year 1990
Text by Pino Poggi

[…] There are carafes, wine, sparkling wine and water glasses which hardly anyone can drink reasonably from any longer… Cutlery which lies badly in the hand and dishes which are hardly suitable for use… or technical products – just think of the car, equipped with so many superfluous bits and pieces which almost extinguish its original and actual function… No!… we can no longer exist with such impractical and wealth related objects… The degeneration of our “industrial design” has gone too far too carelessly… thus, we can no longer survive, the compulsion to use objects that have only a purely aesthetic function, or are simply kitsch. This cannot continue in our society in the long term also because this “unpalatable” design causes terrible deformations of our original habits. It destroys life forms, human situations indispensable to our well-being. These impractical items can only be seen as a gag! I did something like this myself but believe me, it was not a good didactic process for me and it was a negative experience. It nearly damaged my ability to deal with practical things seriously.

The superficiality is spreading like a tumour and the ability to design practical things with visual conciseness is fading… Strategically, it would be advisable to occupy oneself with futurology… this discipline namely gives us notions of other dimensions or at least the possibility to think ahead.

As designers, we must always have a higher sensitivity and gift of observation in comparison to others, we must maintain a constantly curious behaviour that may bring us towards a future-oriented idea by chance or by the favour of the moment. […]

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