Creative Limitations of Plastic in the Domain of Art and Industrial Design

When you look at the field of Art and Industrial Design, and specifically the area where plastic is predominantly the materiel of choice, one of the things that stands out is how the artists and designers are limited by the boundaries imposed by moulds.
Unlike other fields in the domain of crafts where one can just pick-up a pencil and draw, use a brush and paint or take a piece of granite and sculpt, working with plastic is generally a two step process where you first need to create what you want in a three dimensional mould and then use the plastic materiel of your choice in order to bring it to reality.
Although on the surface of it all this may not sound like a big deal, working with plastic, from a pure artistic perspective, does not really allow a designer to conserve the uniqueness character that they may require. To put this into context, lets take two simple examples:

1. If you take a sculpture and ask him to create the same apple our of clay five times, he may produce five items that may look the same on the surface but it is a virtual certainty that on closer inspection you will find them all to be individually unique.


2. If you take a designer and ask him to create the same apple our of plastic five times, he will create a mould and then use on of the common injections molding methods in to order to produce the requested five items. The difference here is that each item, barring any production issues, will result in the production of five identical items.

The fundamental issue when you working with plastic is due to the simple fact that the materiel is not the primary tool in the design process. It is there as a means to create the end result, but it not used in its organic state during the thought process in order to design the end product. Instead of designing while taking into account the properties and limitations of the materiel as a basis to define the boundaries, it is being forced, squeezed and bent to the shape of the mould irrespective of the fit.
This clear advantage that you have with this design approach is of course the ability to mass produce and effectively "copy and paste" products but from a pure creative process you lose on the uniqueness aspect that nearly all designers are taught to aim for.
The technological challenge for the future is to try and close this gap between mass production and "one of a kind" uniqueness in order allow artists and designers to fully explore their creative potential.

Etto Design Lab is trying to bridge the creative gap that exists in the world of arts and industrial design in order to break the mould limitation.