By day they're a bunch of San Francisco's hottest product designers. By night they're a guerrilla band of concept hackers.
Packed around stall E-85 at London's 100% Design show this fall, people crane their necks. "What does it do?" Faces are expectant or bemused. "What is it?"
Neighboring exhibitors - selling every variation on the modern chair - would kill for this sort of crowd. Yet E-85 is nothing but a huge pale-blue box with a 2-foot-diameter hole in it. Visitors, jockeying for position, wait their turn to stick their heads through the opening, and emerge a minute later, laughing, nodding sagely, or looking just as flummoxed as they did before. "It's a gimmick, isn't it? Is it?"
A high-heeled Russian dame teeters nervously forward: "Is it ... dangerous?" she asks, clutching her Prada handbag. "No," answers the young designer dressed in a plain white T-shirt that reads RAW. "It's very gentle," he says, ushering her toward the booth. "At times it can be provocative."
The blond Russian sticks her head into the hole. "We have distilled the design process down to four basic elements: Speed, Chaos, Magic, and Sex," explains the young man. "By pulling on this ring" - he indicates a large black handle - "you can choose which of the elements you want the machine to distill."
Inside the hole is a computer screen suspended below a shallow vat of bubbling liquid. When the woman selects Sex, João Gilberto's rendition of "The Girl From Ipanema" plays, and the screen shows a series of rapid-fire images: an AIDS ribbon, a car, a rat, test tubes, sperm. The machine, says her straight-faced guide, is going through "a very sophisticated process" to distill the essence of sex.
When the images cease, there is a gurgling, belching sound, and a glass vial, filled with a bright-pink liquid - in which the word sex floats - drops from the machine.
"There you go! 100 percent pure Sex," says the designer.
The woman looks at the vial warily, placing it with care into her Prada bag, as the next person steps up to the machine.
The designRAW project is the after-hours undertaking of eight young industrial designers from some of San Francisco's hottest firms. They work in ultracreative environments, helping map the look and feel of tomorrow's technologies. Yet all share a sense of frustration - design can be an exasperating process for those employed to add artistry to a functional product. This frustration inspired the apparently functionless installation they're showing today.
"'Elements,'" according to the mission statement, "examines those ideas which designers and their clients must embrace and employ to arrive at solutions which engage and inspire their audience." In other words, this is a work about everything you don't see when you buy the latest laptop or cell phone: the ideas that might inspire a new design.
"All the magic of the profession gets lost in the conversations we have with clients and engineers," explains Rico Zörkendörfer, a 28-year-old German who met most of his fellow team members at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. The members see designRAW as a way of putting some of that magic back - a means of exploring the arcane and exciting rough patches that are sanded away during the lengthy process of taking a product to market.
The group's immediate objective is to break even; its members are funding this adventure out of their own pockets, aided by several of their employers including Lunar Design, IDEO, and Zoé Design - all of whom responded enthusiastically, recognizing this uncommon project as part of designRAW's creative development.
At the London design fair, visitors wonder what their pitch is. Everyone here has one. "So, what are you selling?" asks a student who's just plucked her vial of Chaos from the machine.
designRAW's Markus Diebel, a 35-year-old German with the countenance of a guru, tells her: "We're not selling anything - apart from a point of view."
The designRAW team first raised eyebrows with its "dialogs" exhibit at the prestigious Salone Internazionale del Mobile design show in Milan last April. Tad Toulis, a 33-year-old American who spent a year in Milan as a Fulbright scholar, was impressed by the way young Europeans with only a few lire to their name would book space to show off their latest designs. With no idea of what he was going to exhibit, Toulis applied for a booth.
Back in San Francisco at the end of 1999, Toulis contacted about 15 colleagues who began swapping ideas at weekly meetings and via email. Though the team that emerged from this process, a committed group of eight, is seven-eighths European (composed of three Germans, two Swiss, a Swede, a Frenchman, and Toulis), all work in the US, so designRAW decided to bring something uniquely American to Milan.
The "dialogs" machine was pure Marcel Duchamp-meets-Jonathan Ive: a giant ATM-like device that spit out ideas instead of money. If you selected Synergy, the machine presented a tea bag attached by a string to its own sugar cube. Harmony was represented by a plastic fork and spoon connected by a rubber band to a pair of chopsticks - two cultures' design solutions to the same problem. There was a poetic beauty in this madness.
While other designers brought functional products to the show, designRAW dispensed with anything that resembled a real product. They were left with just the ideas - however outré - a designer brings to the table when he or she is working. The exhibit blurred the lines between industrial design and fine art, and designers responded enthusiastically: The German magazine Design Report even created a special Young Designers category so they could award this productless team a prize.
The crowd at 100% is just as enthusiastic. They can't get enough Magic and Sex.
"We have almost run out of Sex," warns Pontus Wahlgren, a 26-year-old Swede, as he sticks his head out from behind the booth.
"Just like life," someone cracks.
Despite the crowd's expectations that there must be an ulterior motive to the group's alluring artistry, designRAW hasn't managed to figure out what it is yet.
One happy viewer - a Frenchman who came to 100% with his wife, an interior designer - summed up the machine perfectly. And designRAW, too, perhaps: "Every product is a function and a dream. This is even better. This is just the dream."
