WANTED ONLINE | Does the world really need another “designer” chair? A case for bricolage as a strategy for global repair
Enter the bricoleur — one who takes a designerly approach to working with what’s already in the world. Nash has built a career on preventing plastic waste from being, well, wasted. Bricoler is a French loan word meaning “to tinker or make do with what’s at hand”. It often leads to innovative design solutions that are not likely when employing a more engineered approach. Bricolage relies on acts of trying, testing, and playing. And serious play is what Nash and his crew do best.
As an example, the work of São Paulo’s Campana Brothers exemplifies the global success of a studio of humble beginnings that now surfs the stratosphere of collectible design. For me, their potency as designers lies in the instinctive rawness at the heart of their earliest pieces, often chairs. These works, such as the Favela chair , made from timber offcuts, are “inhabited” by flashes of observational and improvisational cunning. The downside of global recognition is that such designs become unattainablefor most. This skewed notion of “value” is as old as the failure of the Bauhaus movement to make real its original intention of excellent and affordable “design for all” through mass productionin collaboration with industry.
Understandings of design have been dictated largely from the perspective of the West and North. Definitions are canonised and rarely sufficiently questioned. In the era of ubiquitous hashtags, #design is often misused — and almost as poorly framed as the word #curated tends to be. Bricolage offers us more open, site specific, and inclusive understandings of design.
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