LONDON — There is one question that everyone should sensibly ask before designing or making something to show at the Milan Furniture Fair. Does the world need another chair?
Memory chair, designed by Tokujin Yoshioka for Moroso.
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Sedia, designed by Enzo Mari in 1974, reissued by Artek.
The sensible answer is “no.” The world is already stuffed with chairs, many of which made their debuts at past Milan fairs. We don’t need more of them, just as we don’t need more tables, lamps, vases, closets, or any of the other objects that will be exhibited at the 2010 fair opening Wednesday. Unless, of course, they’re gobstoppingly innovative, beautiful, sustainable, expressive, useful or whatever.
That’s the strength and weakness of “Milan,” as the design world calls it. There won’t be anything special about most of the stuff that’s shown there. (It will be mediocre at best; a pointless waste of resources, at worst.) Though there will be a few exceptions, and several hundred thousand people will flock to see them.
Producing something special is getting tougher for the furniture industry. One reason is, of course, the recession, which cast a cloud over the 2009 fair, when attendance at the cavernous Rho fairground fell for the first time in years, to 313,385 from a record 348,452 in 2008. Tellingly there will be fewer exhibitors there this week, just 2,499, compared with 2,723 last year.
The economic pressure is now easing slightly, as the industry’s new markets in Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe return to growth. But demand remains weak in the established markets of North America and Western Europe. “It’s still a negative situation,” said Patrizia Moroso, creative director of Moroso, the Italian furniture company. “Some markets have huge growth potential, and there are signs of recovery in others, but it will be a slow process, because there is a more cautious approach to spending.”
The industry is being cautious, too. Hundreds of cocktail parties, dinners, previews and press conferences will be thrown in Milan this week, but beneath the hullabaloo, manufacturers are quietly presenting fewer new products, and have pruned their existing ranges, by dropping anything that isn’t selling well. Even the shiniest design stars have seen their royalties fall sharply.
That said, the furniture industry has weathered recessions before, and will do so again. A knottier problem is that (and there’s no euphemistic way of saying this) the sort of stuff on show at the fair just isn’t as interesting as it once was, at least not in terms of design.
First, technology is now more important than furniture in product design. (Odds are that the most drooled-over objects in Milan this week will be shiny new Apple iPads, not chairs.) Second, design’s intellectual focus has swung away from producing tangible things, like furniture, toward the abstract process of applying design thinking to ethical issues, such as social, environmental or humanitarian problems, and developing sexy new technologies, like data visualization.
The title of the exhibition to be staged by the hot Dutch design school, Design Academy Eindhoven, says it all – “?” (It isn’t alone. The Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York has named its forthcoming Design Triennial, “Why Design Now?”) “We thought it would be interesting to show how designers take an idea and make it real by asking questions, because that’s how they make sense of change,” explained Ilse Crawford, the British designer who co-curated the Eindhoven show as a department head there. “Design needs to be seen more as a critical process, and less about making things look good.”
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