Elanso

What's experimental in a Flat World?
A fragrance by Zaha Hadid. Jewelry for Tiffany's by Frank Gehry. Self-help books for hipsters by Karim Rashid. Signature designers had arrived in the luxury market long ago and by now it's ordinary. Radical or poetic form, once considered experimental, is the not-so-secret weapon of modern brand building. Where design once served industry, now industry often serves design. Here Design meets Art meets Fashion meets the Devil-wears-Prada Catch-22 of a culture industry starving for new icons and rocket-fueled by a viral Web. If the world is flat as Tom Friedman claimed, then so is design--stripped of the hierarchies that used to distinguish high and low, design and art, theoretical and applied. Has this newfound freedom produced wild experimental design thinking? Not enough. Instead, design's intellectual edge has been mostly employed by the vanities of a fashion system. Someday we may recall this period as design's fashion phase. Is it finally time to revive experimental design thinking from this fashion hangover?

It's not that fashion is bad, or unimportant. Design's marriage to Fashion was fated and permanent so that beauty and design storytelling are here to stay. It's just that it's not so experimental any more. The honeymoon is over. It's as if Memphis never died, and instead is continually reincarnated in an aesthetic economy endlessly hungry for new styles, with plenty of colorful characters ready to exploit new aesthetic markets. Outside this fashion system there are plenty of juicy design issues that deserve experimental exploration in search of new modern meanings. Experimental design is the way that design comes to know itself better and to advance its potentials. It's the way the field of design moves forward. Design has absorbed fashion. Uncharted waters await.