Filed under: Introduction
I grew up in socialist Vienna in a “Gemeindebau” (community-subsidized tenement buildings) a middle-class building, with a grey facade but surrounded with gardens and the view on the vienna woods. Next to my building there is the famous “Karl Marx Hof”, a symbolic building, a housing complex which is called the “Ring Street of the Proletariat”.
Vienna’s culture is not only referring to the richness of the monarchist times but also getting it’s charme from pubs, cafés and restaurants which are typically places of the middle-class. – F.Z.
Filed under: Introduction
With Designing for mediocrity it’s not our aim to design mean products, but to accept mediocrity as part of our society.
I don’t think that for instance by designing single beautiful products the overall picture will change. In my eyes it could be much more effective to take the most ordinary and generally used objects as starting points to develop something new and change things from inside-out.
I want to support mediocrity/middle-class to create a new self-consciousness.
“So yes, let’s design for the ordinary, the average, the unexciting
and uninspired – therein lies the real challenge!” - Sara Berner & Felix Zabel
