Developing New Stylistic Possibilities for African Product Design Inspired by African Cultural Heritage

Abstract

This research project endeavours to explore and develop notions of ‘contemporary African design’. The project focuses on chair design with particular reference to the Senufo articulated chair from the Ivory Coast. In order to frame the practical research the separate histories of Western chairs and African chairs are examined for common ground. Ideas of cultural identity and style as a means of communicating an African identity to the West are explored. Transculturation and liminality are presented as alternative conceptual stances from which to overcome conceptual and theoretical problems inherent in the term ‘African design’. The research also examines the notion of communication in products and artefacts aiming at a better understanding of how products and artefacts conceived in one cultural context are likely to be interpreted by another. A general semiotic theory is used as a starting point providing a comparison to various other alternate and/or opposing theoretical approaches. A chair designed in the Western Modernist tradition, Hans Wegner’s 1949 Folding Chair, is used as a basis for illustrating the applicability of such theoretical approaches. A traditional Senufo articulated chair is then used as a basis to explore cross-cultural interpretation: the ways in which one culture interprets the artefacts of another and attaches new and different meanings to these artefacts because of different cultural assumptions, attitudes and values. Finally, the insights gained from the theoretical and cultural understanding of the chairs are used as a basis for putting into practise a hybrid method for design: that of incorporating craft and design and allowing the two approaches to inform one another. After a thorough elimination process one design is chosen, refined and prototyped, this choice being rooted in the theoretical findings in order to develop a new stylistic possibility for African product design inspired by African cultural heritage.