Private Project

To the design room! A cinematic design collage

"To the design room!" is one of the outputs of an ongoing research about the links between design and cinema, and presents the product design practice and discourse as it is represented in the movies.
This cinematic collage complements design historiography in providing a fresh and lively view of the design practice. The movies where a designer, a design company, or even just an experience related to design are represented, impact on society shaping their image on the discipline. Mundane fiction can be used as an ethnographic tool to gather knowledge on almost any topic. When related to design, movies can tell a lot about the designer’s attitude, the agents and stakeholders that condition the process, the different discourses that are verbalised, or even the politics that rule the field.
The collage is built from the words used during the design process, from the ideation phase to the release of the product to the society. Concepts, drawings, models, prototypes, manufacturing processes, economical or labour-related issues as commented and discussed by movie characters provide an unprecedented overview of the product design practice and discourse.
125 minutes of design onscreen. 530 clips from 101 movies dated from 1931 to 2019.

  • Guim Espelt Estopà
    Director
  • Project Type:
    Experimental
  • Runtime:
    2 hours 5 minutes 38 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    July 15, 2022
  • Country of Origin:
    Spain
  • Aspect Ratio:
    2.39 : 1
  • Film Color:
    Black & White and Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    Yes
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Barcelona Design Festival
    Barcelona; Il·lacions Gallery
    Spain
  • CinéDesign3
    Toulouse; Instituto Cervantes
    France
    June 2, 2022
Director Biography - Guim Espelt Estopà

Designer, PhD, researcher in, for and through design.

My main areas of work are research and curatorship, creative projects, teaching and knowledge transfer, and organisation and management.

I am especially interested in the relations between design and fiction –especially cinema–, design methodologies and socio-cultural aspects related to objects.

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Director Statement

This audiovisual work is part of the doctoral dissertation “Design through cinema: A cinethnographic approach to product design practice and discourse” [DOI: 10.46467/PhD-GEspelt]
The author acknowledges the copyright owners of all movies used and has credited all of them. The content of the clips is discussed in the dissertation text, and their inclusion in this piece illustrates and complements the research and education purposes of the thesis.