Tamar Shafrir
In view of the upcoming Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven (until 29 October), Tamar Shafrir seemed to us one of the best placed figures to talk to about an event that generates huge interest in the contemporary design world, one that for the last almost twenty years has been a window onto the Dutch approach to design. The first time we met her, in 2013, she was living in Milan and working with Joseph Grima and Domusweb. With the former editor of this magazine, she then founded the interdisciplinary studio Space Caviar in Genoa. Currently, among many other things, she is a researcher at the Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam and a thesis advisor on the “Contextual Design” and “Social Design” courses at the Design Academy in Eindhoven. To mention just one of her many projects, “Philosophers in Paris: When Kanye met Jean Baudrillard” is a blog she created for fun a few years ago, but it is a good example of Shafrir’s ability to blend pop culture, design and the social sciences.
Salvatore Peluso: This year’s theme, “Stretch”, considers design as a mental exercise, “yoga for the brain”. It encourages both the participants and the general public to get involved and dare to step out of their comfort zone. It is an invitation to experiment and innovate. Is this the essence of Dutch design?
Tamar Shafrir: I think Dutch design is in a transition moment, a moment of evolution. The strategies that were developed to question things like perfection, beauty, durability, and luxury in the late 90s and early 2000s can no longer be considered radical. You could say that the essence of Dutch design is its ability to dispense with tradition, take nothing for granted, and ignore the reductive arguments of commercial or conservative design. But I think Dutch design is searching for a new territory to revolutionise. Showing us that everyday products can be embedded with value and that material experimentation can generate beautiful new objects is no longer enough. I don’t like the implication of design as “yoga for the brain” — it makes design sound like a form of palliative or therapeutic entertainment, rather than a critical strategy for intervention into materials and energy sources in our environment. But some design schools and designers here in the Netherlands are certainly stretching the expectations of what a designer does; for instance, performance and film are becoming almost as common as objects. That certainly refuels the question of what design is and what it can become.