External Event - Nordic Forum for Design History 2018

3 October 2018

Nordic Forum for Design History, 23-24 November 2018, Museum of Design and Applied Arts, Garðabær (Iceland)

Originality seems to be an overarching ideal in modern design, where copying has the lowest esteem. This is inherited from Romanticist notions of art, and dominates modern art and architecture as well. Laws and regulations against design copies are often based on intellectual property rights despite being difficult to judge legally. Copying in this sense is seen as plagiarism, as stealing ideas, not just quoting or repeating forms.

However, copying also means, to some extent, confirming, and it has had – and continues to have – a valid function in education and tradition. Traditional craft education was based on copying and skills were developed via making exact copies. Though modern design education is explicitly about creativity and original innovations, there might still be tacit lines between when to break rules and when to align the aesthetic norms of the teachers and the school. There would be no training without following and confirming some rules or models, and academics as well have to show skills to reproduce ideas and schemes.

In the history of Nordic design traditions schools are central references to confirm common identities and ideals. We highlight some designs as original and canonise them as design classics. Being 'classics', however, means that they are used as models by followers. The status as classic is confirmed by later versions or reproductions. And some of the early Scandinavian furniture classics were even versions of traditional types, as type form was an ideal in Functionalism. In this sense the copying of types and models played a significant role in Nordic design e.g. the schools of Kaare Klint and Carl Malmsten. We see such traits in all the Nordic countries as alignment and confirmation of traditions, as well as modern identities, if we go beyond the black and white understanding of originals versus copies.

The presentations and discussions of Nordic Forum 2018 unfold the productive role of copying to cultural processes and historical developments in Nordic design, beyond illegal plagiarism.

Send registration for the conference to ingiriduro@honnunarsafn.is before 19 November 2018, and please mention your name, title and affiliated institution.