Design For life - Episode 1

The design for life series explores the mind and world of designer Philippe Starck. He describes himself as a door or bottle opener to creativity, the future and vision. The episodes are based on him finding new designers. His philosophy is based around how good design speaks of life and how it affects life. This is what he is looking for in other peoples products. He narrows it down to twelve applicants which are now let into the world of aspirations of Philippe Starck in Paris. He teaches them how they should be questioning everything, every design decision in a product and how their design decisions affect everyone in the future. In doing so challenges them with projects which will result in two people going home every week and the winner is awarded a six months placement at his agency.


His ethics on the design world are very strong not caring about how better designers are from each other. He is considered the bad boy of the design world due to his controversial aspect of design from the gun lamp to the clear chair. His design is a power to change society. He is going to try and teach that to his applicants. He wants them to understand and design objects to be beautiful, sustainable and useful that can be liked by everyone. He questions its purpose. For the applicants to get a feel of Philippe Starck’s soul they are staying in a personalised hotel full of his objects as a way to immerse them to him.

The first thing he states to the applicants is that it is a school of creativity not design and to speak less of design and more about things around us. He wants them to focus on creating things to improve society and civilisation. He tells them he is a professional dreamer. Whilst going through each applicant’s choice to join he indicates that he hates sculpture, he wants an object that belongs to someone.

In Project one he wants to see and understand how they understand creativity. He wants to get into their heads, to see what makes them tick. They are given 100 Euro to buy two products in an hour. The 2 products they choose have to fit one of these categories:

 Ecology – environmentally sound and not environmentally sound.

Gender – one that is female and male.
Function – useful and useless.

The idea behind this project is to see how there are too many designs and that we should be thinking about how they are useful and sustainable. The result of this project wasn’t successful for many. He wanted them to talk about the symbolism of the product and how they display the language of the above catagories. He wanted to see the story behind the product.