05 June 2009 You’ve Got To Be Kitsching

I was enjoying a coffee the other day with a design student mate of mine who introduced me to what I found to be a very fascinating concept; kitsch design.Kitsch design, he explained, at its most basic is design that is both useless and almost immediately becomes outdated. Perhaps the most common example is those cheap tacky plastic phone holders. They don't do anything except hold your phone, even though the desk is perfectly capable of that. Further, three months later every mobile phone on the market is too small to sit properly in the holder.This is kitsch design. Temporary with no real use that just ends up as land fill.I asked my mate why kitsch design even existed, and interestingly his answer was, "Marketing". The ability to make $2 million in two weeks from cheap crappy mobile phone holders means that kitsch design will always exist.But in a society where we place such importance on long term vision and sustainability, I hope you're not marketing something kitsch. And if you are, then it's probably worse than marketing ecstasy to children....