Design for life the new reality TV program, which started on 14 september on BBC2.
Philippe Starck a name we all know from the design world has achieved great celebrity worldwide for his long and diverse career but has
been introduced to the british audience as uncomfortable ‘french designer of hotels, transparent louis XV-style chairs and iconic lemon squeezers’.
This new program according to starck, is no less than to create an ‘english style’.
He thinks that the brits haven’t had a new national design aesthetic since terence conran opened his first branch of habitat in the early 1960s.
‘I am a sort of new bottle-opener’, is his way of describing the mentoring of talent. ‘you don’t make good design if you think
about design’, he continues, ‘you make good design if you speak about life, sex, flesh, sweat.’
(in short: to understand the subject, you need to have lived a bit.)
The paradox is that starck owes his gigantic reputation to innovation, yet the series itself is more formulaic.
Twelve eager candidate designers, seven men and five women, were chosen
on the basis of works sent to starck – he had chosen them purely on the basis of the paper drawings
(one proposing a light bulb shaped like a noose, another a vertical, screw-in coffin to save space in cemeteries) and did not even want to know their names or genders.
in the program starck sets them creative tasks, and each week he eliminates the weakest. The winner becomes part of starck’s ‘tribe’, he/she will be invited to his HQ in paris to join his team for a six-month placement..!!!
I know …. a PLACEMENT
The driving idea behind the series was to be real and he tried to take a subject that’s normally deemed to be niche and broadened its appeal.
The jury is still undecided one the Apprentice-esque TV series … But its first airing general thumbs down from design-savvy users of social media.
Most welcomed the focus on design by the programme planners, but most were critical of the execution.
One question though ….. as the ‘students’ are from the UK. Couldn’t they, some ask, find a British designer to front the show?
Starck is intrinsically interesting. His philosophy, honed over years. But to couch his ideas in the notion of an academy is false, and doesn’t make particularly good TV. The selection process for contestants is based purely on each one’s idea for a product and without reference to their personality or broader aptitude. So we start with a mismatch between the guru and his acolytes.
Pundits who’ve seen the entire series indicate that none of the contestants eventually want to work with Starck, nor he with them. Is this because the French culture he so richly upholds in the first episode is poles apart from the British creative spirit? More likely it is a result of the pressures of reality TV forcing unnatural constraints on all concerned.
To ape Sir Alan Sugar’s efforts to popularise business through confrontation doesn’t seem to work so well for design.
I guess we’ll just watch this space …
