Hella Jongerius on Design
The August issue of Icon magazine has a piece by Lesley Jackson on Dutch designer Hella Jongerius, who says about her four vases designed for Ikea1:
“[...] So I thought I’d design some vases, nothing special, but I’d like to see if it’s possible to keep my handwriting, my style, my grammar, if they’re mass-produced.” [...] “It’s a kind of craftsmanship in mass-production,” she explains. “In the end, craft is not about making one. The challenge was to design a vase that could be made in huge quantities, but to make it in a very crafty way. [...]”
So is craft = hand made?
How she feels about design:
Jongerius would be the first to admit that her work is perverse. One minute she is reinforcing expectations, the next minute she pulls the rug from under our feet. These conflicting impulses reflect her ambivalent attitude towards the design world and what she calls “this whole marketing shit”. “I like to do things for aesthetic reasons, but not aesthetic reasons that we know from marketing,” she explains. “Design is a profession that I hate and like in equal measure. There’s no reason to design anything, yet it’s something that I like to do. [...]”
1 Couldn’t find these, neither in the catalog nor online; the article says they should be launched in August.