Droog Design: Sense and Experience

When Renny Ramakers, a Dutch design historian, saw the work by young Dutch designers who were using cheap industrial materials or found objects, like old dresser drawers and driftwood to create furniture, she felt it as a sign of the time and decided to bring some of these products together and present them as a common mentality. Remakers organized an exhibition in the Netherlands and Belgium in early 1992 in order to show to the world what she thought was a 'clear break from the past', a genuinely new approach to design. She sold so little she barely covered the costs. A year later, Remakers found out that Gijs Bakker, the product designer and professor at the Design Academy in Eindhoven, was planning to exhibit the work of his present and past students at the 1993 Milan Furniture Fair, she suggested that they collaborate on a joint show. They called the collection Droog Design after the Dutch word 'droog', which translates into English as 'dry' as in dry wit, unadorned informality, and ascetic irony. 'Dry' as that essentially Dutch inclination to 'do normal' and at the same time critically investigate what you are doing and the way you do it. Today Droog makes exhibitions, gives lectures, initiates experimental projects, carries out commissions for companies, produces and distributes projects, supervises the IM Masters course at the Design Academy Eindhoven, and runs a shop/gallery in Amsterdam and New York. Due to its innovative contributions to the field, Droog is constantly featured in surveys of twentieth-century design. Another type of publication where Droog is prominent is in books of Dutch design. The Netherlands is one of today's most important centers of innovation and experimentation in architecture, urban planning, industrial design, and graphic design, and both the government and the private sector have done an important job of promoting 'Dutch Design' both as a label and as a platform for emerging professionals. Examples of this are False Flat: Why Dutch Design is so Good, Dutch Design: A History and the Premsela Foundation which is a design institute that produces lectures, debates, exhibitions and publishes Morf, the Netherlands' largest design magazine. Droog's designs and designers are featured in the discussion about the blur between art and design. These two disciplines are traditionally separated by just one word: function. Regarding 'Design Art' what should be put in a home and what in a design museum? Is it intended as a sculpture or a piece of furniture? Gareth Williams, the Senior Tutor of Design Products at the Royal College of Art and the former Curator of Twentieth-Century and Contemporary Furniture at the V&A Museum, in one of the key discussants of the integration of the practices of art, craft and design in contemporary design. Glenn Adamson's Thinking Through Craft and Steven Holt's Manufractured: The Conspicuous Transformation of Everyday Objects are important publications about the role of craft in today's design and manufacturing environment. Droog is a prominent participant in all of these discussions. Writing and discussion play an essential role in Droog's overall design project. For this reason, the design group has traveling exhibitions, publishes books and videos, and maintains a website featuring their products, projects, and experiments, in other words, their overall mentality. These publications have a heavy visual component but they are accompanied by text so that there is a story tied to the products presented. The head of all these writing projects is Renny Ramakers, a prominent art historian and founder of Droog. The fact that Droog's most complete writings come from an insider adds an emotional, biased, and almost maternal quality to these texts. This is comparable to Barbara Radice's role in Memphis. As Ettore Sottsass' life-long companion, Radice, a journalist, was the principal voice of the design group. Seeing design through the lens of someone in love gives a very particular perspective on both the designer and the designs. I do not see this emotional component as an obstacle but as an interesting vehicle through which I can explore the value of the object for both the designer and the user. Most of Droog's designers do not stay in the group for long, but move on to continue with their own design projects. Droog functions as a platform and marketing tool for young designers to gain a name at the beginning of their career. On the other hand, prominent designers who already have a name of their own are sometimes recruited by Droog for specific projects, but these designers have an agenda of their own that includes but also goes beyond Droog Design. Examples of this are Marti Guixe, Marcel Wanders, Hella Jongerious, and Jurgen Bey. Moreover, these designers have also seen an important potential in writing for the promotion of their designs. For that reason, the writings by these designers on the role of design are a crucial source to understand Droog.

In this thesis I will compare and contrast Droog Design with the career of Ettore Sottsass and the Memphis design group of which Sottsass was a founder. Like the experiences and designs of Droog, the life and work of Sottsass in his Memphis years is now treated as paradigmatic of postmodernism in design by historians and critics. A careful examination of the contrast in the role of the designer, the relationship between objects and people, and the purpose of design evident in the story of Droog and Sottsass will help identify and clarify both what is common to Postmodernism and what is distinctive about Droog.