B is for Bauhaus, Y is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World from A to Z (2015)

Philippe Starck is not a designer that the contemporary generation of design students shows much interest in. They look at Apple’s Jonathan Ive, or the more radical approach of open-source design. Hacking, additive manufacturing, as 3D printing is now called, and critical design make Starck look dated, if not irrelevant.

For all his blithe claims to have been motivated by ecology long before green became fashionable, and still is, now that it is not, he is identified, if he is identified at all, with that moment in the 1980s when the cult of the designer celebrity was born. He built his career as much on his own force of personality as with the objects that he has designed. He relies on colour, sensuous styling and an impressive way with hotel lobbies.

The ease with which he could come up with a philosophy of nursery-rhyme simplicity for every new product, from chairs with three legs to toothbrushes apparently inspired by Brâncuşi’s sculpture, meant that, once the initial charm had worn off, Starck came to be seen as the personification of the glib. And yet, perhaps enough time has passed since François Mitterrand hired him to redecorate the president’s private office at the Élysée Palace to look at Starck with more distance, both as designer and as a phenomenon.

Born in 1949, Starck is like a knowing reincarnation of another celebrated French-born designer, Raymond Loewy. It was Loewy, with his natural gift for self-publicity, who created the prototype for professional designer as heroic form-giver. He managed to have himself photographed cross-legged, crisp white handkerchief in his pocket, perched on a shelf, in a reconstruction of his studio inside the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and to make the cover of Time magazine at the centre of a universe of things he had designed. There is an unforgettable image of Loewy lolling casually at the front end of a massive steam locomotive that he turned into an enormous streamlined bullet for the Pennsylvania Railroad. He wears a soft felt trilby, neatly trimmed moustache, and an immaculately tailored suit, apparently effortlessly in command of the immensely powerful mechanical monster on which he is balanced.

Starck does not go in for hand-made suits. In his early days, he looked rumpled and sported stubble that never quite turned into a beard. But he had an eye for publicity every bit as developed as Loewy’s, and a similar line in cracker-barrel philosophizing. Loewy was always claiming to have streamlined the sales curve with his MAYA formula - the ‘most advanced, yet acceptable’ solution. Starck will tell everybody who will listen that he believes not in design that is beautiful, but in design that is good.

But Starck’s way with words should not distract from his real achievements. Perhaps more significant than his commission to decorate an imperial presidency was when the Thomson consumer electronics company, newly nationalized by the French government, brought in Starck in a last-ditch attempt to stave off the inevitable collapse of European television manufacturing. In 1994, just as the cathode ray tube was facing extinction, Starck produced a series of remarkable objects for the various brands that Thomson owned. There was little chance of competing on price, or with innovative technology. But Thomson were prepared to allow Starck to rethink the language of electronic objects, in both materials and shape. The most memorable of them was produced under the SABA brand. Starck called the portable tv Jim Nature - one of his more irritating affectations is to use characters from Philip K. Dick science-fiction novels to provide the names for his objects. Jim Nature’s case is partly moulded chipboard and partly injection-moulded plastic. The carrying handle is a strip of fabric. Using wood for the case is a memory of the early days of television. Like the radios, television sets were treated as pieces of furniture at first, to be domesticated by cabinetwork.

Jim Nature is simultaneously looking to the past and, with its tight curves and a back that is designed just as carefully as the front, to the future. The messages sent by the materials are deliberately mixed. Wood could be understood as a signal both of luxury, like a walnut dashboard on a car, or of economy of means: chipboard has a suggestion of utility. And given the way that television over the previous decade had avoided the use of once conventional wood, Starck was able to make an utterly distinctive object.

The television set was one of the most charismatic objects of the twentieth century. It was found in almost every home. The technology on which it depended has become obsolete. The social behaviour it encouraged, as a kind of surrogate fireplace, has vanished. The particular form of media that it encapsulated, broadcasting by a few networks and national broadcasters, which created massive audiences for a restricted range of content that was consumed simultaneously by entire nations, has gone.

Jim Nature stands at the end of a line of self-consciously designed TV sets, one that began in Italy in the 1960s with Marco Zanuso and Richard Sapper’s work for Brionvega, the Algol, and Black, the minimal acrylic black cube, and saw Sony’s Trinitron technology applied to the Profeel range of monitors. And Starck’s contribution to close this sequence is the one that has the most to tell us about how design can be used as a language that goes beyond formal perfection.