Paola Antonelli

- I've been collecting definitions of design really for a few years. And I have about 172. And yesterday I found some more on a website so you understand it's so encompassing, just the noun itself that you can say anything you want about it. I have my own, the one that works for me. And the one that also shows which kind of design I'm interested in. To me design, really good design, is what takes revolutions and progress and makes it into objects that we can use. So I like that push forward that designers give to us by taking innovation and bringing it home in a way.

So making it into things that we can use. That's my kind of design. Behind each object there is so much. You know we've gotten used to understanding more about music and more about movies because somebody explained to us what tracks are, what arrangements are, somebody explained to us what a production designer does, what a director of photography does, I just want people to have the same kind of array of critical tools and understanding that we have for other expressions of creativity.

And forever people have had an emotional relationship with objects. You know, that ranges from using them a status symbols and vesting them with memory, and vesting them with function too. But this relationship has been described differently by designers. So the emotional attachment and the functional need has not changed, but at different times in history we've been highlighting different needs. So if you look at the modernist period and the famous motto form follows function, that was just an interpretation of what it is that makes objects so not only useful but also desirable for people.

And it's only lately through many philosophical upheaval, post-structuralism, post-modernism, that we've gotten to instead highlight the emotional bond that we have with objects. Nothings really changed you know, we are still designing them pretty much the same way and good designers do a better job than bad designers. But right now we're talking about some people have actually coined slogans like emotional design and so on and so fourth. But in truth, objects need to have a language and a relationship and a rapport with people that goes beyond the function.