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Yves Béhar makes his curatorial debut with Technocraft, an exhibition exploring the disappearance of the border between designer and consumer. Technocraft is on at the Yerba Buena Art Centre in San Francisco until 3 October 2010.
Subtitled “Hackers, Modders, Fabbers, Tweakers and design in the Age of Indviduality”, the exhibition examines how consumers are increasingly becoming active participants in the design process. Technocraft shows how social networks, open-source platforms and new fabrication technologies have reached a critical mass with grassroots creativity.
Under the themes of crowdsourcing, platforms, blueprints, hacks, incompletes and modules, the exhibition looks at ways in which consumers are expressing their indivuality through design. There is a growing move away from mass-produced sameness and a definite trend towards establishing an individual connection to objects.
Béhar explains: “It is a new era where individualisation, mass-customisation and industrialisation are coming together in an emergent way.”
