This is the ninth essay in a collection of twelve written by Byron Ferris for the "Design Sense" feature of the Sunday Northwest Magazine insert of The Oregonian during 1984 and 1985. The Editors.
Sigmund Freud opened up the idea that each individual is the psychological product of individual experience, that we are molded by outside influences and by choices often out of our control.
Before the 1895 publishing of Freud's experiments in hypnotism, which under clinical conditions revealed underlying problems of troubled patients, most folks thought they were mere cogs following ordered patterns of society. They believed in God and government, and they had the patterns of life properly established in their minds.
The Victorians lived in a proper way within an ordered class structure. In the "Upstairs/Downstairs" years, the standards were well-established – not that the parlormaid didn't aspire to finer things, but her choices were limited.
The upper class collected paintings and hoarded antiques from ancestral estates. Some gathered Asian art as the spoils of colonialism. In the Victorian/Edwardian eras you knew you were lower class if you didn't have any of that stuff.
But here we are in the last 20 years of the 20th century, and "times they have a-changed." Herman Kahn, the socio-economist, noted "the period 1948-1973 was our time of economic boom." During those post-World War II years the United States blossomed with exuberant manufacturing, and the affluent suburban consumer society was formed. Although British observer Stephen Bayley notes the "overwhelming of the American consumer goods industries by imports from Europe and Japan" by 1973, when the U.S. economic boom faded into silence, we now have a worldwide trade marketplace filled with innumerable goods.
If that Victorian parlormaid were to read today's edition of The Oregonian and to realize that all those choices were available to her, she probably would buy a TV and some video games on time and move into the parlor.
But Stephen Bayley also points out, "General taste lost its standards when there was suddenly too much available for everyone." We were cast adrift in a sea of goods and choices.
What do you surround yourself with if the choices you make choices you have to live with tend to mold you? What's your selection in the marvelous catalog of the products of the world: gourmet foods, housewares, fashions, travel bargains and other stuffs of the good life? While some only can sip at all this available drink, others can afford to drink their fill.
And now the choices of taste seem to identify what is called lifestyle. What's your preference? "Traditional," "Classic," "Romantic," "Cultural," "Modern," "PostModern," "Punk," "Memphis"?
I think the matter of choice is a matter of design – I am a designer, after all. No good selection can be made without the consideration of the art of the object. The Wiss dressmaker shears designed by David Chapin of Raleigh, N.C., are the best scissors I've ever seen. They fit the hand in a most natural way to decrease the tiring task of cutting out patterns or clipping coupons, and the blade lies flat on the table so that the hand directs the cutting path as a natural extension. More important, they are beautiful in sculptural quality and organic flow; you want to pick them up and use them.
A Japanese lacquered bowl tells us something about another culture, a culture that we are hearing from in the flood of Japanese goods in today's marketplace: television sets, video recorders, cameras, cars. The bowl, though, makes a statement of Japanese shibui – simplicity, clarity and appropriateness of form. The bowl rises on a section of cone, graceful in the use of cone and section of sphere – two geometric forms that appear in nature.
I've found the attitudes that have come to us from Europe and the new art from Japan an interesting study. Industrial America in the l890s produced cast-iron stoves decorated with vines and squiggles in the Renaissance tradition, and 1985 is seeing a revival of these same "nostalgic" attitudes. I'm comfortable with that strange return to the past because I grew up having my bath in a "claw-foot" tub.
But you don't see the Japanese products of the new electronics age decorated with leaves, vines, squiggles and claw-feet. Not appropriate. Not shibui.
In the "one-world" marketplace, we're forced into our own selections of taste. And I suppose that in the confusion of the marketplace we can suggest some standards for today: Whatever you select, you must admire. Intelligibility of form: Does it work?
But the art of coherence and harmony between form and materials, I must admit, can't be the sole guideline for the selections of choice. We can buy only what's available at the supermarket. I still get Dixie Cups for the bathroom, however, with little decorative flowers printed on the sides in the pretty Victorian tradition.
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