No Name Design exhibition at MKG Hamburg

The beauty of objects we use every day in an exhibition at Hamburg's Arts and Crafts Museum (MKG) leads to the understanding that the difference is all in the details. “No Name Design” curated by Franco Clivio is a festival for connoisseurs of functional design.



Swiss army knives, shaving brush, plastic gloves, welder's goggles. Objects we use all the time at home and at work are being displayed at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe (MKG -Arts and Crafts Museum) in Hamburg, a great opportunity to visit during the Christmas holidays, to realise what the concept of “design” really is.





The exhibition curator, Swiss designer Franco Clivio, university professor and designer for big names like FSB, Lamy and Siemens, sees himself as “hunter and finder” of objects that he has been collecting since he was a young man, when he received his first Swiss army knife with an unusual closing mechanism. 





In “No Name Design”, Franco Clivio shares with visitors his love for the ordinary, the normal objects we use as we go about our daily lives, showcased in 30 display cases meticulously arranged by photographer, Hans Hansen. Each case is a small “Wunderkammer” that discusses the charm for intelligent design and becomes an almost playful lesson in the theory of the communication scientist Vilém Flusser. In his essay “The Shape of things” (Der Stand der Dinge) he explores the etymology of the word “design”. And looking closely at the collections of - apparently trivial - objects, you realise how associations like “invention” and “ingenuity” also have a lot more to do with them than we think. Because as Flusser said, you can use good design to beat the laws of nature such as the force of gravity, or you can even shrink a large volume.



The “No Name Design” exhibition by Franco Clivio at the MKG is aan outpouring of love for the intrinsic beauty of objects that help us every day and that now perhaps we will begin to look at in a new light.

Christiane Bürklein

“No Name Design” exhibition 
from 11 December to 3 April
at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe (MKG -Arts and Crafts Museum)
http://www.mkg-hamburg.de
Hamburg, Germany
Images of the arrangement: Michaela Hille
Images of the display cases: Hans Hansen