Design: Exploring The New Materialism

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Unlike the best of the new buildings, the most intriguing new products and graphics retain a streak of playfulness. Ron Curtis' outdoor table, for example -- a piece of painted redwood fastened to a teak stake -- seems perfect for grownup Cheever children: charmingly zany and casually handy, equipment for a movable fete or a midsummer night's drink. The View-Master 3-D Viewer, a color-slide viewer intended for actual children, has been around for nearly 50 years. In honor of its longevity, the company commissioned Designers D.M. Gresham and Martin Thaler to produce a new version. It is a $5 delight, its function and structure self-evident, its whimsical spirit exactly appropriate.

Floppy disks for personal computers generally come in bare-bones cardboard cases; the imagination all goes into the programming. For the Ability software package, though, Toronto's Spencer/Francey Group has designed a clever casing in black mat plastic that alludes to the injection-molding process itself: the shapes of computer keys and a disk stand in relief, as if actually slipped into the mold. Going to a decorative extreme, Sava Cvek Associates has designed a lamp that seems more like a sculpture than a functional object. Dauntingly tall (6 ft. 4 in.), their light is a lush, glowing monolith -- no shade, no visible bulb -- that convincingly recalls both early 20th century Vienna and late 20th century Tokyo.

The year offered no more materials-savvy work than the witty designs for Pee- wee Herman's CBS-TV show, Pee-wee's Playhouse. Each episode is a psychedelic, slapsticky mixture of humanoid furniture (a bright-eyed "Chairry" that hugs Pee-wee when he sits in it), animated clay figures (Popsicles dancing in a freezer) and blithe video effects (Pee-wee driving a cartoon car down a cartoon highway). The colors are surreal and polymorphous, the sensibility postmodern -- playful with a vengeance.