But if I’m participating in cocoa based adrenaline sports my immediate concerns are nothing to do with design. I’m much too busy wondering if my heart rate will recover and my hands stop shaking before I touch heavy machinery. I’m not thinking about design, and neither are the people who pause on their way to the bus stop, admiring the confections in the window. They aren’t thinking about design when they look into the chiller cabinet, and decide whether to go for a mexican wrap over the BLT, and the couple who are sitting reading the papers near the door couldn’t care less about shadow gaps or mitred corners. As I sit there, everyone around me is immersed in the stuff of life – food, drink, conversation, reading, thought.

Even the owner of the Manna House, Drew, isn’t thinking about design. He’s mostly thinking about what to put into his new window display next, and that his turnover has risen substantially since he was able to display the beauty of what he makes, and since three more covers were created near the door. When With Kerlaff made three elements of new furniture for the bakery, I fretted about whether the back of the Cake Sofa that we made for the window has a consistent language with the other elements. But looking at people enjoying the food, the furniture has been bang on target: in second place, exactly where it should be.

I’m not pretending that design is not important, because it is, enormously. Good design can enrich our lives, and there is great skill and hard graft involved in making it work so well that people don’t even see it. But in championing good design, we should never confuse the design itself with those things it should be enriching, supporting. We shouldn’t confuse design with the sensation of eating chocolate, because there is no contest.

It made for a pleasant change recently to down tools, hang up the overalls and meet with Stephen Cappello, winner of the recent Shadow Screen competition, to discuss with Damien and Genny from ISO the next steps in realising the design.

On the face of it, the process of making a striking, freestanding, screen using Stephen’s Braille based pattern seemed fairly simple – just apply to an existing template that works well, take a few photos and and hey presto, new product launched. But much as I’m a fan of the path of least resistance, it didn’t seem appropriate to knock out more of the same. In fact, the three panel folding screen that is the most clearly identifiable image of the Shadow Screen range is not really a ‘product’ in the conventional sense – it was created for a Beruit Spa, who needed a lightweight, moisture resistant, folding screen. The impetus for it’s development was context driven, and like all good design, it justified it’s presence by creating value in response to this context.

The dilemma of speculative product design is that it has no real context, or at best an assumed one, and so its claim of creating value rests on the believability of a fiction. Because the Shadow Screen service creates value by responding appropriately to the needs of particular contexts, through the means of screening, filtering and defining threshold space, it seems counter intuitive to choose fictional context over reality. Context is arguably essential to showing the value of the Shadow Screens, and particularly so if the winning design is to be used to show the potential of the collaborative work.

The judging panel were attracted by Stephen’s design not only it’s simplicity and economy, but also by the potential to encode site specific content into the work. The digitally based means of fabrication inherently offers freedom from the constraints of tooling set up costs, and the best design has always fully exploited the potential of production. it makes an enormous amount of sense, therefore, for the made design to respond to real contexts, not only formally, but through site specific content. Buildings have long been judged on their appropriateness to context. It will be fascinating to see if product design, like the best architecture, can respond intelligently to place.

One of the ambitions of this opportunity is that it offered value, not only to the sponsor(s) of the event but also to those involved. In a ‘stakeholder’ analysis of the Shadow Screen service, the main group that is not represented is the Shadow Screen clients – architects and interior designers who actually specify the screens. I would love to hear comments on the entries from those who actually will be using them, because the breadth of entries suggests some fascinating questions regarding value.

For example, what place should the Shadow Screen occupy in the hierarchy of an interior design palette? Some of the entries clearly demand to be centre stage, whilst others would be more valuable as contributors to the overall experience. How much attention should a screen demand, or expect?

For my own part, I will be trying to tread a line between rewarding those designs which question the boundaries of the material, and developing commercially viable patterns. These might be exactly the same things, but also might be divergent. I look forward not only to seeing the winning design made, but also to discovering which of these concerns actually shapes the relative impact of each design.

See the entries and comment here