Super normal or too normal?
It looks like a normal crate but it’s not. It’s The Crate, a new product designed by one of Britain’s most famous product designers, Jasper Morrison for Established & Sons. The Crate is on sale at a retail price of UK 95 pounds. Since its launch at the Milan Fair earlier this year, The Crate has become one of the hottest topics in the design world.
The story goes as follows: Established & Sons commissioned Morrison to design a piece for them, and Morrison agreed to design a bedside table. After exploring a few ideas, Morrison came to the conclusion that he could not find anything that works better than the wooden wine crate he uses beside his bed. Morrison decided to produce a replica of that wine crate. It is almost exactly the same as the original, but is made from better-quality wood and the joints are improved to make it stronger.
People who see the crate either love it or hate it. It has been criticized widely in the media and the internet. Why spend so much money on a star designer’s table that is the same as a wooden crate? It’s beautiful and it works. But it’s a wooden crate! the critics say. Browsing through the blogs of the ‘con-crate’ camp, you may find such criticisms as that it’s a shame, pretentious, and arrogant, while those in the ‘pro-crate’ camp say that it’s inspiring, honest, bold, and beautiful.
Morrison himself says in the International Herald Tribune that he had not expected it to be a big controversial issue. The main reason he did it was because he liked his own old crate. In the blog of freegorifero, Morrison popped in and shared his viewpoint: “It’s never the goal to exploit consumers. No one in a hundred years is going to get rich making wooden boxes and selling them as bedside tables”. Morrison argues about the design approach that “There are no limits on how a designer achieves a design so long as it is a useful offering and represents good value or quality”.
The Crate and the exhibition he recently curated, entitled ‘Super Normal,’ are two more attempts to balance the situation in the design profession, which he thinks is becoming ‘a cheap-trick supplier to the media’. His final word is everyone has the right to think it’s a bad project: “No problem. You are not the only one!”.
The case of The Crate might cause many to recall Marcel Duchamp’s famous Fountain — a urinal laid flat on its back on a sculpture stand and signed with a pseudonym ‘R. Mutt 1917’. Duchamp claimed that an art object is designated so by the artist who creates it whether it is a work of art or not. How he distinguished Fountain from a standard urinal is by the signature, the presentation, and the place of presentation — the context. We see this Duchampian spirit in The Crate, and that makes it even more interesting.
So, as an exercise for us designers, consider this simple question:
“What do you think about The Crate?”
