Has Contemporary Design Embraced Steampunk?

While it never admits to it directly this post on the ICON blog (ICON is a fairly high end architecture and design magazines) leads me to believe that the relatively underground Steampunk aesthetic and sensibility has begun to have an influence on contemporary designers.

The posts is titled Design and Redundant Technology and points out the growing trend among contemporary designers to use outdated or retro technologies in place of their modern equivalents. Of course, mining the past to create the future has a long history in all fields, including design. But there is something more going on here.

Consider this quote from the post:

Designers like Random International and Troika are a challenge to linear, engineer-driven technological progress. They pose instead a romantic, chaotic and non-linear approach, based on designing with no end product in mind – a “Victorian approach” of tinkering and experimenting.

This quote creates a direct link between the goals and method of this small group of contemporary designers and the Steampunk (and it’s umbrella “maker,”) community. The themes of tinkering, experimenting evoked here are similar to those evoked in the recent Nature feature on Steampunk.

Both articles also emphasize that these are not regressive impulses by pointing out the willingness to use contemporary methods when appropriate. I, for example, used computer aided design (CAD) both the Dihemispheric Chronaether Agitator and the Triaparator and had the blades for the Triaparator cut with an extremely advanced water jet cutter.

A key element of Steampunk, is the application of retro-futurism, that is projecting past futures (futures that never were) on contemporary objects. This idea is echoed by one of these designers when he say:

“It’s not an ideological rejection of the new. The thinking has to be futuristic, and then you select the appropriate technology, which is often in front of you and 30 years old.”

But why is the past so valuable to contemporary design and art? This quote strikes more the the heart of the matter.

For Noel, it’s about bringing something from the recent past to the technology of today. “The straight reuse of older or redundant technology is maybe a little restrictive,” he says. “Our approach is more a reflection on technology, how we can produce a different quality in sound or in physicality to things that are more and more virtual and more and more miniature.”

One example, mentioned twice in the post that really highlights this point, is the Hulger P*Phone, (pictured here for sale here at Neiman Marcus). The incredible similarity between this object and Uber Steampunk Jake Von Slatt’s Retro Cell Phone Mod neatly sums up the connection between this design movement and Steampunk.

As the objects around us become increasingly electronic, digital and miniature it becomes increasing difficult for people to form connections with them. This connection can be facilitated by reincorporating older technological elements which have qualities, beyond their “retroness,” that contemporary ones lack. The sounds of clacking gears, clicking linkages, whizzing belts, hissing steam and squeaky wheels imbue mechanical objects with organic qualities that people connect with on a more visceral, human level.

I’m unsure to what extant this greater connection people have with these older, mechanical technologies will exist in the future. Perhaps, two hundred years from now when quantum computer and other unimaginable technologies saturate the world of objects people will connect more readily with their retro digital electronics the their contemporary whatevers.

But I seriously doubt it. Personally I think the long term future of design is organic. Nothing can replace the emotional connection people make with objects that mimic living organisms. Don’t tell me you don’t feel for this wickedly cool robot when it’s slipping around on the ice or being kicked off balance by some (jackass) researcher.