Phillipe Starck’s Design Ideology

In the video, I was most intrigued by Philip Starck’s drive of passion – making a better life for friends and loved ones. In some other interviews, Starck also particularly mentioned that he does not design for a “target consumer” which is largely emphasized in my past design experience. He designs for the people we love and respect such as family, friends, or us. I think his approach to design is very nonmaterialistic. Besides the quality and functionality of the product, he also values honesty, earnestness, and passion in his design projects. The pureness of the original intention is extremely valuable.  

I think his concept also matches my understanding of the two aspects that make a good designer. Same as Phillipe Starck, I regard a good designer has to consist passion and love. Only when serving the people we care and love, we are able to fully immerse ourselves into a sense of empathy. Only with the emotional connection, we can pull the most potential and creativity out of ourselves in the design. Only by having passion and love, the designer is not a design machine who only coldly thinks about the function, the formulas that make the product profitable, or simply fulfill the requirements of “target consumers”… The product is sensational, warm, loving. What’s more, it delivers an earnest message to the users.

I think the other aspect of a good designer is a well-rounded life. This means the designer should constantly get in touch with all aspects of people, lifestyles, mindsets, problems, etc. From the rich life experience of the designer, there can be a wide range of passions that can be the inspirations and initial points of the design ideas. However, this goes against Starck’s management of concentration which he mentioned that his creative and disruptive ideas come from “living like a monk” – disconnecting from the world. I think Starck’s management of concentration is definitely a good strategy to avoid our creativity being influenced by the mainstream and conventionality. Yet, this goes against the core of design – connecting and communicating with people. The design process should be a combination of closed self-concentration and open communication. A complete enclosed design process sets a physical and mental limitation to the designer from the numerous ideas and possibilities from the rest of the world… 

To understand Starck’s management of concentration better, I looked into some of his projects. A lot of Stark’s industrial designs are “his own idea” rather than “answering a question”, according to the two types of design initiating points that Starck raised. In this scenario, instead of practically solving a real-life problem that requires abundant communication with the “target consumers”, he just let his creativity freely burst out new ideas. The discreteness of some radical appearance of his design is the attraction for the consumers. People are not buying for a certain function, but for the creativity, satisfying curiosity, and for the connotation of lifestyle that the product delivers. For example, the consumers might not understand the function of Starck’s Juicy Salif (figure. 1) at the first glance. The curiosity drives them to buy this product, but the product might not be absolutely useful or solve a significant problem in life. Also, Stack V Avor (figure. 2), Starck’s faucet design, focused on the creative aesthetic through incorporating a vortex in the transparent faucet body. The aesthetic is definitely appealing like a flawless sculpture. However, the price of the faucet is more than $1,500, some variations of colors can make the price exceed $2,000. The price is unaffordable and unnecessary for most people. Thus, we can see a lot of his designs are “psychological function” over “practical function”. This also goes against the incline to practical function when Starck mentioned that he thinks design is to “make things that deserve to exist – to serve the community”. The high price and the target market of the high-class are also opposing Starck’s ideology of democratic design, which focuses on mass production with lower cost. 

For sure, there are a lot of controversial points that Stark mentioned in his interview and his products: psychological function vs. practical function, passion, and love vs. enclosed management of concentration. Even though they are standing on opposite sides, I think a good designer should embrace all. The inclusiveness can bring more possibilities and limitless space to design. 

Citation

Figure 1.

Benedict Hobson |9 July 20145 comments. “Movie: Alberto Alessi on Philippe Starck’s Juicy Salif Lemon Squeezer.” Dezeen, 10 July 2019, https://www.dezeen.com/2014/07/09/movie-alberto-alessi-juicy-salif-controversial-lemon-squeezer-philippe-starck/.