Design byHugh Aldersey-Williams

Untitled (1998), the dominant presence in last year's exhibition of the work of Anish Kapoor at the Hayward Gallery, is a fibreglass shape like a voluminous white kidney but with a rectangular void let into its concave face. The void and its enveloping form are meant, no doubt, to induce contemplations of sublimity. But to the profane eye it looks just like the space where a wide screen should go to complete what's obviously meant to be a giant television, the sort you'd have in your sprawling Manhattan-style loft.

It is one of the self-imposed tasks of the sculptor to help us make sense of the materials around us. But shouldn't the designer be doing this too? If a sculptor like Kapoor is able to make blank fibreglass mean more, it can only be because designers are failing to make the stuff strut.

Graphic and textile designers happily plunder Riley's wiggles and Damien's dots. But three-dimensional designers seem to have little truck with sculpture. How so? After all, artists have found inspiration in product design. It was in 1912 that Duchamp famously exhibited a porcelain urinal and a metal bottle-rack - and purported to be dismayed when they were instantly embraced as art. "When I discovered ready-mades I thought to discourage aesthetics," he wrote. "I threw the bottle-rack and the urinal into their faces as a challenge and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty."

Richard Hamilton raised the stakes by paying homage not to anonymous commonplaces but to branded goods. Ford, Chrysler and Ricard were among his subjects. "My admiration for the work of Dieter Rams is intense," Hamilton has said. Dieter Rams? Some new Nat Tate figure? No, Rams was for 40 years the design director at the electrical products manufacturer Braun.

This much is flattering for designers, but of no practical help to them. In minimalism, however, sculptors had something designers might learn from. Their interest was no longer in products themselves but in the essence of "productness". John McCracken's fibreglass slabs and Donald Judd's crisp chrome rectangles had the smooth lines and polished perfection of industrial production - but somehow smoother and more polished. At the same time, the technology of manufacturing advanced to allow products to be moulded with precisely right-angled corners and parallel sides, something that had previously been as difficult as building a sandcastle with truly vertical walls. Minimalism in art was well timed to influence a new generation of products.

Kapoor's work seems to have little bearing at first. But that would be to discount the eruption of "organic" forms among previously rectilinear products, their complicated lines made possible above all by computer-aided design (CAD). But Kapoor slightly post-dates this technological revolution, which is why his sculpture looks like a television housing. If minimalist sculpture usefully coincided with refinements in manufacturing, here a connection has been missed. How much more of an influence Brancusi or Arp or Hepworth might have had if CAD had come along earlier to enable designers to follow their curves.

Designing in the Digital Age at the Victoria & Albert Museum is one of the first exhibitions to explore how technology is changing product form - a process that is occurring without many designers even being conscious of it, let alone consumers. For the V&A, it's a signal that the museum is humping itself into the digital era in other ways too.

The exhibition shows how products - in this case, a Dyson vacuum cleaner, a Zanussi refrigerator and a BT telephone - make it from the designer's mind's eye to sketches to the computer screen and the growing significance of what happens to it thereafter. Once digitised, the concept may be rendered in seductive ways, clothed and animated and made to pirouette neatly like a model on a catwalk. It can also be transformed directly into what are called in the trade "rapid prototypes", actual-size models of the product made of resin set in shape by laser scanning. (There is another sculptural correspondence here, between these translucent monochrome models, with their emphasis on pure form, and the work of Rachel Whiteread.) Both the CAD renderings and the physical models have become means of selling designs to clients who can't read technical drawings.

Digital technology has the power to change both what is conceived and what is then chosen to be made in untold ways. What is unarguable is that the infinite variety of sophisticated shapes which may be produced for manufacture demands that designers look more closely at sculpture.

Kapoor's reniform fibreglass sculpture is remarkably like recent designs for hand-held objects such as cameras. There are important differences, of course: the piece gains majesty and mystery from sheer scale and the clever curvature which makes it so hard to read. (The void, more compelling than the positive form, is also crucial; to a designer, a void is just a dust trap.) But its textureless surface places it closer to a product than a "traditional" sculpture in polished stone or wood. And just like a designer, Kapoor "is wary of attention focused on the making of the work, or the hand of the artist. His ideal is for a work to appear to be there, and not made."

Products seem not to attain the heights because they must do things. Function is a hard taskmaster. A push-button or a vent, a knob or a handle on an otherwise pure form is enough to drive out the sublime. But the way products work is changing. Buttons and switches are disappearing, being replaced by touch-sensitive panels, remote-control devices and voice activation. Soon there will be no reason why everyday objects cannot have the gravitational attraction of a Kapoor.

"Designing in the Digital Age" continues at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London SW7, until 4 January 2000. "Duchamp and Brancusi" is at the Tate Gallery, London SW1, until 23 August

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