Form follows function – we’ve all heard this. This was the guiding ethos of most 20th Century design. But what if design wasn’t just about function, but about storytelling? Anthropological design challenges the ordinary, blending art, nature, and philosophy to create pieces that make you think. Arising from the postmodern revolution, anthropological design tries to deconstruct and challenge the ideological and technical cannon of design. Thus, individual pieces and projects often serve as explorations of design itself. It exists inside a great overlap of art, sculpture, and design. It’s not mass manufacture. Rather, production often comes in the form of unique works or very limited series.
It is a semantic representative language, born as an evolution of other representative languages like Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau. In fact, contemporary anthropological design is often referred to as “Arts and Witchcrafts” – a play on words. The link between them seems clear: both movements arose as a reaction to an embrace of the future and its technological implications. The link with Art Nouveau is visible by the thematic prevalence of blending nature with technology. This similarity exposes the ideological clash between both languages too, though; Art Nouveau celebrates modernity through harmony between nature and manmade materials, while Anthropological Design creates more jarring juxtapositions. However, while both Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau embrace the ornate, Anthropological Design abandons it for rougher aesthetics.
Anthropological Design in the 80’s
In the 1980s, Anthropological Design Language originated and stood out with primitive and postapocalyptic design. These aesthetic movements were driven by a rejection of modern rationality, which are no longer perceived as "innocent" in light of the oil crash of the 70’s and growing environmental concern.
Projects such as Animali Domestici – a collection of objects designed by Andrea Branzi, translating to “Domestic Animals” – call for a throwback to primitive design. Other objects, such as the Well-tempered chair refer to a post-industrialized world, expressing massive industrialization and this rejection of mass manufacturing and modern rationality. Meanwhile Scott Burton’s Rock Chairs directly intervened in but did not process natural objects to make them into useful objects.
Burton, an American artist known for blending sculpture and furniture design, was an important figure at this time. His pieces blur the line between functional object and minimalist art. Made from industrial materials like granite, steel, and bronze, Burton’s works, such as his iconic "rock chairs," emphasized simplicity and natural form. His approach was to integrate art into daily life, rejecting ornamentation in favor of clean, geometric shapes. Burton's pieces are notable for their sculptural quality, balancing utility with artistic expression, often inviting viewers to interact with the furniture while contemplating its aesthetic value.
Droog Design
Following on themes of designing for the post-apocalypse Anthropological Design in the 1990s explored how design might evolve once we moved past our ability to produce new things. This time period saw a resurgence of modern materials, re-contextualized through their repurposing. The obvious figureheads of this lateral thinking approach were Droog Design with projects such as Rag Chair and Chest Full of Drawers. Both pieces by Tejo Remy simulated the function of their respective objects without being bound by traditional forms and materials.
Droog places great importance on the process of making."Process is key," they say. The Do Hit Chair is a 1mm-thick stainless steel cube. Once the cube has been received, it is up to the user to create their seat. The customer hits and dents the steel using a mass provided. Transformed into a unique seat, it becomes a "design by yourself" contemporary work of art. The user becomes the co-designer of this project by becoming an actor in the design of this seat.
In the same vein, the reintroduction of natural elements now took a slightly different form. In a slight nod to things to come, the natural elements were now made to not only look out of place relative to their adjoining objects, but relative to the world as a whole. Projects such as Studio Nucleo’s Terra armchair – which was literally grown out of the earth – see nature as intrinsically part of the human experience yet completely malleable. Similarly, Jurgen Bey’s Gardening Bench for Droog, compresses natural debris and trash in a compacting machine that then cuts out the crude shape of a chair. The effect is of some thing natural seeming foreign, thus highlighting how, by being so accustomed to a modern lifestyle we find ourselves completely detached from the natural.
Arts and Witchcrafts
As the language of Anthropological Design matured focus shifted towards the effects on a physical and psychological level, brought about by how humans and technological machines interacted. Arts and Witchcrafts’s concerned with how, two hundred years after industrialization, forty years after the advent of computers, and in the midst of a technological boom that sees us experiencing things previously inconceivable, we are able to unquestioningly accept the current situation as anything short of magic. Its answers create objects that force us to reconsider accepted forms and thus highlight their artificiality. This is often done through the use of aesthetics that seem almost alien and themes of alchemy and archaism.
Stine Mikkelsen is a Danish designer and materials researcher. Her approach involves mixing craft and design in order to develop pieces that cannot be easily placed within any preexisting typology. Mikkelsen’s project ‘Solid Formations’ is based on Italian geology; the pieces are made from a new composite material of volcanic ash and marble, and their shapes are inspired by the contrast between the shapes of natural landscapes and the (often geometric) human interventions within them. The result is objects that live in an uncanny valley between the natural and artificial which inspires both awe and questioning.
Batten and Kamp, the (now) Paris-based studio, works with the interplay of nature and technology. Their works often meld raw materials with industrial and technological materials. Thus, the resulting objects transcend time, and become a narrative on human nature and progress. However, they have an eerie, unnatural quality to them. This harsh juxtaposition creates objects which are hard to grasp but incredibly compelling.
In light of the AI boom, it’ll be interesting to see what evolution Anthropological Design might take next.
