Retro-design, by definition, has always been around as one of many ‘styles’ of graphic and even product design. Yet I still don’t know what retro-design is, except for things that look as though they could have been designed a long time ago; in the last decade; during a specific period, or simply earlier. Times of crisis seem to bring out a need to look back to an age when things were certain: a coffee-maker appeared like a coffee-maker and a book cover was not a small sculpture with embossed surfaces and metallic ornaments. I can understand that it’s frightening to design objects today, knowing that mobile phones have more memory and functions than the computers that got the first men to the moon 40 years ago, whereas our fingers are as clunky as they were when we first made tools from bones and bits of stone.
Biologically we are still the same people who were hunting on the plains a few thousand years ago. We stand upright in order to see further than the four-legged animals we eat, and we make tools to first kill and then carve them with. Our evolutionary forebears were not only hunters, but gatherers as well; that way they could survive long winters on what they had previously brought home.
We designers also gather things. Not to survive long winters, and not food, but things that we imagine might be useful one day in the future. This is certainly the case with books, because most of us buy more than we could ever possibly read. It’s also true of photos, which, instead of depicting the natural world, portray unusual artefacts such as road signs with typographic defects or other peculiarities. Pictures of pictures, in other words after the motto ‘ceci n’est pas un enamel sign’.
I know of no designer of any sort who doesn’t collect things. Much of the time these are objects one wants to preserve from oblivion; enamel signs, old cigarette packets or analogue cameras, for instance. Or there are themes that have to do with the profession in some way: books with only blue sleeves, Thai shadow puppets, typographically designed matchboxes, old Braun appliances, wood type or measuring devices from five centuries.
Like most colleagues, I collect so that the objects that inspire me don’t get thrown away. Some represent the crest of a development and are therefore examples of successful design, from which I can learn. When Apple started using aluminium for their computers, I took out some of my old Braun radios and amplifiers from the 1960s and found the same details: perforated surfaces and soft, but precise corner radii. This, of course, officially wasn’t considered stealing other peoples’ ideas, but flattering them by imitation. It had obviously helped that I wasn’t the only person who had those objects sitting on their shelves. Others have learnt from them as well.
Out of the masses of frighteningly complex black million-function monster cameras, now there emerges a new class: small, simple-looking without being primitive. They evoke an age when reporters went around with cameras that needed to be rewound after every picture but would take perfect shots at a 125th of a second, black and white only. I have a collection of those old Leicas. They are perfect tools. Though threatened with extinction, they work well for me because – unlike most digital cameras – they don’t do everything pretty well, but instead do some things just perfectly. Recently, Leica introduced a digital version that has most of the advantages of that old format, but doesn’t need film. And I can use all my old lenses – retro-design at its best.
The hunters on the plains were frightened of anything new, as new meant danger. Designers share this fear, even though we try to convince our clients that they’re getting something new every day. Mind you, our wrath befalls anyone who dares tamper with our trusted daily newspaper of choice.
Eventually we can’t avoid the new, neither privately nor professionally, so we use old things to conjure up the past, when everything was nicer and easier. Still, keeping objects which serve no practical purpose defines something that, like the use of tools, separates us from other animals: culture. Collecting is culture in itself. Why would museums exist otherwise?
