Written for: Technology Transfer - Design in a scientific research program, a publication of the Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) Wood Innovations.

The Core Project

The ‘Innovative Technologies in the Design and Manufacture of High Value Furniture and Wood Products from Microwave-modified Wood’ project was nominally directed (although I protest, not named) by me but in the event proved to be an ecumenical process shared by Prof. Lyndon Anderson and Lotars Ginters.

The inclusion of a creative industries manifestation such as the Faculty of Design at Swinburne University of Technology was unusual for CRCs per se but proved a good fit or the modus operandi and further aspirations of the Faculty. The staff and postgraduate students involved are all connected with Industrial Design, a discipline that was first developed in the early part of the twentieth century as a bridge between art and technology, an appropriate context for this project.

Research undertakings in this project have included:

• The application of innovative manufacturing technologies such as the microwave modification of timber.
• Investigation into the manufacture of bent furniture components.
• The development of composite timber materials designed to improve the strength and stability, amongst other properties, of the various species of treated timbers.
• The development of value-adding solutions to Australian regrowth and plantation timber species for domestic and export markets.
• A focus on identifying and developing commercial opportunities for the use of timber bending as well as window production for the construction industry. A comprehensive database recording window and door construction in the building industry has been under development in collaboration with scientists at the CSIRO, Melbourne.
• The testing of furniture components and the development of design parameters suitable for deployment within the CRC, conducted in collaboration with scientists and engineers at Furnitech, Tasmania.

The Faculty is involved in the research and development of products at various stages of project completion. Designers are involved in pushing developments in technological and scientific experimentation, product development and market identification for the Australian furniture industry.

Through links with manufacturers and research institutes including the Forest Products Commission in Western Australia and the Department of Primary Industries in Queensland, Swinburne Faculty of Design and the CRC for Wood Innovations has worked to directly involve the furniture manufacturing and building construction industries in its research programs and to supply them with the outcomes of that research.

The Contribution of Studio Design to the CRC

The general modus operandi of the Faculty of Design is not that of privileging the studio, or the art/craft-based object. In fact, it is its capacity to place creative endeavour into the user and technology-based design continuum that gives it its raison d’être within a University of Technology and gives it the capacity to claim a role in this CRC. My associates, and the research students working on this project, have applied an exemplary range of skills and dedication to the core, industry-focused objectives of the project.

As Dean I was responsible for the carriage of the Faculty’s applied mission for ten years, but none the less, I have maintained a professional profile at the intersection between crafts and design practice for three times that long. My work combines dynamic zoomorphic with architectonic forms. The value of the project specifically to my work stems from its promise to provide efficient and eco-responsible methods for delivering the curvilinear and theatrical components of my designs. The value of this aspect of my work to the project is in being able to extend high-level artisanry, and the focus my professional reputation can bring, to the artefacts the project is capable of producing.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how and why studio design, and its values, has proven to be a useful doppelganger to the core technologies and methodologies of the project.

The Contribution of Creativity and Context

Designers, artists and craftspeople know that design works sit in a rich narrative of personal/public as well as a historical/contemporary location and purpose. A further challenge for many workers in these fields is to develop a category of work that allows for some of the primal narratives of our culture to be linked with new and relevant personal or group narratives in various situations; in the micro personal and domestic as much as in the macro shared and public. When they are melded into any public or private environment, the works of artists, crafts practitioners or designers, can take their place within a new critical context. They can begin to accrue further levels of meaning through association with new people and events. They can be mitigated by, and in turn mitigate, the other components of their environment, with each core element having a story to tell.

Design, as a category of endeavour, is usually understood to be predicated on ultra-contemporary concerns - we tend to speak from the base of our understandings, we frame questions and answers within whatever frames of reference are available to us. However our contemporary understandings of ourselves, and the social and cultural context in which we exist, have roots that go back the formative mythologies of our history and even to some of the iconography associated with the expression of those concepts in earlier times.

Functionalism Revisited

Most of the things we design have a primary use function, whether or not that use function is the principal reason for it having been brought into existence. On one level the measure for a functional object is precisely what the word suggests – does it do a job of work? Products in this category are manifestations of all the processes connected with design – problem solving and idea generation, project management, production, materials analysis, technology, distribution, marketing, selling, installation and use. On another level, a richer and more comprehensive idea of function can be brought to bear on objects which function within our personal stories. At its most extreme, and where all else is equal, reductive functionalism might logically result in one common design for any task – for any situation. The geometric reductionism of pure high Modernism is an aesthetic on its way to that extreme. However all else is never equal. Socio-economic, cultural, spiritual and national variations (amongst others) insist on a complementary range of iconographic differences manifesting in the products destined to service those variations. Our concepts of taste and consumer choice, even if we recognize that they are clustered through one form or another of group identity, are predicated on those differences.

Studio Furniture

Studio Furniture, as it is known in the USA, is consciously geared to being artistic object. Narrative and conceptual content are layered over function. In Australia the term Designer/Maker is sometimes used to meld the concerns of the designer with those of the crafts practitioner, into one complementary descriptor.

The characteristics of this category include the works being either unique or at the most, a limited edition or a related group of items. This provides part of their provenance, destined for exhibition or niche deployment, they are assumed to be successful if they gain in value as their creator gains in reputation and if they are collected by regional, state or national galleries and are subsumed into the national estate. Works in domestic collections also gain in value by virtue of the public reputation the designer/maker earns through peer review and by being included in significant collections. They may also gain private value as a result of a patina of meaning continually accruing for the owner, possibly even becoming heirlooms.

Mythology and Metaphor in the Design of Products for the Contemporary Market

Human beings first created myths in order to make sense of the world within their, usually limited, frames of reference. The capacity for imagination and abstract thought, which we believe is only given to humans, can manifest as a burden and bring with it the fear of the unknown. Myths gave pattern to existence and allowed people to locate themselves within that pattern, in effect to anchor themselves in an otherwise unfathomable eternity, no less today than in the past. Inevitably, in periods of history where logic and rationality became the dominant methodologies for inquiry and understanding, faith in the emotional and ritualistic waned proportionately.

Rationalism is not unique to modernity. Plato (c. 427-347 BCE) and Aristotle (c. 384-322 BCE) argued for a philosophical understanding of the world, which privileged logos (logic) over mythos (myth).1 However even at this seminal time in the development of Western thought, logic and myth were not totally separated. As Karen Armstrong has noted in her book, A Short History of Myth:

“…philosophers continued to use myth, either seeing it as the primitive forerunner of rational thought or regarding it as indispensable to religious discourse…despite the monumental achievements of Greek rationalism during the Axial Age, it had no effect on Greek Religion. Greeks continued to sacrifice to the Gods, take part in the Eleusinian mysteries and celebrate their festivals until the 6th Century of the Common Era, when this pagan religion was forcibly suppressed by the Emperor Justinian and replaced by the mythos of Christianity.” 2

In a more recent timeframe, the Industrial Revolution and the development of technologies rooted in scientific enquiry saw the culmination of a trajectory towards Modernity in the West, which began at the end of the Middle Ages. Again, and this time in an arguably more encompassing manner, logos triumphed over mythos. The Enlightenment in Western civilization saw the suppression of mythology as a widely utilized strategy for the creation of social anchors. A desire to bond science and art, religion and knowledge, power and service (including that of production), and not least economics, into a grand pattern, underpins the journey of our culture into the enlightenment.

Yet even today, one option out of many for designers, for the development of a narrative continuum for their work is to be sensitive to the icons and the narratives of the foundational myths of their culture. The designer, as much as the artist, could consider allowing a place in our material culture for icons that connect with past narratives, where they contain some ongoing resonance and contemporary relevance. One needs to make a distinction between the celebration of story and the use of visual metaphor, and religiosity. Both may be present but not necessarily. Armstrong attempts to reconcile two opposites: the idea that “…myth could never be approached in a purely profane setting”, with the alternative example of a reader being meditatively absorbed into a novel - which can be read anywhere, without ritual. She concludes that it may well be the role of artists and creative writers to bring fresh insights to our world.3 Again, here we need to understand mythologies not in the sense of lies, or even of fiction, but mythologies as in metaphorical narratives.

To the observer, the mythos of the sacred, as in religious practice, offers perhaps the least controversial setting for accepting the role of objects that are designed and made for ritual. The public art collection, manifesting as it most often has in a large state supported architectural edifice, until recent times with strong classical undertones, also has its own kind of quasi religiosity. The reverence with which state validated hero art is traditionally treated allows a relatively easy link with mythos to be made. It is also not difficult to demonstrate how large commercial projects, for example those connected with commercial architecture, can also be seen as a site for elements of the built environment to operate as metaphors, particularly of power.

All of that notwithstanding, a designer concerned with user-centred domestic product is advised to understand, or at least credit, that the domestic ritual of homemaking, the assembling of a narrative of personal and social space, also sits within a sort of contemporary mythology – a story about self. Here it is important to understand the home as a sanctuary – the space, in some cases the last or only, place, in which the primacy of the occupant’s world and his/her place in it is unchallenged. Here we can foresee the deployment of a perceptual-cognitive (pertaining to the primacy of perceptual/experiential understanding) category of products, a category predicated on an appreciation of the nature of domestic or personal space, a category that explores the relationship that people develop with the objects they gather about themselves to mark and to protect their environment - and which includes a place for the decorative elements to which people are attracted as a form of benign, personal graffiti.

Importantly, in recognizing the psychological foundations for sensory perceptual knowledge (aesthêsis – as named by the classical Greeks), we recognize a paradigm that underpins and enriches the concept of a visual language, an expression often used in design and the visual arts. It is a paradigm that allows for a renewed appreciation of how the voice of the designer, the artist, the craftsperson, is heard through creative work. This stands in stark contrast to many of the values of anonymity, much preached although, given human nature, far less practiced by the contemporary design community.

It is indicative of the fact that the time of design has come that Governments, industry, and the professions are now recognising its place in the commercial and social continuum. Creative practice, where traditional manufacturing (artisan) skills and attitudes can be updated with contemporary technologies and mores, is proving to be well located within the endeavours of a CRC. The Faculty can be proud of the fact that its capacity to identify and meet its milestones within a complex inter-disciplinary research and development undertaking, which has not been without its periodic vexations, has been proven.


Prof. Helmut Lueckenhausen
Pro Vice Chancellor and Chief Executive,
Swinburne Sarawak
17 May 2008


1 Armstrong, ‘A Short History of Myth’, Canongate Books Ltd., 2005, p. 102.
2 Armstrong, ‘A Short History of Myth’, pp. 102-103.
3 Armstrong, ‘A Short History of Myth’, pp. 147-149.

Note. This paper draws on two previous works:

1. The concluding chapter of the author’s PhD, Iconism, Narrative and Contemporary Mythology in Design – Creating a New Perceptual Category.

2. An original draft for a catalogue essay for the exhibition Smart Works,
Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, 2007.