breadedEscalope
(Sascha Mikel, Michael Tatschl, Martin Schnabl)

A material’s meaning is not intrinsic to the material, not a function of its chemistry or its physics. It is the ways in which the material is tooled that introduces culture to the physicality of the material.
The way in which a tree is manipulated into cultural form from its own biological condition depends upon the ways in which it is cut, seasoned and otherwise treated. An axe will deliver a culturally distinct object from the smoothness of French polish.
The manufacturing of material is the manufacture of precise cultural meaning as much as it is the production of stuff that we can build with. In this way, a tree can become, for example, rustic (a log), raw (say, plywood) or luxurious (a lacquered veneer). Though usually distinct, these are not fixed states but a spectrum of possibilities.
By combining two different states within one object, it is suggested that the desire for truth to materials should prompt the question, “Which truth?”


bl<m design working group (Katharina Maria Bruckner, Hans Stefan Moritsch, Verena Litzka)

There is an irony in Adolf Loos’ rage against the tattoo, for while writing it he must surely have stroked his moustache. From the perspective of our clean-shaven age, a moustache exists as part of a historical aesthetic of body adornment, the decorative styling of a secondary sexual characteristic – not so distant from the tattoo.
Hair – how we cut and style it – exists at the intersection of our bodies’ physiology and design. It is a point where bodiliness becomes socialised, where identity politics, social convention, and individual expression are cut and trained into the stuff that extends from our follicles. Our haircuts are part body, part object.
Like many vernacular applied arts, hair-design has an ephemeral materiality that suggests a malleability of meaning. Equally, its own set of techniques and formal solutions to the ‘problem’ of hair – the ways it marshals of thousands of very thin strands into some kind of coherence. Here, high design might learn new approaches and techniques from other less canonical design fields.


DANKLHAMPEL (Katharina Dankl, Lisa Elena Hampel)

Food, it transpires, is a matter primarily of formatting. The array of equipment, tools, and other accoutrements in our kitchens are devices that turn ingredients of varied scale and consistency into discrete assemblages. Cooking encodes nutrition is into portions of social meaning.
In this way, we might think of cooking as part of a much wider process, one that involves the construction of gas mains and freight logistics as much as sautéing, roasting or drizzling. Food then is ‘cultured’ by more than simply taste and texture. It is a product of economic, technological and social frameworks, just like any other kind of design.
Thinking of food-as-design can begin a dialogue between public and private realms, between the scales of the personal, social, economic and political which populate our plates. In this way, a recipe might be conceived as a participatory social action plan and the redesign of  kitchen tools might allow alternative conclusions to the way food performs socially.


Guerra Vanzetti (Carla Guerra, Bartolomeo Vanzetti)

The rise of so-called tribal body arts within subcultures of advanced economies is, we can speculate, an unlikely result of industrialisation. When Adolf Loos wrote of tattooing in the modern age, he characterised it as degenerate: ‘criminal’ because of its unnecessary ornament, its uselessness.
The rise of the contemporary tattoo is a gesture of resistance, an attempt to escape, perhaps, from the all-pervasive flattening of culture and identity in neoliberal economies. Tattoos – and the co-opting of other primitive, criminal and degenerate aesthetics – are attempts to reconstruct sensations of authenticity and truth. This, of course, is an ironic reversal of Loos’ argument. Loosian sentiment – the search for a ‘truth’ in design – is expressed through an anti-Loosian technique of self-ornamentation. This paradox is a perfect explication of the complexity of meanings – and the idea of truth – within contemporary design.


Nina Levett

A wedding is as close to most of us – even designers – get to a Gesamtkunstwerk. Its choreography of objects, clothes, flowers, food, music, words and so on creates a total and immersive experience. Its design – though perhaps a form of design that we wouldn't normally recognise as design – becomes a means of expressing complex set of social relations, emotional conditions and supernatural beliefs. Within this milieu, objects – and the relationship between these objects - take on heightened significance.

As intersection between primitive ritual, commercialised of romance and legal necessity, weddings are an example of design as an expanded field of operation – a point where design and life come into brief union.
A wedding is an aesthetic high, an exceptional condition within everyday life whose visual achievements are captured by the only time we are likely to hire a professional photographer.

Sebastian Menschhorn

We can understand ornament as a means of inscribing information onto the surfaces of objects and buildings. Ornament imprints social, political and economic values. It configures design as a medium of communication. Historically, the languages of ornament have been often been arcane, requiring special knowledge to decode their finer meanings.
More recent design traditions have seen the delamination of the ornamental from its object-host. Communication has become more direct while design has operated in a more abstract way, rejecting direct communication. Their separation might be eloquently illustrated by thinking of the relationship of a billboard and the building it is applied to.
Estranged for so long, we might wonder how these two design attributes might react if they were to be reunited. What might each have learned in their time apart? What stories might they tell each other? And how might their reunion be consummated?


mischer’traxler (Katharina Mischer, Thomas Traxler)

After Modernism’s great purge of ornament, it is difficult to think of decoration as anything else but a veneer, as something separate from that which it adorns.
However, even when ornament has been expunged, the blank surfaces that remain are not released into liberated abstraction. Despite themselves, they still operate as signifiers of other concerns.
We could in this sense, reconceptualise any kind of surface effect as a form of ornament. Not ornament in an obvious traditional manner, but ornament in the sense of communication, narrative, media or even a psychogram. That is to say, surfaces continue to transmit meaning.
Ornament, then, might be much more than is traditionally conceived. It might be rehabilitated as the point which registers much wider aesthetic, cultural, social and political meanings in the surface of things.


Katja Nagy & Bernadette Krejs

Roads, sports, airfields are spaces where the codification of landscape through their surface is explicit. Their markings dictate the ways in which space is to be occupied: Speed, direction and so on are indicated by clear graphic languages.
We might think, however, of the codifications of other horizontal fields that also act as indicators of occupation. The landscapes of domesticity, for example, may be less explicit in their instruction, but their social and cultural codings are just as profound. Though these are spaces that remain programmatically separate, we could group them within a common category of two-dimensional architecture – where carpets and rugs merge with football pitches and highways into a hybridised archigraphic spatial meta-language.
The possibilities of this spatial language might allow new forms of coding of space where graphic pattern becomes an indicator of programme. A flat-land architecture of the horizontal can blur distinctions between highway and hallway or penalty area and parking space, suggesting more fluid and temporal types of occupation.


Andreas Pohancenik

Pastillage is a thick sugary paste that was used historically to construct ephemeral sugar sculptures used as centrepieces at the banquets of the aristocracy. These often depicted buildings, trophies and objects as well as displaying filigree decorative effects.
As sugar became more commonly available, pastillage became something more quotidian. Its contemporary form is seen in the decoration of wedding cakes and the sugary flowers applied to birthday cakes.
If pastillage often historically represented architecture and objects, might this tradition be reversed and allow architecture and design to learn from its now distant relative? If we think of a cake, in some way at least, as an architectural object, might we also be able to think of ways in which architecture and design might be able to possess cake-like qualities?
The ways in which cakes are iced, frosted and otherwise decorated to communicate specific and personal meanings might be scaled up, allowing architecture to reconceive the ways it uses and the purpose of its surfaces.


Patrick Rampelotto

Trophies have little claim to functionalism. As objects, they are functionally useless –cups that are not cups. Instead, their function is symbolic. To commemorate whatever special and outstanding achievement that may have occurred they use a language of specialness that we associate with winning: shininess, reflectiveness, curves and surfaces that refract light.
Behind this decorative sparkle, however, it transpires that trophies – at least the kind of trophies you and I are likely to win – are literally assemblages of effects. They are assembled from a range of modularised and mass-produced components that can be assembled into specific forms of celebration by the addition of particular elements.
This industrialisation of individuality is unsurprising. (Do you really believe that our measly achievements deserve something hand crafted?) The reassembly of these trophy components, sorted into wands of self-similarity, allows us to examine (and enjoy) the decorative language of trophiness.