Looking Back and Forward
It’s a new year. Although a new day, a new path, and a new chapter can begin anytime outside the 1st of January, we celebrate it as the day to mark a changing course of life. We reflect on the year that has passed, try to foresee what’s in the future, and make plans to navigate that future. To reflect on the passing year, it’s essential to be aware of the currents that have happened: some of its peak and low points.
At the dawn of 2022, we saw several unfortunate passing in the design world. The death of Fernando Campana, one of the Campana Brothers duo, has reminded us again of the kind of creation that break the boundaries of craft, art, and design objects. Their Brazilian identity dominated their works but remained relevant and inspiring to the global audience. And in this era of authentic identity, their approach—since the Estudio Campana inception in 1983—has become even more relevant. Something worth noting for ourselves and other Indonesian creatives: it proves that looking at our own identity and exploring should never be second-guessed.
Left, Vermelha Chair, edited by Edra, 1998 Right, Cadeira Plástico Bolha, 1995 Image Courtesy : Wallpaper
Marcus Fairs, the founder and editor-in-chief of Dezeen online media, also passed last year. Although the media he founded comes from London, the quality of it has resonated globally, even in Indonesia. Our home country needs more design media existence to complete its design industry ecosystem. We can learn a thing or two from the impact of Dezeen on to design industry, globally and locally, and push the agenda of good design journalism in Indonesia. Yet, at almost the same time, several AI software suddenly makes a broad and global appearance, from visual art generator Dall-E and Midjourney to text generator ChatGPT. Both of them are groundbreaking with their own rights, but to journalism and the art of storytelling through text, it poses a real threat as it poses a very obscured line between truth and made-ups—very meta. Journalism and the readers should get more ready for more meta things that will appear in the future.
As the world spins towards more chaos and uncertainty—one of it being the war between Russia and Ukraine, if you haven’t known—there’s an essential survival skill we can hone and equip to be in the eye of the storm. As Jenny Odell has also said, “Given that all of the issues that face us demand an understanding of complexity, interrelationship, and nuance, the ability to seek and understand context is nothing less than a collective survival skill.”
Object-wise, the design world saw a lot of new creative energy through new object creation. We saw it firsthand with the return of design fairs and exhibitions from hibernation due to the pandemic. Many brands and designers seem to carry—although not explicitly—nature-oriented narratives mixed with contemporariness in their designs as the world is at its most significant concern for the sustainability of life on earth. It’s resulted in more setups for outdoor living or intervention in forgotten spaces, organic and minimal shapes looking like they were taken out of dunes, responsive designs, and expressiveness of digital spheres formed in a three-dimensional, real-life world, as an ode to alternative life that tries to escape the natural doom.
Take a look at a few examples of those narratives:
Entrance Threshold by OMA Image Courtesy : SolidNature
Requiem, The Divine Inspiration by Lee Broom, FuoriSalone, 2022 Image Courtesy : Elle Decor
Triennale Milano, Forest Tales by AHEC Image Courtesy : Interni Magazine
Although those narratives have created increasingly more exciting works, sadly, the much-anticipated gathering of world leaders at COP27 brought much-criticized results because of the seeming lack of seriousness and meaningful actions established by the event. There was a lot of disappointment among the citizen of the world. Meanwhile, the world expo in Japan that will happen in 2023 highlights collaborative capabilities that communities can have, at least in Japan. But the failure of most world leaders to make collective efforts in saving the world made us question whether we can truly have those capabilities or if it is just jargon on paper.
At the very least, due to it, we forecast that there’ll be more design directed to intimacy as we start to return to our loved ones to spend the limited time we have, a more artful object coming from self-expressiveness and anti-establishment, and more recycle-based and sustainable objects for sure. This is the time to climb over the mounting trash produced by the global population, and the track to the top of it would not be easy. Moreover, this is the time to pause and take care of what we already have and what we’ve done.
