The design virus has slowly infected nearly every activity
At first glance, “anonymous” seems like a pejorative: an unknown thing, unrecognized, and therefore impersonal and not associated with any particular individual.
In the context of contemporary design’s overly fashionable trends, however, the seemingly grey character of the attribute “anonymous” becomes a desirable quality. It first has to be said that the design virus has slowly infected nearly every activity that is even remotely associated with Gestaltung.
Even time-honored skilled professions such as metalworking have been spruced up to look cool and refashioned as metal design. This of course wears thin over time, and leads to the exact opposite. What supposedly ensured a high image factor and hence high prices has long since become an economic depressant;
what was once devised as a pricey symbol of exclusivity might now at most excite chain store consumers. This is not the case with anonymous design because there are no specifications, categories, or names. It merely indicates that the designer, meaning the author, is unknown or forgotten.
This has two implications: first, that the design is the product of a deliberate act of designing and that the external form of the appliance, tool, or piece of furniture is not accidental, but the unique result of someone’s specific criteria. Second, that the person who designed this is unknown or unacknowledged, meaning it has existed for long enough to become standard, and in the process has lost its creator’s name.
With this in mind, we encounter the label anonymous mostly on objects that have developed over centuries in different cultures and that are more or less dependent on the resources available in that culture.
This means the daily tools and appliances that are characterized by an unmistakable functional value and immediately recognizable operating instructions. The resources are not limited to a culture’s natural conditions or a region’s traditional skills, but also include the materials, technologies, and skills of a global industrial culture. Meaning this category not only consists of handmade appliances or clay, glass, stone, wood, or iron containers, but also industrially produced bottle openers, crown caps, preserving jars, and the everyday basic tools that we would never categorize as design, yet which were in fact, at one point, designed by someone.
They were never christened with the name of their author, yet their sustained use has earned them the highest rating available in design: the fact that they have become standard.