on of the design philosophies that i have a lot of time for is that of recontextualisation… this applies to objects and their uses. marcantonio raimondi malerba goes even further to play with their identities and interchange their functionalities.
it has delivered striking results which move past the design ethos to a place where he asks of his table lamp design greta; to be a lamp or not to be a table? his ironic humor permeates the products which services a large gap in the sterility of the mainstream design industry; our relationship with objects. here the renegade notions about art-design doesn’t interest me much. it only testifies to the stick-in-the-mud attitude that designers and artist wrap around their egos, creating an endless stream of new genres like utility-art, designer-object and other uselessness. i much prefer to treat each on it’s own merit and veer away from the temptation to re-classify everything. malerba’s designs may be artistic to some but what i find most intriguing is the way in which it challenges conventional design and re-appropriation to the point where it almost becomes anti-design. the combinations of everyday commonality with a new perspective is what make these designs so powerful. one of my main concerns with the tired design tradition has always been the ‘new’-ness; what is new, why is it new and most notably, why do we always need new. ‘new’ and it’s built in redundancy has always been part of my critique in design and my pet hate would be the newest of course. i much rather prefer to look at ‘different’; a different material, use or aesthetic. beauty is to be found in unexpected places and our ideas around efficiency and utility dates faster than the latest computer processor. that is why i look for paradigm-shifts rather than purist design ethics (bauhaus cured me of that). design is about removing boundaries and not about inventing them.