Experimental Jetset Online Archive Lost Formats Links News About this site Contact	Under A Tenner What is good design? page 1 of 3   The Design Museum (London) asked us to contribute to Under a Tenner, a group show that took place from 3 December 2004 to 27 February 2005. For this exhibition, a group of 15 designers (including us) were asked to nominate ten examples each of what they believed to be good design, with none of the items costing more than 10 pounds. The chosen products were exhibited at the museum, alongside some short written motivations. Shown here are some pictures of the exhibition. Please note that we weren't responsible for the design of the exhibition, or the graphic design of it. We can only take credit for the selection of the ten items.		As for the selection, we didn't really have a thought-out plan about what to show; as always, we didn't have much time. What we did try was to select some items that would illustrate our interest in the 'thingness' of (graphic) design. As we wrote in our introduction to our selection: "Usually we're quite systematic, but for some reason the collection of items we've selected is far from systematic; if we had to narrow it down to one underlying theme, it would be our interest in the idea of design as paraphernalia: the designed object as an artefact, as a materialised idea, as a container that carries its own meaning." As for the motivations that we wrote: since the amount of words that we were permitted to use was limited, the texts are quite short. But we still hope they make clear what we like about the items. Here are the (unedited) texts:		Geometry Set Square Originally manufactured by Aristo, now produced by companies such as Linex and Rotring, the geometry set square is a triad of plastic sharpness, hard transparency and pure unbreakability. Pythagoras said that "there is music in the spacing of the spheres, and there is geometry in the humming of strings". If this is so, the geometry set square is the oversized plectrum to pick these strings.		National Geographic The iconic yellow frame is literally a window on the world, and what a consistently well-designed window it is. There is something about this magazine that makes us incredibly happy. Maybe it's the the radical absence of bitterness and sarcasm, or just the bright yellow frame, which, in all its emptiness and transparency, seems to be constantly opening the horizon of change.
(c) Experimental Jetset 97-06	Previous / Back to Archive / Next				Photo's: Femke Dekker		Related link: Designmuseum