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Product Designers are Showing Their AngstDesigners are in an explosive mood.
Surplus hand grenades are turning up as candle lamps, in basic military metal or plated with silver or gold.
"Grenades are such interesting looking shapes," says New York designer Piet Houtenbos, "but all they are designed to do is blow up in a million pieces."
Toy soldiers are being melted and reshaped into plastic "War Bowls" (The lamps cost $40 to $60, the bowls close to $300).
London designer Dominic Wilcox has brought winners and losers from Waterloo together at last in his oven, along with a few ninjas and knights.
"Some say it conjures up memories of playing toy soldiers as a child," Wilcox reported by e-mail.
"Some see a representation of the horrors of war.
There is no right answer."
Such objects are for sale, for dozens of dollars or hundreds.
But generating mass-market consumption is not the point.
At the cutting edge, product designers are acting like artists.
Their best works are generating emotional charges far beyond traditional notions of function.
Insiders talk up the movement as an overdue crossover between industrial design and fine art.
Some call the remix DesignArt.
Murray Moss, a New York retailer who serves on the board of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, says there hasn't been a period of such fertile creativit
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23/1/2006 | Viewed 42,390 time(s)
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