The passed

In this assignment regarding "the passed" I decided to talk about avant garde design. I was interested in the idea that avant garde design is cutting edge and always ahead of its time, yet with every avant garde movement it is eventually replaced by a newer and more radical avant garde and the first passes away into history. It seems that the very nature of avant garde design is that it is doomed to fade away only to be reborn in a new incarnation. The life cycle of an avant garde movement is similar to that of a new hit product. First it arrives on the scene and it's like nothing anyone has seen before. It becomes an instant hit with the art crowd and it begins to grow from there. Soon non-design people start noticing the style as it is commercialized and dumbed down by big companies. Soon what was once avant garde and radical has become ordinary and familiar and people start looking for the next new thing. And so that avant garde movement dies as another one rises to replace it only to fall prey to the syclical cycle that is avant garde design. This idea is illustrated in the timeline below by the Eames LCW. When that arrived on the market it was the most refined and advanced use of bent laminated wood that anyone had seen and it became an instant classic. Now that that technology and aesthetic vernacular has been adopted by thousands of designers and companies bent laminated chairs, which were at first a product of avant garde design, have become ordinary. Only time will tell if this pattern with avant garde design will continue. Currently conceptual design is the new avant garde and it has been going strong for about 15 years. If history is any clue that means that conceptual design is soon to be replaced by a new avant garde movement and conceptual design will join the ranks of the passed avant garde movements like Art Nouveau and The Bauhaus.