Strange Design : from objects design to behaviors design
Publication
Jehanne Dautrey & Emanuele Quinz
ISBN : 978-2-917053-18-8
380 p.
Price : 28 euros
For several years, some strange objects appeared in the world of design : dysfunctional, mysterious, complicated objects. These objects fall under what English designers Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby defined as Critical Design : a speculative and reflexive design which does not suggest solutions but rather asks questions and wants to defy fast assertions, prejudices and commonplaces about the role of products in everyday life.

This book does not aim at going all over this history again, in an exhaustive or linear way, but rather at focusing on some parts of it in order to bring out critical tools that can be useful for the history of design — just like a seismograph that indicates resurgences of a model’s crisis.
Four periods of design’s history are chosen : the Italian Radical period (from 1967 — until Alchimia and Memphis, that are a kind of epilog to this period), conceptual Dutch design from the 1990s, English Critical Design from the 2000s, and an opening on the contemporary scene (particularly in France).
Voir la fiche du projet « Behaviors : strategies and aesthetics of behaviors between art, science and design »
Contributors : Gijs Bakker, Jurgen Bey, Pieke Bergmans, Bless, Jan Boelen, Elio Caccavale, Florence Doléac, Anthony Dunne & Fiona Raby, Didier Faustino, Catherine Geel, Ugo La Pietra, Mathieu Lehanneur, Luca Marchetti, Alessandro Mendini, Gianni Pettena, Stijn Ruys, Noam Toran