I’m a designer get me out of here
Asked to contribute a piece on improvisation to a new magazine about sustainable design, I leapt at the chance because the notion of improvisation has been buzzing in my head for a couple of years. I remember claiming in some piece of writing that the best design combined a Vitruvian firmness of production with the freshness of improvisation. Now I wonder what on earth I meant, and I’m stuck, frankly.
For is design not in fact the opposite of improvisation? Design is planned, holistic and slow. Improvisation is intuitive, immediate and swift. Tellingly, Wikipedia lists 10 “domains” for improvisation in the arts (poetry, comedy, music, etc.), something called “corporate improvisation training”, unclassified “role playing games”, and finally one short category adjacent to design: engineering (largely occupied by the sub-category of improvised weapons). All this suggests that you’d better off shipwrecked with a troupe of luvvies than with a studio of designers.
Yet isn’t design classicly defined as problem solving? Dieter Rams says at the end of Gary Hurstwit’s film Objectified that from here on out “the value of design will be measured in how it can help us survive”. Wow. Here am I arguing that design IS resourcefulness and self reliance and all, but when the chips are down, is it a survival skill? Or is it a body of technical knoweldge fit only for civilised, refined, strategic, upper domains of social and commercial strife?
Put it this way: would you want to be lost at sea/up a mountain at night/in the jungle with any of the following: Jonathan Ive? Chris Wise? Hilary Cottam? Dieter Rams? Tim Brown? Hella Jongherius? Ben Fry? Peter Saville? I take comfort in the fact that my husband, a graphic designer, is also an Eagle Scout.
What’s a daffodil to a designer?
So I enjoyed the Design: ego or conscience? talk with the RCA Design Products students, organised by Sebastian Bergne for Gareth Williams’ s critical platform. Michael Marriott, my interlocutor in this Monday afternoon event and a leading protagonist of beautiful but modest utility in design, presented the contrasting attitudes of Alec Issigionis and Karim Rashid; the latter very much more prominent in persona than in the fashionably-styled and rather forgettable objects he designs, the former probably no less of a show-off but way, way much more of a designer when you consider what the Mini had to be, and was.
The students did seem to crave a moral compass. While on the one hand, these pluralistic times declare that you can be any kind of designer you want; on the other hand, climate change, massive consumerism and critical self-respect all make it unacceptable to be the handmaidens of consumerism and neophilia that designers were 25 years ago.
I talked about how the holy principles that I learned at design school were overturned by the elevated importance of storytelling in our times. I heard recently about 17-year old trying to get into an Ivy League university being told that what he needed was a personal “narrative arc”. Look at how branding has become imperative – a big story, a big effort to create narrative coherence and shape. At my “schools” Pentagram and Yale (less so, because things were already changing), designers strove for coherence but it wasn’t literary, or narrative, unless you were an illustrator. In fact a literary idea wasn’t an idea at all, for the strict formalist. When I worked for the graphic designer John McConnell at Pentagram he explicitly rejected ideas that he described as “literary” rather than formal. I had come late to design, via literary criticism in fact, and was quite puzzled by this. When I later met Paul Rand (father of all graphic designers) in the early 90s I asked him what the difference was. He pointed to a vase of daffodils on the table and said a literary idea would be that they represent Spring. The true designer just sees them as yellow and having a certain shape.
My, how times have changed. The buoyant art market of the last ten years has encouraged designers to express psychological drama in mechanically-reproducible objects, to exploit design as a language packed with reference and symbolism, to cleave the conventional unions of form and function for semiotic thrill. Gareth Williams’s V&A exhibition Telling Tales: Fantasy and Fear in Contemporary Design was a fine document – and perhaps, in view of the now deflated market – epitaph of the “design-art” decade. It was full of talking products, limited editions of furniture and luxurious interior appointings, rich in hand-craft, surface decoration and visual reference, in three brazenly romantic settings: the Forest Glade, the Enchanted Castle and Heaven and Hell. I admired the show and many of its exhibits, but the subjective immodesty was the opposite of what I had been taught as a designer; ego and conscience all re-mixed for a culture that prizes storytelling above all.
I left the students with two pleas. One: to consider how, rather than taking problems away, design could help people to solve problems for themselves. This might range from designing a product whose inner functioning is legible and repairable to applying what they know about form and function to any number of social enterprises. I would not rule out some storytelling as a device. Secondly, to think about teaching in school. D&T teachers are frequently isolated from the proliferating and exciting uses of design in our world; while design tutors tell me teaching is simply not considered an aspiration by undergraduates today. Still, three students raised their hands when I asked if anyone had considered teaching as a career. Out of about forty, not bad.
A modest new year: is it design, or is it me?
I’m puzzled by Design Week’s Sounding Off column, which opens by asking, “with its iconic landmarks, transport design heritage and the Olympics, London is crying out for branding”. Crying out for branding? What exactly is this supposed to mean? That London has no identity, is obscure, presents no image in the global mind? I don’t think so. Or that London simply has so much identity that it would be a shame not to pack it all up into one magnificent hyper-cipher? This headline seriously made me wonder if branding has run its contempoary semantic course.
I was recently asked to contribute to a journal with the theme of modesty. It immediately struck me as ironic that the clichés of design are all about modesty. The notions that less is more, that ornament is crime and that the designer is properly attired in clerical black and unflattering spectacles, all speak of restraint; of denying the base allure of decoration, functional superfluity and symbolic freight. Suddenly I began to see modesty and its counterpoints all around.
First Sebastian Bergne told me that his years at the Royal College in the 1980s represented a contest between anonymous, “modest” service to industry – represented by the then Professor – and the overt personalities of younger practitioners. Welding ready-mades into new industrial bastards, Ron Arad and Tom Dixon now entered the design scene with stories of their own. They were not the first – Tapio Wirkkala is said to have cultivated a man-of-the-woods-look and feel, palpable in his designs as well as persona, in the 1950s – but design’s power to express individual rather than corporate ideas, its subjective immodesty, came full bloom in the design-art phase of recent years and is not over. Bergne fears that today’s students may be confused by competing agendas of personal recognition and collective good, and has invited me to join a conversation on the subject of designers’ proper “motivation” at the Royal College of Art in a couple of weeks, which I look forward to.
Next a famous designer in his 70s, dismayed by contemporary design’s media circus of celebrity and meretricious formal brinkmanship, told me that everyone’s own work was just a bid for personal recognition, with my own Design & Society programme a particularly vain and “political” example (thanks a lot). As well as being fundamentally misanthropic, his insight struck me as truistic, for how do we distinguish between the common human need to accomplish a task well and an ego-trip? Any designer, any creative person, is asked to risk contributing what they uniquely have to a task, rather than to execute some established procedural moves. Modesty in design might be construed as a convincing attempt to put the advancement of design before the advancement of a personal reputation; convincing rather than measurably successful, perhaps.
Obviously that’s what I think I’ve been up to, but let us rather consider Konstantin Grcic’s Design Real exhibition at the Serpentine. He has striven with the utmost rigour and austerity to produce a statement not about himself but about design, with a simple and optimistic ambition “to evoke the fascinating complexity of today’s world”. In doing so, at least one person said he’s produced a portrait of himself.
Co-design’s least likely dramatis personae
Among the people I wouldn’t expect to hear say “co-design”, one is Deyan Sudjic. His excellent book The Edifice Complex: How the Rich and Powerful Shape the World, ultimately nudges a sense that architecture and power is a kinship its author admires; while as a design critic he tends to the staunchly classical and modernist. The other is Dieter Rams, because in spite of his thoughtful and philosophical and persuasive reununciation of industrial design today, he did become famous in an era when designers didn’t do “participation”.
But get their little movie interview over the Vitsoe 620 chair system, configurable by the user, in the Design Museum’s Less And More show. Deyan: “So you’re inviting the user to co-design?” Dieter: “A little bit, yes, in this direction”. This careful and partial concession is all I would expect from a designer whose rationality is sublime, and why I like Germans so much.
Design: hope for everyone, craft for some
Bumper comments on last week’s post, so let’s mine this place a little deeper. Nice piece of writing by Rodney Fitch in Design Week. He makes bold claims for design’s ubiquitous importance: “everyone should try to understand design’s power and significance”; and later “inside everyone, there lives a designer trying to get out”. Everyone.
Of this “everyone” I’m exercised by who exactly stands to benefit most by an awakening of their inner designer. Practically, we need to break down this everyone. Not merely for the sake of illustration, I’m focusing on a very concise group at the moment. We’ve developed a proposal to trial design training as an element of rehabilitation or occupational therapy follow-up for people with spinal injuries. The use of design to improve the independence and fulfilment of people whose capability is limited by age, illness or disability – through assistive technology, for example – is recognised and quite well-rehearsed. But while the discourse concentrates on the development of devices and systems that can be made available to individuals – designed for them – our interest is also in enhancing the ability of these individuals to design for themselves; to understand the insights and processes that designers use to see and solve problems. We say design can increase people’s resourcefulness; these are people whose resources have been suddenly and dramatically depleted.
Increasingly expansive, Fitch cites William Morris’s rejoinder to the question “What is the purpose of Art and Design?” “To give hope, Madam, to give hope” in support of his own candid declaration that design is the hope of the world. The world. Once again substituting my more concise cohort, the introductory design training I’m proposing for spinal injury patients has the same essential message of hope. The purpose is to give confidence and comfort to people facing a life in which independence may be an extreme challenge: there’s something out there that can help you and it’s called design; here’s how you start thinking about it.
I’m convening a small group of designers in the next few weeks to figure this “how” out. Meanwhile specialist spinal units, the spinal injury charities, occupational therapists and a small number of spinally injured designers and non-designers have responded with enthusiasm to this idea. A senior psychiatrist told me – with an agility I had not anticipated from a profession so distant from design – that he thought this had tremendous potential for mental health patients as well. So far so good.
Fitch’s observations contract to the more specific: “design is a universal language more capable than any other of transcending boundaries”; “design is the least private of the arts”; until with “design is the handmaiden of innovation” we do start to lose the plot slightly in the miasma of innovation, service and change agency. This is merely the hazard of invoking “everyone”. In this fog, and in conclusion, he proffers the beacon of craft. Design really matters “because it’s what you do, so care about it and do it well”. I can’t be sure, but I think he’s invoking a good old fashioned Protestant work-ethic which transfers to all trades.
We need to understand how some people’s craft can deliver hope for everyone, for it is not self-evident. One prominent individual keeps telling me good design is uplifting and inspiring and that this is all we need to know. I’m not convinced. Why, then, is good design not ubiquitous? I think we might get somewhere by breaking down the everyone to the true dramatis personae. I’ve submitted mine; whom would you cast as your design agents?
Oh social, schmocial: beyond co-design
Oh, social design. Social, schmocial. In buildings and on the streets, in the shops, on the newsstand and coming through the letterbox, on the screen and on the web, on my back and yours – it’s all around us and in our face; it’s all “social”. And if it’s any good, and visible or available to a decent number of people, it has social benefit. Even baubles of exquisite craft and fineness viewed only by half a dozen people in private cabinets often end up in museums for public view, so luxury has its social benefit also.
The outgoing master of the Royal Designers made a mysterious disclosure last night when he said that the RSA were “uncertain” about the election of milliner Steven Jones to the Faculty of Royal Designers. Speak for yourself, I thought, since neither I nor anyone else at the RSA, as far as I know, has raised an eyebrow about the sensational hatter. Fashion, which fills the pages of so many magazines and walks among us – not to mention the employment it generates across the developing world – arguably has the greatest reach of all, the greatest potential to diffuse the art of the possible, and quite a widespread social benefit.
The basic argument for the social value of design is that people are happier and more productive when they can buy products, use facilities and services, or inhabit environments that are well-designed and pleasing. Here’s the paradox. With the twentieth century and the triumphs of modernism in hindsight, only a fool would disagree. Of course people are happier and more productive. The argument rings gratuitously at this point – we know this already so why are we still saying it? Because manufacturers and government procurement practices continue to take it or leave it. Also because the script hasn’t been adopted by enough people who aren’t designers themselves, and they would say that, wouldn’t they?
So let’s stop making sophistical social claims for design that’s self-evidently both good and available, and let’s stop construing the social as not-for-profit work for good causes. Let’s change tack. Right now, we need two things: firstly, a new accommodation between the professional designer and everyone else, and secondly, a new accommodation between design and the market; that is, the times we live in.
Taking it as read that good design makes people happier and more productive, in the RSA’s Design & Society account I’ve made the assertive claim that design – rather reductively interpreted as a readiness to improvise and prototype, a bravery in the face of disorder and complexity, and a developed sense of part and whole – can also make everyone more resourceful and self-reliant. We’re calling for a re-distribution of the tools and insights and processes that professional designers use among the wider population, from policy-makers to punters. Having made that claim, naturally our ambition is to prove it by increasing the design capability of those who are “under-resourced”. Currently this includes school children, police officers and people with spinal injuries; we expect it to expand.
On the second thing: It may be too soon to say we are fortunate in the UK with a prevailing political agenda of inclusiveness and participation. But never before have civil servants taken so much interest in what governed people might do for themselves, including the design of public services. This is a commercial opportunity for designers as well as a social one, recognised particularly by the emerging group of “service” specialists. We are doing what we can to invigorate both supply and demand in this area.
Private sector interest in choice, customisation and creativity might also help to redistribute the tools of design. The commercial value of creativity at large in the population is not lost on manufacturers like Nokia who recognize that an adaptable or customisable product is one of the solutions to multiplying customers with increasingly diverse preferences and capabilities.
And all the while a downturn in the big, conmmercial design and construction market prompts us to ask, how might people trained in design and architecture enter a productive relationship with the smaller, local community or a more distributed economy?
The social change I’m looking for is an advance on the well-rehearsed discourse of designing for disadvantaged, ageing, socially excluded etc. people, for little or no money. Prepositionally speaking, let’s go from for, through with, to by; beyond co-design. Let’s look at how design might help people do more for themselves, and at new business models for design.
Grande Diffusion or Grande Illusion?
Bummer that the RSA Bicentenary Medal presentation to Cameron Sinclair meant I had to miss the French Institute’s special screening of Jean Renoir’s 1937 masterpiece La Grande Illusion, introduced by Julian Jackson and Martin O’Shaughnessy on Monday night. But Sinclair’s story here was powerful, persuasive and peppered with clever insights about how to diffuse “millions of ideas that billions of people can use”. When Matthew Taylor asked him: does design make people more resourceful? Sinclair reminded us in a smart conceit how resourceful most people already are: “More people think of themselves as architects than architects think of themselves as people”.
At London College of Communication on Wednesday night Lucy Kimbell organised a debate called The Limits of Design, asking us to be alert to the risk of illusion: ”Can designers really design anything they turn their hands to? Are there limits to design thinking and if so, what are they?” Panellists from the worlds of policy and social services and – verily – of all strange bedfellows, the UN Insitutue for Disarmament Research, greatly outnumbered the design professor among them; yet managed, I understand, to have a useful converstion about design, which they think very important whatever its limits.
From non-designers talking about design to non-architects building buildings, which (although Cameron Sinclair reminds us it happens the world over, to 98% of structures on the planet) is now quite unconventional in evolved design economies like London. In th Evening Standard on Monday, Rowan Moore showed a surprising (for an architecture critic) degree of deference to Burberry’s top designer (of clothes) Christopher Bailey, whose talents have been deployed in the architectural design of the new global headquarters, and several stores. Moore concedes and callibrates: “You probably wouldn’t want a fashion designer designing a museum or a school, but they can do very nice stores and offices”.
It really was a week for it. On the same day, in the same paper, Jenny Wilhide declared that interest in fashionable typographic fonts in booming. The London Underground advertisements for the electronics merchant Dixon’s (bearing the strapline “The last place you want to go”) are evidence that the public is considered typography literate. Each parodies the type-style of a major retailer (Selfridges, Harrods and John Lewis) and the public, even though most of them are not graphic designers, are expected to get the joke.
Prince Philip said at the 50th anniversary event for his design prize how few people knew about design when he started it. The same was true of our own Faculty of Designers for Industry at the RSA – in the 1930s, designers themselves, plus a very few enlightened commissioners, like Frank Pick, were the best available arbiters of worth. Now all this interest in design from non-designers, policy-makers and punters; all this straying out of territory. Is it fashion or is it change? Grande illusion or grande diffusion?
Design & high society interior of the week
I lunched at a most unlikely spot earlier this week: the Athenaeum. The small number of other gentlemens’ clubs I’ve been in share a shabby and intransigent atmosphere; more than a whiff of dwindling significance, and with it elegance. But on Wednesday my steps echoed in a place of such confidence and classicism, and in such fresh nick, that I feel compelled to describe it. The height and breadth of every room; the polished surfaces and rich depths to which grand staircases beckon. At the interstice of Pall Mall, Waterloo Place and Carlton Gardens, it occupies a glorious east-facing position yielding windows on no fewer than three sides. Enormous windows with gleaming panes of ancient irregular glass.
I think it was the 2007 Milan Furniture Fair when gigantism was all the rage – the absurdly overscaled bibelots of Marcel Wanders and Jaime Hayon. But in the Athenaeum you really are like the shrunk Alice in Wonderland. The buttoned-leather entrance hall benches are like day-beds, bigger even. A varnished lectern bears whole broadsheets, spreadeagled. The magnificent doors of the first floor drawing room have quite the awesome scale of a Greek temple. This room, about the size of the Buckingham Palace Picture Gallery I’d say (see my last post), was occupied by fewer than a dozen lucky post-prandial coffee drinkers.
And what a difference from the latter dowdy place where all the indeterminate, dusky pink flock and gilding and temperate lighting do their very level best to deaden the happy shock of a Van Dyck, a Rembrandt, a Constable, a Turner and a Vermeer everywhere you turn.
Whatever you think of gentlemen’s clubs (I seldom do), it’s worth contriving a means of entry. My host was actually a woman.
At the RIBA Stirling Prize dinner on Saturday night a very successful engineer told me that scientists and engineers were the people who really understood how the world worked. I violently demurred, for surely language is an equally significant means of construing it? A position between science and thought-construed-as-language is, I think, worth claiming for design.
Meanwhile Design Week roots for near-forgotten textile designer Jacqueline Groag in a review of a new monograph; and the Ferens Art Gallery in Hull celebrates Shirley Craven and Hull Traders, similarly hid from view in our meretricious modern reckoning of what really matters and will move us forward. In the Vienna Design Week conference on Arts & Crafts earlier this month, I asked about the decline of single craft disciplines in universities, courses like textiles and ceramics (the real victim). Is it because they’re not discursive; somehow intractable to social and theoretical extrapolation? Whatever the reason, Lesley Jackson’s catalogue vibrates with ravishing and bold designs, and prompts me to wonder what these printers and weavers know about how the world works? Thought-construed-as-drawing, pattern and colour?
Are designers born or made?
I wasn’t surprised when someone asked me this recently. I’ve argued for a re-distribution of design – or the tools and insights and processes that designers use – beyond the professionals for whom design was likely a vocation, to everyone else. So I must think designers are made not born. Let’s see.
I asked it myself of Rianne Makkink in the Arts & Crafts conference at Vienna Design Week last week. She’d regailed us with the highly-crafted, scintillating cabinet of curiosities inhabited by Makkink & Bey and its workforce of brilliantly talented young designers. You’d never imagine you could enter it without being a genius, without being born with it. Not so. Rianne used herself as proof that designers can be made: everything about her own birth and background, she said, indicated she should more properly be a housewife.
Roberto Verganti later a summarised of his recent book, Design-Driven Innovation. He points out that designers, more than most professionals, are plagued by stereotpyes. First they had to fight off the common perception that what they did was something like art; unbusinesslike. Now Tim Brown, David Kelley, IDEO and the spreading message of design-thinking have birthed another stereotype. Design thinking is the dream of managers: ”Finally, there’s a process! It’s not art after all, and therefore I can understand it. You do ethnographic research, then you brainstorm, then you prototpye and test and finally you have your product and service, threaded through with deep cultural insight”. Unfortunately, quoth Venturini, business schools tell people that it is wrong to decide from their gut. Put differently, I wonder if managers are being misled into thinking that designers are made and not born.
Last week we ran a seminar jointly with RSA Education for RSA Fellows: “How can design help education?” It asked, since teachers are increasingly required to undertake things that correspond to design – from lesson planning to timetabling to classrom layout to managing capital projects - whether and how the input of professional designers could help. One Fellow raised the troublesome point that the creative, “cognitive”, interdisciplinary, project-based approach to teaching is very much more resource-heavy than the traditional didacticism by which you teach a single subject. The interdiciplinary teacher, the teacher with a designer’s knack for integration and synthesis of part and whole: born or made? And if he/she is made, then what is the cost?
The science-fiction writer Bruce Sterling was enthralling in conversation with Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby at the Icon Minds symposium on Wednesday. But as he extrapolated and ellaborated in glorious language the idea that design is a lot like writing fiction (”potentially thinkable objects and services”), I began to wonder. A significant number of designers are born dyslexic, which effectively makes them into designers rather than writers. Sterling reckons Karim Rashid is a “pretty good writer”; certainly easier to imagine as a novellist than a mathematician or a police officer. This is like saying if you’re born a designer, then you’re born a writer. Likewise if you’re made. I begin to fear elision. Although I know many designers whose critical analysis is acute, I can count the ones that can (or want to) write on the fingers of one hand.
Our own debate on hacking yielded many insights in the midst of a tangled subject. Otto von Busch spoke of fashion designers’ “source code”, as if you could learn and re-apply (hack) the aesthetic insight with which Karl Lagerfeld was born, thereby transfering it into the “made” category. Colin McDowell’s elegant response was to characterise the come-lately, made-rather-than-born creator, the happy hacking amateur, as “infantile”. Scott Burnham, who chaired, praises the open-source-spirited denial of the lofty auteur in order to garner creativity at large; this he calls the hacking “methodology”. It pursues the progressively made, the built-upon, rather than the thunderstroke insight of a born designer.
The purpose of universal education is to overide accidents of birth so that everyone has a chance to be re-made. Working with RSA Education colleagues I’ve argued that that Design & Technology (as it is currently termed by the QCA) comprises generic skills that can empower the learner and the citizen: problem-finding and problem-solving; improvisation and adaptation, visualisation and conceptualisation, drawing and making, order, sequence and the integration of “big-picture” and detail. Moreover that these have unique potential to contribute to a sense of practical competence and resourceful optimism in young people.
In spite of my personal wonder at what certain individuals can do on the strength of something innate and environmentally inexplicable (born), I believe this about design: that it can make you different because it teaches you (made) that problems have solutions and that there’s a way of getting to them.
The born and made of design were arrayed grandly at Buckingham Palace last night for the Prince Philip Designer’s Prize. The winner was Andrew Ritchie, inventor of the Brompton folding bicycle. The bike itself has clearly had a slow birth and progressive evolution to the elegant thing it is now, and Ritchie was himself in the process “made” from an engineer into a designer. In the nicest possible sense, Ritchie is a one-hit wonder.
The nominees with the inimitable innate gifts, Peter Saville and Hussein Chalayan, the born designers with a language all their own, were rather abruptly summarised by the Design Council’s copywriter as pretty much a designer of record-covers and of freakish, avant-garde concept dresses. I think the born cateogry of designer is not optimistic for Britain Plc.. He doesn’t seem to come from a continuous supply; seems the exception when we want a rule; a rational continuum from Brunel and his Victorian peers to the present. We want reassurance that there’s more where he came from, which seems more likely true of the made than the born.
Someone asked how the RSA’s nomination of Peter Saville squares with our argument that more people can be made to think like designers; he being so unique and all. I replied that millions of people know what a designer is because of Peter Saville. Seeing and looking at what he did has taught them to see and look. What he and Chalayan were born to do has made everyone more of a designer.
Bruce Sterling proposed that someone should write a science-fiction type of parody of Ruskin – put themselves into Ruskin’s head and imagine what the author of Modern Painters and Unto This Last would have to say about interraction design or Facebook. He didn’t write fiction, but he could transfigure art and nature into prose images better than anyone. He is the greatest ever advocate of seeing and looking. I think Ruskin would really go for Peter Saville.
Hacking: folly, theft or design’s democratic new dawn?
This is what we’re debating here at the RSA on Wednesday next, 14 October. For those who are not au fait, here’s the background to our motion:
The word “hacking”, which originally denoted brazen trespasses into closed systems of electronic communication, increasingly invokes a broader range of stunts and sabotages of security and convention. It has also entered the argot of design criticism. The stereotypical designer – passionately authentic, famously unbending and always in black – is newly vulnerable to the interference of amateurs. The hard-won tryst between designer, manufacturer and intellectual property rights, likewise, has few defences against the open-source spirit and an internet wherein no secrets are hid.
The brave ones embrace it. While cheerful design jam sessions of professional and amateur go on in cities and design festivals all over the developed world, nothing changes in the favelas and rural villages where necessity has always been the mother of invention.
Otto von Busch “haute-couture heretic and DIY-demagogue” is coming from Sweden to present his extensive series of projects that experiment with the reverse-engineering, hacking, tuning and sharing of fashion as a form of social activism. Scott Burnham, author of a new RSA Design & Society pamphlet on design-hacking, chairs a panel discussion with fashion commentator Colin McDowell, automotive designer David Godber of the Design Council and Rector of the Royal College of Art Paul Thompson.
Is design-hacking merely an introverted chapter in the post-modern history of design, or does it reveal civic ingenuity and resourcefulness that a century and a half of industrially-fed consumerism have masked?
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