Johanna Hartzheim – Formalistic formgivings

Designers permanently have to deal with constraints – be it the requirements of standardized production methods and norms, a client's requests, material properties, certain fashions, cultural conventions or the essential limitations of time and budget. Such constraints are however not to be misunderstood as restrictions of creativity. On the contrary, they are the essential basis for any creative freedom, because they open up possibility spaces. In French literature, a group of authors who called themselves »Oulipo« – Ouvroir de la littérature potentielle (»workshop for potential literature«) – have explored this principle, basing their whole work upon formal rules that act as literary constraints. Their formalistic method gave rise to extremely experimental and playful new means of working with language.
 
This thesis is an attempt to translate Oulipo's literary undertaking into a design context, using seemingly random constraints as a »creative tool« for an experimental, but at the same time goal-oriented way of working.
 
Three exemplary design-concepts serve as illustration: The first one is inspired by an Oulipo-book (»Les Revenentes« by Georges Perec) based upon monovocalism, a rhetorical figure allowing the use of only one single vocal. I designed a picnic-set, constraining myself upon the use of only one material (ash wood), one producing method (the lathe) and one month of time to realize it. The second project is a devolution of the famous »Exercises in Style« by Raymond Queneau. The design tries to translate the basic idea of describing one and the same incident, in a multitude of different styles into a lampseries, in which one lampshade is repeated in ten different materials, working with the constraints of forcing each material into that one shape. The third design concept is about clustering objects, their traditional material and production method and then swaping amongst these categories to come up with new, unconventional solutions.