Design by Distance

The Museum of Craft and Design (MCD) presents Design by Distance, curated by Ginger Gregg Duggan and Judith Hoos Fox of c2-curatorsquared, a timely virtual exhibition showcasing how designers from around the world are responding to the current pandemic through the development of objects, garments, accessories, and space planning. Located in San Francisco, MCD explores the creative process and current perspectives in craft and design through inspired exhibitions and experiential programs.

Design can be defined as invention in response to needs and conditions, and designers see the world as a set of problems to be solved. The natural response of designers to the global pandemic is to develop objects, garments, accessories, and space planning that will guide us through living in an environment threatened and filled by virus. And we, now armchair curators more than ever, see these proposals in on-line publications, sense in them a kind of inventive, optimistic, nimble, spirit that promises that the future, though different from what we have known during the last decades, will not be entirely dark.

We have seen fantastic advances in the PPE required for those on the front lines. And we have seen the joyful smiles of Matisse’s and Picasso’s figures covering faces, or printed on the masks, rather, of passersby. The re-purposing of clothing has resulted in a huge range of mask styles and configurations; Ikea has made available instructions to build a cardboard fort in your living room. Restaurants are removing tables and installing plexi sheets between tables, even placing them in their own tiny, individual green houses. Airlines are turning seats around and inserting plexi hoods between and around them so that still packed in like sardines, at least passengers won’t be breathing on each other, so much.

But what we have found most interesting, and have brought together, are proposals and solutions that offer new forms rather than re-purposing and re-positioning what we know. These proposals, some meant for production, others speculative, offer commentary on the range of emotions elicited by facing a pandemic. Humor and satire, albeit of a gallows sort, result in masks, emojis, and mechanisms for maintaining social distance, a term that has taken hold nearly overnight. Our need for personal protection, while allowing for human connection, finds form in a range of body coverings and interventions into spaces we inhabit together.

At least one critic, Kate Wagner, has taken designers’ responses to task, coining the term “coronagrifting,” a subset of “PR-chitecture.” She deems many of these proposals as self-promoting and profiteering during a time of serious crisis and tragedy. She does cite “paper architecture” of the 1960s and 70s, as pre-cursers, and we’d like to add the proposals of Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, Étienne-Louis Boullée, and Jean-Jacques Lequeu, all 18th century French architects and designers; and fast forward to Vladimer Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International(1919-20).

As we are in midst of this pandemic and do not know what lies ahead as global conditions shift and evolve, the array of design work here is by no means definitive. Design publications unveil new proposals nearly daily. Some may go into production and become part of our daily surroundings and wardrobes; others, though impractical, will ignite other proposals, and some will make us laugh. And that is very important.

We are grateful to the participating designers and their studios for sharing their materials.

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