No Rules

At Milan’s Salone Internazionale del Mobile this spring, the conceptualist Swedish product designers of Front exhibited a video game called “The Representation of Things.” They reengineered an existing game to explore qualities of objects that might not be available when working purely in real space—an idea that began as an outgrowth of creating nonmaterial forms with 3-D modeling software. While there is no linear narrative to the game, players can shoot at objects and move things in ways that defy logic. “A lot of the projects we do as designers exist only as images anyway,” Front’s Sofia Lagerkvist says. “We want to do things that we can’t normally do—for example, something that has no gravity. We were looking to see how far we could stretch an image.” The video game, which has been developed further since it was exhibited in Milan, will be shown in September at the Droog Design galleries in Amsterdam.