Laboratory 2013

The Laboratory of the VIENNA DESIGN WEEK was initiated in order to motivate the interdisciplinary exchange between product designers and communication designers using a crossover approach, but most of all to make design processes accessible to the public. Visitors can have a peek over the designers’ shoulders as they work and ask them questions. The designers have frequently cooperated in exchange with each other, and what is more, with the public. Each year the Laboratory team, guided by free association, address a work theme which they use as basis for developing the idea. What could be more self-evident than to put the “idea” itself at the centre of things in autumn 2013?

Work theme: Idea reloaded

An idea is a brainwave, sometimes an invention, perhaps an inspiration and occasionally presumes a flash of genius. New and original ideas are very rare, they occur
far more from the combination of what already exists. Especially in the field of design the stubbornly surviving cliché of the flash of genius conceived by the inventor or artist in his or her solitary garret is disproved by the practice of sharing and cooperative work. This paradigmatic change puts the ingenuity of the individual to question and answers it with an abundance of possible solutions, for instance in crowd sourcing. It confirms that there can be several excellent approaches to a task on a par with each other, that ideas go through (collective) development processes and in the end are reliant upon the form in which they are conveyed.

This year’s Laboratory revolves around these development processes: the run-up involved gathering ideas from the designers in the Laboratory – some extremely promi-
sing, others never realised, some rejected, or some we would have been better without. These ideas are exchanged for further development between the participants; finally, the original idea and new solution approaches will be presented next to each other. All designers and other guests will in addition introduce themselves and their work in a Lab Talk.

Curators: Neigungsgruppe Design and Erwin K. Bauer
Design: Robert Rüf (AT)