Nonobject about the design philosophy of Branko Lukic." /> Nonobject about the design philosophy of Branko Lukic." />

Advertise | Masthead

12.05.10

John Thackara | Essays

This is Not an Object

This is not an object:

And neither are these:

Well I know they “look” like objects, but that's because you have not read a new book called Nonobject about the design philosophy of Branko Lukic.

Branko's collaborator on the book, Barry Katz, cites respected commentators in support of his proposition that although these images appear to depict objects, they do not. Among the experts called on are: Claude Debussy, Dieter Rams, Ettore Sottsass, Charles Eames, Philippe Starck, Louis Sullivan, Alvar Aalto, Antonio SaintElia, Filippo Marinetti, Pablo Picasso, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, René Magritte, Alexander Rodchenko, Friedrich Nietzsche, Claude Lévi Strauss, Leonardo Da Vinci, Beethoven, James Joyce, Walter Benjamin, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Plato, Michelangelo, Pablo Neruda, Ortega Y Gasset, John Donne, Le Corbusier and Sosigenes of Alexandria.

Speaking of calendars (Sosigenes was a calendar designer} it's now 22 years since I, too, did a book about design along the lines of Nonobject. Mine was called Design After Modernism: Beyond The Object. Now it's not that I'm bitter and envious — Oh no — but back then, nobody compared my philosophy to Goethe, Wittgenstein or Nietzsche. If the truth be told, the number of people who noticed the book at all was modest.

In retrospect, I made a strategic error. My book about design beyond the object contained words, but no gorgeous pictures of nonobjects. Perhaps if I had included more gorgeous images like this one:

People would have understood what I was getting at.

Comments [1]

this is not a comment

Emils Rode
02.03.11
03:46

John Thackara is a writer, speaker and design producer, and director of Doors of Perception. In addition to this blog, he is the author of twelve books including In The Bubble: Designing In A Complex World and Wouldn’t It Be Great If….

More from John Thackara

When Tech In Care Is Evil
I spent the last two weeks in-and-around a care home in England that looks after people with dementia and terminal illness, and their families – including, this time, mine.

Food As A Commons
People go hungry not because of a shortage of production, but because the food available is too expensive, or they lack the land to grow it on. In California, the prototype of a combined social, political and technical solution has been launched which promises to unlock the food system crisis.

Presence and Encounter — How We Meet Is As Important As Why
I’m not suggesting that we abandon social media — just that we cultivate a hybrid approach so whenever someone says “online” someone else says, “and what about offline?”. Or when we find ourselves inside, someone else says: “and when do we go outside?”

Keep Your Stuff Alive
What would fashion be like if it was more than a an act of consumption with no meaning beyond the point of sale? What kind of system would improve the quality of our fashion experience without increasing the quantity we consume?

Cloud Commuting
A two-year project in Belgium proposes new relationships between people, goods, energy, equipment, spaces, and value. Its design objective: a networked mobility ecosystem.

Jobs | November 05