In March 2008 Philippe Starck, who was already one of the best known designers alive, shocked the world saying that “design is dead”. The absolute apex of design creativity – he argued in an interview with Die Zeit Magazine – was reached in the 1970’s and ever since we have just been copying and modifying. “Everything I made,” he said, “was unnecessary,” and then went on to apologize for being a “producer of materiality” and even announced his upcoming retirement.
While one could argue that design may conceptually have died in some ways, the design industry is alive and well and so is Mr Starck’s career. He did, in fact, say he would continue designing only if he found an entirely new way of expressing himself. That new way is by allowing for every single person to truly express themselves through design: it materialized in his TOG project and Starck himself said that 3D printing will play a major role in it in the near future.
During the latest Milan Design Week and Salone del Mobile, Starck and his partners presented TOG, which at the moment is an online shop where people can customize bare pieces of furniture by choosing colours and materials. The furniture is currently produced by traditional processes but in the future it will be 3D printed to afford the maximum level of customization.
In fact Starck will open a TOG Store in Sao Paulo, Brazil, where customers will – within a couple of years – be able to make their own pieces of design furniture through 3D printing technologies. The same will happen with the TOG website. In fact, in Starck’s vision (which often tends to be quite radical), in the near future cities will have kiosks with 3D printers for anyone to use and 3D print what they created.
“People will be able to match and mix pieces of design to get exactly what they like, according to their own taste”, he said to the Wall Street Journal, “this is a fight against trends,” he continued, “the only acceptable trend is to be proud of your differences.” Expressed by someone that became famous by making things that thousands of people bought it may sound a bit like a clever promotional strategy but it is definitely a concept that many in the 3D printing industry can get on board with.
