Furniture e-volution
Published on Apr 7, 201
Background story
'A lot of things that used to take up room, such as records, you don't need'
Industrial and interior designer Harry Allen on how technology has made some things redundant
Forget the work desk. Spell's Nomad table (above) has an in-built docking station for those who want to stay connected from their couches. -- PHOTO: NEW YORK TIMES
New York - Philippe Starck was in town last week, to introduce the Zik wireless headphones he designed for French company Parrot. But Starck, who had just flown in from Paris, seemed more interested in holding forth on the future of design.
Dressed in yellow pants and unlaced white sneakers, he stood in a smartly furnished room of an upscale townhouse in Manhattan, jubilantly addressing a small crowd.
'What's the future of design?' he asked. 'There is no future. When the product becomes bionic, in the end there is no product.'
The digital age, he said, has created a process of 'dematerialisation', in which products such as the Zik headphones are simultaneously shrinking and becoming smarter. 'It's the elegance of the minimum,' he said.
The end result? Eventually, he said, people will be implanted with microchips and they will be the product.
Of course, that could take a while. As technology rapidly remakes most parts of people's lives, the furniture industry remains largely low-tech.
For many retailers, mid-century furniture designed 60 years ago still qualifies as 'modern'.
Even so, in recent years, a number of furniture designers have been struggling to adapt to new forms of technology and the proliferation of devices such as the iPad, e-readers and ever-thinner flat-screen TVs.
At Herman Miller, Mr Ryan Anderson, director of future technology, works with the design team to come up with answers to vexing Internet- age questions such as what the home office should look like when the iPad and other tablets and laptops have freed people to work anywhere.
Others are also designing furnishings to incorporate the devices.
Consider the iCon Bed from Hollandia, its headboard equipped with speakers, an amplifier and docking stations for two iPads. Or the Fleur de Noyer chest of drawers by Think Fabricate, which features what the company calls 'Fleur de Tech' - a fancy way of saying it has a built-in charging station for electronic devices.
One of the most-talked-about of these mash-ups is the D'E-light by Flos, a sleek table lamp equipped with a dock for Apple devices.
Some designers, however, are wary of this kind of mash-up.
'Technology moves at such a rate that it's going to be redundant in a matter of years,' said Edward Barber, a co-founder of the London design studio Barber Osgerby. 'As soon as the charging docks change, suddenly the lamp is redundant.'
So it is not surprising that retailers such as M2L are taking a more pragmatic approach, producing furniture that is not about incorporating gadgets but rather about adapting to the way people use them at home.
The Scene XXL chair, designed by Gijs Papavoine for Montis and recently introduced by M2L, for example, comes with the option of an attached 'tablet table' and an upholstered high back for privacy when typing.
'What's interesting, from a design standpoint,' said industrial and interior designer Harry Allen, 'is that the computer gets rid of so many things. You don't need clocks because they're on our phone. You don't need file cabinets because they're on our phone. A lot of things that used to take up room, such as records and books, you don't need.'
He recently designed two apartments for women in their 20s and recalled thinking: 'What is this apartment going to be filled with?' In the end, he left the spaces largely empty, with the idea that they would eventually be filled with personal artefacts.
It is an aesthetic that industrial designer Karim Rashid has been championing for years. Long before Ikea announced that it was making its Billy bookcase deeper because people were using it to hold everything but books, Rashid ditched the bookcases in his home, along with his books and CDs in an effort to dematerialise.
He envisions a world in which furnishings 'will start speaking or feeling the technology', and cites possible near-future advances such as upholstery that reacts to temperature and wallpaper embedded with liquid crystals that turn a wall into a TV screen.
In an ideal world, technology would be integrated into homes in a more 'magical' way, suggested Yves Behar, founder of design and branding firm Fuseproject. 'You would be able to modify the couch in a way that makes it adapt to new technologies.'
Until that happens, he and others might want to check out Jonas Damon's Alarm Dock for Areaware. Little more than a block of beechwood with a docking station, it turns an iPhone into a nightstand alarm clock.
Yes, it is simple and retro-looking. But it also acknowledges a new truth: The device itself has become the furniture.
New York Times