Design, Collecting, and Collecting Design
Everything is designed, and everything is collectible.
Everything is designed. We might think of something as bad design. And we might attribute what we think of as bad design to a lack of design. But nonetheless, if some thought and intention went into its making, technically—it was designed.
Design comes in many flavors, from the carefully planned drawings of a professional designer, to the unspoken dictates of a community’s vernacular tradition. Indeed, some of the best examples of good design have been passed down to us through generations of nameless engineers, users, and tinkerers whose tiny innovations and gradual improvements have shaped the world as we know it and the objects within it.
And everything is collectible. A collection is a grouping of anything that has been collected, or gathered together. Since anything can potentially be collected, everything is collectible—whether or not the authorities deem something as officially “collectible”, or other people think of it as “worthy” of collection.
When Public Sale catalogers write lot descriptions, we tend to reserve the term “collection” for a grouping of items that share a certain quality or category but have a breadth of provenance such that they would not be called a “set”—which implies completeness, or a “series”—which implies singularity of origin. They may have been the former owner’s collection, or they may have been gathered into a lot that could become a potential collection for a new owner—whether either owner thinks of them as a proper “collection” or not.
Since everything is designed, and everything is collectible, the practice of collecting design can take a multitude of forms. Our Modern Blueprint auction features many chairs from one local collector. This particular collector gathered these chairs together not because all the chairs were the work of a single famous designer. It wasn’t because they were all chairs of a certain type, or a certain era, style, or material. No, this collector’s criterion for inclusion was that each chair in the collection should be a chair that might one day be collectible. You might call it a practice of meta-collecting, an ongoing act of curatorial selection that becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.
Of course, we all have more than one chair in our homes, but we don’t all consider ourselves chair collectors. What number constitutes a collection: three? Simply more than the average person would have? It seems there are as many ways to disagree on collecting as there are ways to collect. But perhaps one way of distinguishing a collection from any mere grouping is that there is a sense of design behind the collection itself. It feels like it was collected with some care, some intention.
And one of the gratifying things about bringing items up for auction is that they can be presented as objects of contemplation, as unique lots worthy of consideration, specimens of diverse taxonomies limited only by the bidder’s imagination—and potential acquisitions for every future collector.
