Book “TOTAL DESIGN. Die Inflation moderner Gestaltung”

The book has 175 pages. The front cover has the author “MATEO KRIES”, the book title “TOTAL / DESIGN / Die Inflation moderner Gestaltung” [TOTAL / DESIGN / The inflation of modern design] and the publishing house “nicolai”. The cover image shows the “Banquete Chair” (the seat of which is made of several different soft toys/plush animals) by Fernando (born in 1961) and Humberto (born in 1953) Campana, furniture and product designers from Brazil. The back cover has a blurb featuring the book’s contents: “Technically speaking, design should make our world more beautiful, better and more practical. However, the opposite is now true; we are surrounded by an ever-increasing number of tacky, superfluous and impractical things. At the same time, design is encroaching on almost all areas of human everyday life, dictates our lifestyles and forms of communication as well as economic theories and even genetic engineering. In this well-informed yet humorous essay, the author examines structures, absurdities and excesses of our design culture and asks what changes we could make. He also deals with the role played by his own contemporaries, who grew up with corduroy couches and spruce wood shelving in the seventies, only to dedicate their lives from the eighties onwards to the search for the true form by means of shopping sprees, the wellness culture and the New Bourgeoisie.”

Mateo Kries is an art historian, curator and author. He has been the director of the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein since 2011.