In a world in which channels of communication are as clogged with pollution as the environment, the Dutch designer Jan van Toorn is seeking to reverse some of the damage. For 30 years, Van Toorn’s aim has been to rescue the media from its role as a distribution network for dominant ideology, and to reassert what he sees as its legitimate function of communication. Few designers are more clearsighted about the part they play in the transmission of society’s assumptions and value.
‘In my opinion designers are connected to the existing order,’ says Van Toorn. ‘That’s the reality and you have to deal with it. But within that you can still make a choice about your position in the field, depending on your background and ideas, and then if you want you can be a hindrance. And I would like to see many more hindrances.’
Van Toorn’s goal is to contribute to what he calls a ‘counter public sector.’ And as the recently appointed director of Jan Van Eyck Academy in Maastricht – where he is establishing a challenging teaching programme for art, design and theory – he will be well placed to continue the political and aesthetic agitation that has marked his career.
Interactive Furnitures
How would you like your furniture to communicate with you and to send you messages? It actually sounds very futuristic and it makes you think of furniture that talks and moves. We haven’t got the technology to make that for our homes yet but we’re getting close. For now, your furniture can only communicate with you through shows of light, colors and through their intelligent and fun designs.
Interactive furnitures encourage kids to collaborate, explore, and learn, or just keep young children engaged during free time.
High-tech products
If Van Toorn’s work for the Van Abbemuseum was, as he says, ‘friendly’, then he was to take a far more combative approach in the calendars he designed in the early 1970s for the printer Mart Spruijt. The collaboration had begun in 1960 with Van Toorn still in his ‘classic’ phase, using formal exercises and typographic jokes as an essentially aesthetic programme.
But Van Toorn’s work soon developed into what he describes as a ‘laboratory situation’ in which he experimented with images of unprecedented power. ‘I found out in these calendars that it is possible to construct a counter-reality, with more brutality and more openness than I will ever dare do again. That’s the challenge I still have.’