Fair Curation
The MW02 design by Mojow (image: Maison&Objet).
How do you provide creative direction to a trade fair? Commercial events are essential to the operation of the design industries, but many fairs also aspire to contribute to critical understanding of their field. But amongst the commercial demands of such events, what space is there to provide fresh perspectives onto the field as a whole?
Many trade fairs seek to carve out opportunities for critical engagement through talks programmes and installations: moments of pause and reflection amongst the hubbub of the wider event. Yet for each edition of Paris’s Maison&Objet trade fair, the event’s organisers have aimed to go further, setting an overarching theme that is intended to shape the experience of both the fair’s exhibitors and visitors.
Creative direction for this initiative falls to NellyRodi, a Paris-based consultancy and forecasting agency for the creative industries. Led by Vincent Grégoire, the agency’s director of consumer trends and insights, NellyRodi seeks to identify a theme for Maison&Objet that may speak to contemporary debates around design and provide a critical framework to help structure engagement with the fair.
For the fair’s next edition, due in January 2023, NellyRodi has already announced a new theme, “Take Care!”, that aims to explore ideas of inclusivity, health and ecology across design. To understand how these ideas may be made manifest within the fair itself, Disegno spoke with Grégoire about the theme of the most recent Maison&Objet, “Meta Sensible”, which explored crossovers between physical and virtual space and experience. To what extent can creative direction be provided to a brand showcase, and how do Maison&Objet’s contributing brands engage with the themes of the show?
An edited version of the conversation, which took place in September 2022 at Maison&Objet, follows below.
The Tabloid table by &Klevering (image: Maison&Objet).
Disegno How do you provide creative direction to a trade fair? It’s a very different thing to curating an exhibition, for example, given that you have hundreds of different brands all displaying under the same banner. How much scope do you actually have to shape a fair?
Vincent Grégoire I'm looking at a lot of things. I'm travelling a lot and collecting lots of information from across the field: things like focus groups and consumer analysis. So I’m there to look at what's happening in wider culture, sociology, the environment, economy, and so on, and my job is then to try to understand the evolution of consumption and what consumers may have in mind in relation to that.
“I’m tracing consumers who are early adopters, and my first step is trying to isolate the most important design subjects of the moment.”
Disegno But how do you make that manifest? Are you aiding with the selection of the brands who exhibit, or is your research played out in terms of the programming around the fair: the talks and installations for instance? How do you bring your research across?
Vincent It's sociological analysis first and foremost. So I'm not looking at the brands and products. My analysis is more grounded around observations of what is happening in wider creation, communication and distribution. I’m tracing consumers who are early adopters, and my first step is trying to isolate the most important design subjects of the moment. So I collect a lot of information and then, at the end of that process, a key subject emerges. This time, it was people’s desire for physical or sensual experience, and an obsession for “real” things, paired with a simultaneous obsession with virtuality. I was attracted by that paradox.
Fist chair by Polspotten (image: Maison&Objet).
Disegno So “meta sensible” is an attempt to wrestle with those paradoxes and combine them in a fair that is, on the one hand, engaged with physical experience of the projects on display, but also gesturing towards this new fascination with the metaverse?
Vincent We want better, deeper physical experience – to reconnect with materials, to reconnect with our five senses. There's a desire for something very physical that you can reconnect to with a new intensity. At the same time, there’s an obsession for something that is not real, something virtual, where you can bring your senses into another dimension. The development of the metaverse is around this desire for something “super real”.
Disegno But how do you make that manifest within the fair? You're talking about looking into social and cultural forces, which is exciting, but the fair has a very specific commercial focus. It exists to form connections and, ultimately, facilitate sales. How do you make your idea legible in that context?
Vincent I'm a pathfinder. My mission is to bring these ideas to light and point towards them, because they’re going to have consequences on creativity, creation, distribution and communication. Some fields are going to be impacted by these changes, which create new habits and behaviours. I just want to persuade people involved with the fair to look at these things, because they may change the way they’e going to create or promote products on social media. So I give the team behind the fair examples of these ideas in advance, and they then use them to try and understand how it could apply to the selection of new brands or new ways to organise the talks, for example.
Saba’s Morning from its oltreNFT project (image: Maison&Objet).
Disegno How open do you feel that the industry is to your ideas? Because everyone is interested in this crossover between digital and physical, but the design industry can be quite traditional at times, and there's still a huge emphasis upon materiality.
Vincent It’s a question of generations and cultures. We don't have the same relation with these subjects [of digital engagement] in northern Europe as they do in Asia, for example. For a member of Generation X or a Boomer, it's not the same either – they don't feel as comfortable as a younger designer. There's been a real movement from pigment to pixel. The new generation grew up with illuminated screens – everything is more full of light, materials are more synthetic, and they’re enriched with lighting effects. Their relation with time is different – they're not maintaining attention for a long time, but they can do a few things at the same time. The way they create and imagine the future is different and this is interesting for design. Maybe it's not for you, but you mustn't ignore what’s happening.
“There’s been a real movement from pigment to pixel. The new generation grew up with illuminated screens – everything is more full of light, materials are more synthetic.”
Disegno You want to encourage the fair to think about how wider cultural forces are shaping the field.
Vincent These things have an impact. They could affect the selection of colours for a furniture collection, for example, because younger generations are looking for rainbows – they want new possibilities, new materialisations, maybe iridescence. Shapes too – people are looking for something more comfortable, so everything is more rounded
Disegno Do you feel these ideas are actually manifest in what is displayed? Rounder furniture forms and fuller colour ways seem to already be present within design, but do you feel the wider ideas are also visible as it stands?
Vincent The subjects that I’m picking are supposed to be a little bit in advance. So I can already see some weak signals, but step by step these ideas are going to infuse throughout the fair and the way that brands express who they are. For some of them, it's far from their current reality, but for others it can have an influence. It’s about exploring how our homes are going to look, how our officers are going to look, how our hotels and department stores and malls are going to look. We have interior designers visiting the fair and their job is to imagine all of this.