The twentieth century is the first century of self-conscious, total design at every level of our living and environment. Care and vision in application of design have come to be demanded in every aspect of modern life – from our kitchens and bathrooms, to our factories and workshops, from our clothes and domestic objects, to the packaging of pocket calculators or the structuring of plastic dining chairs.Although the word has been used since at least the fifteenth century, when Italian writers spoke of “disegno” in describing the quality of line possessed by an image or artifact, in all essentials “design” is an industrial or post-industrial concept. With the introduction of mass-production, the people who invented ideas for objects became separated from the people who made them who, again, were separated from the people who sold them.The industrial revolution also created the concept of the market.
Personal needs, or the whims of a patron, were replaced by a more abstract demand: the tastes of a large, amorphous body of consumers. The modern designer came into being as an intermediary between industry and the consumer. His role was to adapt the products of industry to the mass market, to make them more useful and durable, perhaps, but to make them more appealing and commercially successful, certainly.Commercial success is the touchstone of achievement in design, although designers in different cultures have often taken different views as to how the achievement is measured or the success validated.
On the other hand, modern design is a carrier of social changes. Such point of view most precisely corresponds to features of a developing social and economic, political, cultural situation in the societies possessing a high level of development of social structures and technics.The increasing variety of phenomena of a modern industrial and postindustrial society deeply changes essence, the nature of design, qualitatively expanding, opening its opportunities. The modern design becomes design of environment and design of human experience, design of a social context. The subject of design extends before designing social event, designing of style and a way of life, synthesizing of new cultural, moral, social values.
One more aspect of contemporary design is that it is possible to call in a word – a mystery, an ambiguity, and incomprehensibility of forms, of essence that gives to works intriguing depth. The impression is created, that you never can comprehend the depths of object. The ambiguity is sometimes reached by means of the minimal design, introduction of Buddhist symbolics, downturn of forms’ informative capacity level. Frequently such effect is reached due to images and means of computer science.
Many works of designers are designed for independence of an audience in development of new symbols and values.The designer today more than formerly, reinterprets, modifies value of object consumed by the individual, the designer becomes the intermediary, the resonator between the person and his objective-informative environment, becomes the creator not only a subject, but also human experience accompanying this subject. Comprehending new functions of design as functions on creation of experience, styles of life, means of an establishment of interpersonal contacts, the design thus is included in the decision of sharp social problems and problems of the person.New forms of culture, and not just new versions of consumer goods, on designing which the modern design is focused, expanding opportunities of personal participation of each person in creation of own unique microstructure of individual life – should become alternative of mass consciousness and mediocrity, a basis of culture of judiciousness and a wide choice. From my point of view, the design can be considered not only as result, and as complex the social-significant process possessing independent value both for the designer, and for the consumer, and for society as a whole.
