“The details are not the details. They make the design”*…
Katerina Kamprani set out to “re-design useful objects making them uncomfortable but usable and maintain the semiotics of the original item”– that is to say, to demonstrate design gone wrong…
See more of her whimsical riffs on utility at “The Uncomfortable.”
* Charles Eames
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As we struggle to reinsert the “you in “utility,” we might recall that it was on this date in 1914 that George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion opened in London. An essayist, novelist, and short story writer, Shaw is best remembered as a playwright– and Pygmalion, as his most-loved play. Having detested a musical adaptation of is play Arms and the Man (called The Chocolate Soldier), Shaw subsequently forbade musicalization of his work, including a proposed Franz Lehár operetta based on Pygmalion. But after his death, several of his plays formed the basis of musicals—most famously the musical My Fair Lady. It is officially adapted from the screenplay of the film version of Pygmalion rather than the original stage play (keeping the film’s ending); still, librettist Alan Jay Lerner kept generous chunks of Shaw’s dialogue, and the characters’ names, unchanged.
Shaw is the only person to have been awarded both a Nobel Prize in Literature (1925) and an Oscar (1938, for his work on the film Pygmalion). Shaw wanted to refuse his Nobel Prize outright out of disdain for public honors, but accepted it at his wife’s behest: she considered it a tribute to their native Ireland. He did reject the monetary award, requesting it be used instead to finance translation of fellow playwright August Strindberg’s works from Swedish to English.
