Looking at such a manipulated photo, we are at the same time our parents, who we look at in our faces, as well as our own children, who look at today's photo with nostalgia. The Polaroid filter also allows you to look through today's banality and actually see the photographed right away . But what does this have to do with Czech Grand Design?
Small Speakers
What you won't know when you open Respect. Karolína Vránková recently wrote in the column dedicated to the presentation of domestic design awards Czech Grand Design, the skeptical time when the economy is destroying the crisis, somehow exposed too much that more and more chairs, lamps and stylish things are not what the world needs at the moment. There were times when better objects were believed to improve the world. There were also times when design was provocative and attacked with banal taste. Recently, however, he has presented himself as a field that only produces even more design nonsense. (Respekt 12, 2012) Of course, this must not only be a pretty sad read for Respekt readers, full of big words, important observations and interpretations, but fortunately we will also read that it suited the moderators of the evening. What about that now?
I don't know, so I'll turn around. Small Speakers are a common name for a popular sound profile that you set up in audio applications and players so that something other than a distant melody disappearing into an unpleasant growl can be heard from your laptop or the player's boxes. That is, a function that suppresses the treble and emphasizes the bass so that the soundtrack sounds a little better. You are digitally exceeding hardware limits. However, it is probable (if this is not already the case) that in a while we will switch on the function of the same name out of nostalgia, but with the opposite effect; it will create the familiar tin snort from the hifi sound. You downgrade your equipment. From optics to better subjects will improve the world you are doing an incomprehensible thing. In this way, you deny the features and quality of your hi-fi system for reasons that were not anticipated in building the future. Like Instagram, one of the most advanced mobile applications for sharing photos and editing them through filters simulating the typical colors and fog of Polaroid. Why, in fact, do millions of users around the world want to share their photos of yesterday, just like the poor quality of the 1960s? Are their photos otherwise boring? Why then do they share them? What value do photos gain in their eyes thanks to a filter that evokes an analog visual that they don't even remember personally? What kind of nostalgia is this? Sharing has created a kind of global photography market into which our moments enter and fall into disinterest like most others through a relentless network of likes. Here they become really banal and useless. But with Polaroid, they seem to age in decades and gain their meaning. Looking at such a manipulated photo, we are at the same time our parents, who we look at in our faces, as well as our own children, who look at today's photo with nostalgia. The Polaroid filter also allows you to look through today's banality and actually see the photographed right away . But what does this have to do with Czech Grand Design?
Back to the article from Respekt. Leaving aside the problematic assumptions (who knows what the world needs at the moment? How did the times when better objects were believed to improve the world turn out? Design is said to have lost any ethos. He resigned himself to the transformation of society and it seems that he has no other meaning than the endless production of seasonal uselessness, or production of the seasons themselves. Yes, it must have been once intoxicating, contemplating the design swinging in the new tubular chair behind the glass wall of the functionalist cafe and believing in its deeper meaning. However, our dissatisfaction and frustration today does not stem from the failure of the world of design , or from abandoning the right path of pipe bending. On the contrary, it can be said that almost everything has been achieved and more and more horizons have opened and continue to open. Some useful items have mutated into fetishes, others have become so trivial that we don't even notice their sophistication and beauty. However, talking about design today is so different from, for example, the 1930s that it doesn't really make sense to refer or compare. What is design today? How to affect it in a few sentences? And what's the point of trying? Design is ubiquitous, our active experience with it is everyday, not only in text editors and other computer applications, the Internet and various mobile devices. Today, we are almost all design experts, just as we have become experts in shopping. At the same time, design co-creates extremely sophisticated technologies that we simply do not understand in the slightest, and it would be bold to have an opinion on it. Today, the field is also a kind of meta-design that creates a structured space for our creativity (as marketers would write), not just a manufacturer of final or static products. That's why the mention of Small Speakers and Instagram, where you can't even say where the design ends and the technology or programming begins. The radicality and discovery with which design permeates our world and shapes us is unprecedented and incomparable with recent history.
However, this unprecedentedly stagnant world of design largely misses the point of Czech Grand Design. Of course. And it will not be so much a problem of the event itself as of us and our current situation. Like yoghurts or monitors, for example, trends in our country are not created, they are mainly multiplied and consumed here.
A2 , 2012