Top, mischer'traxler's Automated Cake Decorator and bottom, one of its finished cakes. Photo: mischer'traxler
Curated by Sam Jacob, British architect, designer and director of FAT, the Design Criminals Or a New Joy Into The World exhibition is situated in the Design space of the MAKVienna and co-organised by Thomas Geisler, one of the founding members of Neigungsgruppe Design.
A selection of young designers from Austria were invited to create new works based on the Adolf Loos' 'Ornament and Crime' discourse written by the Austrian architect in 1908. In his essay, Loos explains that ornamentation can have the effect of causing objects to go out of style and become obsolete. Loos saw it was a 'crime' to waste the effort needed to add ornamentation, when the ornamentation would cause the object to soon go out of style. The exhibition title refers to this ambivalent debate about ornament and decoration and how the surface has become a form of cultural expression that conveys personal and social agendas.
As a way to explore this debate the selected graphic designers, product designers and architects focused on exploring the potential for ornament in more everyday and anonymous design activities such as cake decorating, hair dressing, tattoing and floristry.
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