Industrial designer Yves Béhar makes his curatorial debut at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco this month in a major exhibition called TechnoCRAFT: Hackers, Modders, Fabbers, Tweakers and Design in the Age of Individuality.
Béhar’s exhibit charts current movements which blur the traditional boundary between designer and consumer while looking at ways that personalized design asserts both creativity and individuality in addition to providing an emotional connection to objects in an age of mass-production and mass-consumerism.
TechnoCRAFT is centered around six sub-themes: Crowdsourcing, Platforms, Blueprints, Hacks, Incompletes and Modules. The selected works included in the exhibit range from purposefully collaborative products that allow individuals to engage in customization, to finished products, which have been adapted or modified by the user. Several internationally acclaimed designers are featured in the exhibition including Enzo Mari, Max Lamb, the Bouroullec brothers, Studio Makkink and Bey and Olafur Eliasson.
As Béhar explains, digital technology allows consumers to be more ambitious in the way we interact with products. “By putting millions of people in touch with each other, the Web has created a whole new economy of designing and making objects and selling them, it is enabling mass-participation in design.”
Because of the increased technology in our lives, users already manipulate and adjust content on a daily basis. For example, the way one customizes an iPhone or iPad by downloading an assortment of applications allows the user to directly interact with the product on a sophisticated level.
What: TechnoCRAFT: Hackers, Modders, Fabbers, Tweakers and Design in the Age of Individuality
When: July 10 – October 3, 2010
Where: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA), 701 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA 94103-3138
August 2010
