People don’t buy products. Actually, they don’t even care about Design.
When one likes an object, he or she actually only wants the benefits and meaning of it, that means matter is a way to reach the intangible.
A turning point to our existence was when Homo Erectus started to control fire.
With that discovery, our tribe could benefit itself from heat, light and security. At that stage of evolution, maybe the habitants of Earth thought fire was irreplaceable and even something divine. Thousands of years later, we still need that same heat, light and security that fire first offered to our ancestors. However, now it is replaceable with electricity and other products. That is why each year at the Milan Design Week there are hundreds and hundreds of new objects being released – the newest lamp from that famous French designer is nothing more than a beautiful 2.0 version of our ancestor’s torch.
Imposed needs are always evolving, however, the basic needs and desires of our existence remain the same and there is no indication that they will change any time soon. Designers try to answer to these callings with all that is available in the world today.
A designer’s creativity might not be an entirely rational process. Sometimes we might even say a sort of divine inspiration happened, as if something whispered into our ears or simply popped into our minds. But this can also be us listening to some sort of guidance, a kind of divine spirit of creativity, or as ancient Greeks would call it, daemons: the good beings that remain invisible, known only by their acts.
A designer is like an antenna that captures the spirit of our time (the zeitgeist) to benefit our society. Thinking this way, every designer’s creation is not entirely theirs. Every artifact was and will be designed by our culture.
Achieving some sort of transcendence, bordering on being possessed, they receive signs and messages from this intangible world and translate it to our material world, through a composition of mundane elements in such a way that people intuitively understand it and therefor, feel it. Feel it. The intangible.
