Designing for the 21st century
Date
May, 2022
Location
Rotterdam, Netherlands
Some argue the Industrial Revolution gave birth to design as we know it today by introducing mechanised production. Prior to it, objects were often crafted by one individual who was responsible for the conception, planning, and making. Industrialisation, with its division of labor, separated conception and planning from actual making, changing design forever.
During the 18th century, design wasn't seen as a framework bridging theory and practice, and its philosophical implications were unclear. In the 19th century, design became a topic of intellectual interest, gaining momentum in the early 20th century when figures like Walter Gropius began uniting theory and practice through industrial means. Gropius founded Bauhaus in 1919, aiming to bridge social idealism and commercial reality in the aftermath of World War I, allowing design to adapt to the ever-evolving nature of the industry.
Design in the 20th century, influenced by Bauhaus, saw a surge in complexity as numerous people and processes got involved in production. The outcome was no longer solely an individual's effort, but a collective one, shaped by diverse perspectives. The only constant was perhaps understanding that design should come to terms with the mechanised logic of production, largely based on matrices, moulds, casts, dies, or stamps, enabling economies of scale through identical copies.
Today, in the 21st century, the logic of industrialisation is challenged by the proliferation of digital fabrication tools that merge making and thinking to create a new design paradigm. The first generation of tools in digital fabrication was largely based on subtractive methods, where an object is shaped by removing material. The latest generation of tools is based on additive methods, known as 3D printing, where an object is formed by adding material, layer by layer.
Tools in digital fabrication diverge from the standardised matrix-based mechanised production of the 20th century because producing copies no longer yields economies of scale. There is no need to reuse any matrix when there is none to begin with. When digitally made, any copy is a new original, and making more of the same will not make any of them cheaper. This fundamentally changes the way we design for the 21st century.
