How is the definition of design changing?
The first objects that I acquired from Mathieu were from his thesis project, a series about delivering medicines that empowered patients. I considered it design right away. All of a sudden taking medication for chronic ailments became not a duty you tried to forget but an activity woven into life. The project was about playfulness and improving people’s lives through objects. It’s the same thing with the Mathieu’s Elements project. It asks: Why acclimatize a whole building? Why not have pets that follow you around, warm up the air, and deliver a certain amount of white noise — it’s all about acting locally, being pragmatic, avoiding waste. A major change in the definition of design concerns this sense of responsibility, and museums need to understand this. With rapid prototyping, for example, the difference between prototype and series has completely vanished. To say deliberately that this is a limited-series object makes it art right away: It’s in the intention of not making it widely
