How some design appears to be something that it is not--by
beautifying, amusing, substituting, or deceiving.
Pretense design pretends to be something that it is not. Pretense design
includes all kinds of designed objects: a pair of glasses that looks
like a fashion accessory rather than a medical necessity, a hotel in Las
Vegas that simulates a Venetian ambience complete with canals and
gondolas, boiler plates that look like steel but are vinyl. In this
book, Danish designer Per Mollerup defines and describes a ubiquitous
design category that until now has not had a name: designed objects with
an intentional discrepancy between surface and substance, between
appearance and reality. Pretense design, he shows us, is a type of
material rhetoric; it is a way for physical objects to speak
persuasively, most often to benefit users but sometimes to deceive them.
After explaining the means and the meanings of pretense design, Mollerup
describes four pretense design applications, providing a range of
examples for each: beautification, amusement, substitution, and
deception. Beautification, he explains, includes sunless tanning, high
heels, and even sporty accessories for a family car. Amusement includes
forms of irrational otherness--columns that don't hold anything up, an
old building's façade that hides a new building, a new Chinese town that
mimics an old European town. Substitution pretends to be a natural
thing: plastic laminate is a substitute for wood, Corian a substitute
for marble, and prosthetics substitute for human organs. Deception
doesn't just bend the truth; it suspends it. Soldiers wear camouflage to
hide; hunters use decoys to attract their prey; malware hides in a
harmless program only to wreak havoc on a user's computer. With Pretense
Design, Per Mollerup adds a new concept to design thinking.
