Joel Blanco

Department: Contextual Design
Website: www.joelblanco.com

Super Lekker Super Mooi

Becoming a designer forces you to think about the value of things: what is worthy and what is not? With his ‘Super Lekker Super Mooi’ series, Joel Blanco challenges ideas that take themselves too seriously, and at the same time searches for new meaning. His design strategy: combining the understandable with the extraordinary. Take this huge donut for example. It evokes the idea of breaking the world record for the biggest donut ever made. On the one hand this confronts us with the knowledge that, in the end, everything is silly and meaningless in the grand scheme of things. On the other hand, breaking a world record proposes a new kind of value: it is not the value of eternal truth or wisdom, but rather temporary fun.
Analysing the donut brings Joel to the hole in the middle that defines it. Contextual design is about designing the context of that emptiness, he argues. “In fact contextual design is about making donuts. Let’s show the hole and celebrate the dough, because one would not exist without the other.”