Therese Granlund

Department: Contextual Design

Form follows Foam

“Can I skip the signature of the star designer?” The designs depend fully on the properties of the basic, hard to control construction material.

Design can be seen as the vehicle of the
established aesthetics of our time. But it
is a car stuck in the slow lane, constantly
being overtaken by other media in popular
culture. A state of indifference has turned
the design industry into a gathering of
narcissistic cowards, a club that also
includes myself.

This project is an investigation into how design could be more vital, more challenging and less predictable. It explores different possibilities to confront and attack the obsession with perfection. Perfection – the drive towards an aesthetic that lives beyond an object’s function and meaning – is considered in this project as a kind of fascism. It is an ideology, resulting in design that is mute and autistic, ignoring
design’s power to speak about subjects
beyond the superficial.

This project also asks why the ego of the
designer dominates creativity, why ‘process’
is the new essence of design, and why a
designer cannot rely on an object finding
its intended context.

The culmination of the thesis is a design
proposal, a series of objects that will arouse
curiosity by their being and making. They question rather than answer, balancing
between insanity and tolerance, friction
and flux.