DESIGN evolved as a response to make things easier for people. With the ease of technology and the sea of knowledge around us now, an easier life (for some, at least), is well within reach.
So design today has to give something else. If it made life easier before, maybe it can make life better now. More than an experience of convenience, perhaps design can now contribute to an experience of pleasure.
Jacob Jansen was an important Danish designer whose work forms a major part of the school of Danish modern design. His minimalist style is best seen in his work with electronics company Bang & Olufsen, for whom, in the latter part of the 20th century, he designed appliances such as telephones, radios, and speakers. In 1958, Mr. Jansen set up the The Jacob Jensen Design Studio which his son, Timothy Jacob Jensen, took over in 1990. The elder Mr. Jensen departed this world in 2015, leaving behind a legacy of functional and aesthetically pleasing products.
BusinessWorld met his son, Timothy, last week at the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) International building. Just like his father, the younger Mr. Jensen is well-known as a designer, bringing that tres-chic and tres moderne industrial-minimalist aesthetic to a variety of products, from television sets to mobile phones — even coffins, bowls, and jewelry.
“I’m the youngest from the first marriage. When you’re the youngest in the family, you have to make more noise to get attention,” he said on following his father into design, and the course of action to achieve this was to invent and innovate. “The other thing was, that I didn’t like school, or school didn’t like me,” he recounted, which led to his apprenticeship at 16.
Mr. Jensen was in the country as he is in talks to build one of his design studios in the Philippines — there are currently studios in Denmark, Shanghai, and Bangkok. Asked why he plans to build in the Philippines, he said: “I’ll turn the question to around. What’s wrong with the Philippines?”
“You have 100 million wonderful people living on these exotic islands in the Pacific Ocean, in this almost-perfect climate. You have all the resources — except self-confidence,” he said.
He said that he wasn’t going to be here to make money, or exploit cheap labor. “A nation of maids? Christ, you can do better than that, right?” he said in response to business associates in Shanghai when he asked them what they associated with the Philippines, and they answered “Maids.”
“We’re here to try to enable and enhance young talents here to build great ideas and great brands, so you can pay more in taxes, and get the majority of your people out of poverty,” he told BusinessWorld.
Coming from Scandinavia — consisting of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, Finland, Iceland, among other territories — Mr. Jensen follows a legacy of great products: think Ikea, Bang & Olufsen, and H&M. Asked why the region has such a saturation of great design, he boasts that he considers the region the design center of the world. “It’s because of the values we have.” He talked about the equality and equity present in the country: excellent health care and education accessible to all, for example. When asked how these bleed into design, he said: “If you have a really good platform, built on some [good] values, you can create a lot of good things out of that.
“If people are beautiful inside their minds, maybe they’ll make beautiful things also.”
One of the big debates of design is if an object should be functional first, and beautiful second, This is in line with the German Bauhaus school of thought, that an object’s function should come first, and its form (preferably appealing) should follow. Mr. Jensen said: “It is banal, and does not apply anymore.” According to Mr. Jensen, this thought came about when the Bauhaus school was established in the late 1910’s — “That was when it was difficult to make [something] function.”
“Rubbish now! You can say form, and feelings. It is banal to think things should work… come on! It has to do something else. You can say feeling, or emotions.”
Of course, he says, an object should be functional and sustainable, but it has to be more.
“You’ve got to add something, another dimension to it. It has to be sexy, it has to be appealing, it has to be reassuring, caring, exciting — and it has to be inspiring. If you make a solution that contains these attributes, then you have good design,” he said. “It’s got to turn me on, or make me happy.”
Natalie Portman, acting as Jacqueline Kennedy in the 2016 movie Jackie said: “Objects and artifacts last far longer than people. And they represent important ideas. History; identity. Beauty.” Asked what place objects, and their design, occupy in this world, Mr. Jensen points to evolution. “You can say design is the cultural world for evolution. It’s making things hopefully better.”
As animals adapt to the world, one can look at changing design in much the same process.
As for if objects do matter, he said: “It depends. To some it does, to some it doesn’t. There’s a few people… sitting on a stick, with a big sack of rice and saying they don’t care about stuff. But to the rest of us, we care about it.
“Of course objects matter.” — Joseph L. Garcia
