Post-Fordism

Is modernism as truthful as it claims to be? Is it accurate to say that an object has only one meaning? Meaning is unstable, because there is no ‘one’ truth; everyone sees things differently, and that realization sparks the era of specialization, uniqueness and differentiation. Post-fordism opened up new ways of interpreting mass production and consumption. The prominent ideologies of standardization and regulations were replaced by increasing individualists systems. No two person are exactly the same, even twins, everyone is engraved with different DNAs, we look different, we act differently, and we obviously think differently. Therefore everyone has his or her own individual characteristic, and even though we are bind with rules and restraints there’s always the need to express that distinction, which is much of what is seen in today’s society. For example, even students contained within the same regulations, under the same school uniforms are able to articulate their own individual personality by customization. The idea of differentiation is evidently seen in parametric designs of fluid forms. Those animated forms represents a ‘process’, captured in time, the ‘in between’ of two (beginning and end), emphasizing the idea of multiple truths. Hence, the form changes and morphs every step of the way, calculated by computer, the adaptation in reaction to different stimuli. So even though it is seemingly spontaneous and flexible, simultaneously it is very controlled, as seen in Zaha Hadid’s urban carpet that merges the wall and sidewalk floor into one surface, so it looks like the city flows into the building, using the environment to design.

Zaha Hadid's Urban Carpet

Not only that, the idea of structuring of ‘process’ is relevant to contemporary society more than the past. For instance, grading systems in schools are mainly evaluated from the ‘process’ rather than the final, complete work.