Murray Moss, namesake and founder of Soho’s venerable shop/gallery, Moss presented his ten favorite design trends at the opening of the AIGA Design conference tonight. Moss talked about shop-keeping as theatre and autobiography and his quest to find great content in things around us. Here are a few points that resonated – and reflect much of what we are seeing online.

Participative production
Moss talked about design as creation of a framework for collaborative process and the beauty of randomness in the outcome.  Campanas’ "Favela" chair is an example. “Favela” refers to the ad-hoc shelters which are built out mud, sand, scraps of wood, bricks and stones in the hills around Rio de Janeiro. The chair captures the chaotic wonder of that setting. Each is different. Decisions about how the pieces come together are made by assemblers in Brazil.

Comfort with the idea that nothing is new
Moss talked about the tenuous nature of authorship and how a new generation of designers like Maarten Baas are playing with the idea. Baas has taken the Favela chair above and remixed it in a very simple way. He burnt it and added his name.

Home decor becomes political
Design, like media is becoming very personal and expressive (blogs). Moss sees a growing embrace of very potent design content in the home. Two killer examples… Starck’s Gun Lamp and my fav, the War Bowl (left).

Objects as utopian ideals
Eagerness of designers to reconfigure the world, to bend nature. He cited Sassoft Pesaro’s Fertile Garden soft stone chair as example. Beauty of rock, comform of foam.

Functional overkill
Moss sells thousands of Fisher Space Pens a year with the promise of writing in zero gravity…just because. The Internal Rolex is a hilarious reaction – this piece encases the classic status symbol in leather, robbing it of function as a timepiece. How we edit and simplify is one of biggest challenges/ opportunities in experience.

Technocraft
The rise of craft is one of the most visible trends in design. Again, we see it online in everything from hand made interface style to blogging. As Mcluhan said: ""As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics  of every situation again and again. The age of automation is  going to be the age of "do it yourself"."

Posted by Troy Young