FOS

Art and Social Life is Karriere’s subtitle, and one designating a focus that clearly overlaps and resonates with FOS’s notion of “Social Design”. The concept provides the overarching framework for the platforms that FOS devises and into which everything from design objects, performances, music, talks, and rubbish is integrated. FOS’s contribution to Karriere is a piece of art design: dining tables and small coffee tables. The colours of the dining tables were chosen randomly, using a rotating colour wheel – for the aim is not beauty and harmony in tonally matched furnishings but, on the contrary, diversity. A pervasive trait informing his designs is the serial repetition of a figure or a module, combined in displaced progressions. But he is not a designer in the traditional sense. His furniture isn’t really all that functional and his designs have a touch of clunkiness. Where traditional designs strive for harmony, FOS’s designs create friction. His injection of off-kilterness into the everyday realm frees up human interaction. His designs are poised between the stringent and the gritty (for example, the small coffee tables’ shiny clean lines and the raw concrete) and between the recognizable and otherness. That aesthetics and sociality are inextricably entwined is one of his key assumptions. In part, he is interested in how, as individuals, we are unconsciously driven by structures that are created by the market (for example, the spaces that surround us) and in part by the social factor in encounters between individuals that elude control. As he puts it: “The best chef is no guarantee of a good dinner party” – there is always something unpredictable in play between people. FOS’s design inhabits the intersection between two poles: the conferral of aesthetic form on a social situation and the degree of impact so doing might have in leading it in a different direction. This is essentially FOS’s project. The individual utility articles should therefore not be regarded as complete in themselves but as elements in what FOS calls a ‘socially accumulated situation’. The aim in this process is not concretely defined; it’s the process itself that is of interest. The encapsulation of off-centre social ideas in an aesthetic material – that’s “Social Design”. (MKT)

FOS, born 1970, Denmark

www.socialdesign.dk

• artwork