Eamespunk follow-up: Better Living Through Plywood

The internets are fun.
It was only a matter of time before this meme snowballed into a manifesto. In this particular case: less than a week.

Melbourne-based designer Daniel Neville picked up the original meme and ran with it in his post Eamespunk'd. Today, Neville expanded on the idea with his Eamespunk Manifesto.



"Who needs brass goggles and mirror shades when you can have wall size projector screens in bucky domes? Overturn the individualist agenda and share in media together! Collective humanist action will unify us while we are amazed at still slides of interesting details! We will return the suburban home to the great importance it once had. The focus on the family as a unit will return, and we will design for them and their needs. And they will have a multitude of things to sit in. And they will be vastly more comfortable than temper-foam or leather upholstery. Soft curved humanist wood, with modern curves will form to your body. Enjoy the comfort! Post War enthusiasm will return my friends. Pavilions and fairs demonstrating the latest in plastics and molded plywood will bring amazement back into your hearts. Who needs cyberspace or the great aether when we will have the house of cards. Interchangeable modules of information, slotting different electric modules of knowledge together. The great consensual hallucination will be made from card and be in your hands".

Brilliant.

Granted, I threw a little gasoline on the fire last week because 1) I thought Nakamura's article made him sound exactly like the worst pretentious stick-in-the-mud stereotype of "serious designers" that makes me embarrassed to be a "serious designer", 2) I thought Bruce's retort was perfectly concise and snarky in tone and right on point in substance, and 3) mostly because it's a great story on so many levels - one being the potential for a well placed tongue-in-cheek comment to warrant a manifesto [from half way around the world at that] within a week! I'm not going to spoil the fun for everyone by picking apart how much the response to this simple meme says about design culture, the ephemeral but very real impact blogs have on society, the details of how memes morph into trends morph into movements morph into subcultures, etc. You're all smart and you know all that. Let's just all sit back and enjoy the next big thing: Eamespunk!

[We're still eagerly awaiting our dear friend Eames Demetrios to chime in on this topic with what I fully expect to be a most humorous reply, but he's quite fairly otherwise occupied.]