No Randomness: The Chocolate Bar
Image courtesy of Oscar Lhermitte.
In 2015, industrial designer Oscar Lhermitte launched No Randomness, a project that highlights the design stories behind the everyday standards, systems and products that surround us. Having begun life as an exhibition at the Biennale Internationale Design Saint-Étienne, the project will now become a regular column in the pages of Disegno.
“Stop yelling, kids! Form one line and you’ll each get your piece of chocolate!”
—A father taking care of a bunch of kids on a Saturday afternoon in a park.
I always struggle when it comes to explaining to people – and especially young design students – what design is actually about. Luckily I manage to get my point across most of the time, but only after a certain effort, and the use of many different examples.
Design is all about context and systems – where a product lives and to what systems it belongs. It’s a process of making observations and decisions. Explaining this through the typology of the chair, while a design stalwart, is too difficult. It takes a trained pair of eyes to see the impact of one design for a chair over another: the subtleties of an armrest, the use of ash over oak, and so on.
To best understand (and appreciate) design, we should talk about the things we use every day. The mundane stuff that we see so often that we don’t even look at them properly any more. Dissecting and understanding the small details and decisions that make up our objects is the key. And there is no better place to start than with a chocolate bar.
Chocolate, in essence, hasn’t got a shape. It’s not square, it’s not round; it’s solid, it’s liquid. And because it’s highly appreciated all around the world, we’ve had to come up with lots of different ways to shape and package it.
Solid chocolate was already consumed in Mesoamerica in the form of small balls made from ground cocoa, but it was during the Industrial Revolution that something marvellous happened. The combination of steam-powered engines and new grinding techniques gave chocolate an incredibly smooth texture that could be moulded at an industrial scale – and at a price accessible to the mass market.
But one 19th-century chocolatier, François-Louis Cailler (Swiss, of course), understood that chocolate was a delicacy to share with one another. Appreciated by children and grownups alike, chocolate needs to be divided fairly. So Cailler gave his chocolate a super-functional form by pouring the chocolate into a mould with segmented ridges, thus making it easily breakable into equal parts. This is the chocolate bar we know today.
It seems so obvious that we don’t question it. The bar has simply become the norm for the confectionary industry, and hasn’t changed in 200 years. Whether it’s for distributing pieces of chocolate to over-excited kids or for precisely measuring 185g of chocolate to bake a brownie, the bar makes your life a lot easier.
Did I get my point across?
Words and photograph Oscar Lhermitte
This article was originally published in Disegno #36. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.