Paola Antonelli

Does good design have to be innovative?
Absoluntely not!  There is a whole tradition of great designers humbly improving and perfecting objects that already existed. So much of Scandinavian 20th century design was based on it, and Castiglioni used to teach a whole class on the redesign of pre-existing objects. It takes a pretty self-assured designer to do that, though.

— Paola Antonelli, Curator, Department of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art

 

Comments

[Birgit Jevnaker]

Good point though some nuance can be added. Because even redesigning existing objects and their messages, presentation spaces, events, etc. can lead to innovations, which can be of multiple kinds.
In all the current talk about-often disruptive-innovation, it may be rewarding not to forget doing incremental as well as architectural innovation (I guess both were important in e.g. Scandinavian design, which also included innovation in handling of wooden materials). Add to this the usefulness to reconstruct and innovate conversations about innovation.

[Chris Conley]

I would add to Paola's and Birgit's thoughtful comments by better defining innovation. I use, "Innovation is the creation of something new that becomes widely adopted."

Of course, "new" and "widely adopted" are relative, but they delineate two important aspects -- "uniqueness" and "acceptance/recognition by third parties."