I love tracking trends. Social trends, food trends, fashion trends – all of it fascinates me. But aesthetic trends, specifically those that bubble up in design, fascinate me most. Why? Because picking up on a trend and chasing it back to it’s source is a bit like sleuthing. It’s damned good detective work. You can see the signal (evidence) but the reason (motive) takes a little more digging and a fair amount of intuition. In the past 20 months or so I’ve been fascinated by two trends in particular: the wide edge and the bird cage.
The Wide Edge tracks the proliferation of broad, flat-surfaced geometries that have become the de facto aesthetic statement of our digi-centric lives. Masses are minimal, surface development nominal and fit and finish or “joinery” (how the pieces come together) is where the character of the thing comes to life. These geometries create broad canvas-like surfaces which give designers and CMF specialist a lot of space to experiment with ever subtler color and texture mash-ups. In fact the color pallets applied to these forms, usual muted on large forms and super intense on small forms, have become much more sophisticated than the standard whites, black and chromes of just five years ago. What’s more; to pull it off really really well requires a deep commitment to good tooling and high quality production. It is not a visual strategy for the lazy nor cheap. Looking at geometries that use this language I can’t help but compare over developed surfacing to something akin to skeuomorphism rise and decline in the interaction design space; a buttery deception that may taste savory at first but which quickly becomes sickening and overpowering.
The Bird Cage tracks a genuine curiosity; the growing tendency to wrap all manner of objects within a seemingly arbitrary exoskeleton. I first saw this trend emerging around lamps but in recent months have seen it applied to stools, vases and desks. I’m still up in the air on this one a bit, but the celebration of this external structure seems to have its roots in two artifacts of the digital design process: the lattice structures which some 3D printers use to support builds and the tessellated or polygon surface representation prevalent in CAD packages. So far this one seems a bit more stylistic than the Wide Edge but I wouldn’t count it out, time will tell if it can develop into something more functional; a light-weight frame, a permeable mass, sculptural antennae – who knows?
As for me? The wide-edge is driving me to revisit the work of 70’s sculptor Donald Judd. Master extraodinaire of minimalism. Aesthetics come in elliptical orbits – habituating one’s self to their rhythms is not only good practice, it’s sure to impress friends, peers, and clients alike.