Louise Schouwenberg | A conversation that might have taken place

Department

Director documentation 2019-02-15

Louise Schouwenberg, Director at finished Temporary Programme Material Utopias (2013-2015) spoke with Hella Jongerius in 2003 for 'a conversation that may have taken place'.

In 2017 they co-authored the Beyond The New. On The Agency of Things, which explored the life and agency of things when experienced in various contexts.

LOUISE: I’m not talking about a strict dividing line between art and design. It’s the motives that count. People sometimes accuse designers of parasitizing art. They borrow their concepts from the art world, and transform a diluted version of them into usable objects. I have no problem with that in principle - there’s nothing wrong with parasitizing art or anything else. And perhaps designers should be even more shameless about doing so. There’s a lot of inspiration to be had from other disciplines.

HELLA: Exactly, from other disciplines! I often get inspiration from literature and art, as well as from simply keeping my eyes open as I walk along the street. Talent alone won’t get you far in this profession, because there are too many factors involved. You have to be fully aware of what is going on in the world at large, not just in the design world. And street culture is just as important as high culture. We don’t have to be artists or architects ourselves to get inspiration from those disciplines.

LOUISE: Artists are notorious for pinching ideas from one another and from other fields. It can lead to resentment and furious arguments, but apart from that nobody turns a hair. If designers steal things from art, though, it ought to be the content and not just the jargon they take.

HELLA: Designers always flirt with art.

LOUISE: You envy the freedom and higher status of art, yet flirt with the clichés and the jargon of the art world. You exhibit vases on pedestals in white-walled museums and galleries, as though they were autonomous works of art. The air is thick with terms like experiment, content, research and refusal to make concessions. But do they belong in design? Conversely, artists flirt with design because they think it’s less isolated and less highbrow than their own area. Design has to meet criteria of usefulness, but art doesn’t. (excerpt from

Beyond the New: https://www.designacademy.nl/Portals/0/www/pages%20of%20book%20Beyond%20the%20New.pdf