Design hoax and design hygeine
So the Amateur Share in Milan last week was all a big hoax. I guess the dead French philosopher in the A-list was a clue, but you never know; I just thought the invocation of Guy Debord - not uncommon among designers – meant it had a conceptual edge.
Meanwhile the Today programme redeemed themselves fully with its feature on the Design Council’s project to “design out” hospital bugs earlier this week. David Kester’s insights argued winsomely how far design has moved on from chairs (see my last post) ; but pointed out that the chair in question (a commode with no crannies wherein bugs may lurk) was designed by the very same designers (Royal Designers, no less) of Virgin’s Upper Class seat.
This was a nice move. It’s important that we don’t divorce socially-minded design from premium-service-consumerly-minded design. Those who know the difference - and therefore also the similarity - should strive to make plausible links between design whose virtue is formal and design whose value is social. The Design Council will be touring hygeinic hospital room-set widely.
What would design be if there weren’t any money? A primitive truism?
If the recession is killing our idea of what an architect is (see my post on Cameron Sinclair, 9 April), then what of our idea of design? What would design be if there weren’t any money? The repurposing and reshaping of things that exist already or come for free? The organisation of what surrounds us into order and sense? The solving of problems of a practical and semiotic nature by amateurs leaping into the commercial breach? My first three e-invitations to events at this week’s Milan Furniture Fair gave me reason to believe it might be so. Tom Dixon’s show Utility promises “some of the most basic and primitive and materials, re-thought for the modern age”. Then I got the Craft Punk notice promising “tenacious creative expression, unruly experimentation and brilliantly low-tech design”. Finally, and most intriguingly, something called Amateur Share with an A-list of contributors, no promises and an invitation to bring your own drinks, cigarettes, spirit and discussion.
In the middle of writing this, Pascal Anson sent me the link to his absolutely brilliant YouTube films. He asks almost exactly what I’ve just asked, as a proposition for a new home-design tv show: How can you start with nothing and end up with a really beautiful home? If all your money goes on your mortgage, how do you furnish the property? Pascal then applies charm, comic bravura and all his resourcefulness as a designer to fabricating a kitchen, a set of dining chairs, a mirrored wall and a shelving system in the form of a three-dimensional alphabet. “Do try this at home” is the message.
It all sounds like a grand un-doing of design; part of the big Victor Papanek moment we seem to be in. I’ve come accross more Papanek citings in the last 6 months than ever before. Trouble is, it always seem to be designers who cite him. Designers know what he says is true: “All men are designers. All that we do, almost all of the time, is design” and thrill to this primitive truism.
Yesterday, in the final round of our Action for Age student design award sponsored by Gulbenkian Foundation, finalist Katy Shields offered a great example as she proposed a new social network bringing together society’s two most isolated groups: old people and new parents. Katy is a doing a Masters in design as a novice; she was previously an occupational therapist. When asked by puzzled community members why the problem of social isolation needs a designer to solve it, she told us she often gets her two vocations muddled in responding: “it’s about working holistically” she says, “looking at every aspect of what people do in their lives”.
I’m not accusing Papanek of reducitveness – he does after all take about 350 words to explain his primitive truism. But in practice, how is the public imagination to navigate between the idea that all we do almost all of the time is design; and the much more readily consumable idea that all designers do is design clever and pleasing things. I wonder if non-designers actually like and want and need design to be more than ”a fundamental human activity”; more elevated, more professional, more distilled into outward and visible signs, in order to perceive it as design.
My pulse quickenend as I heard mention of design on the Today Programme - occasioned indeed by the Milan Furniture Fair - at 0747 this morning. For all the wit and wisdom of Tom Dixon’s insights, it was a disappointing feature; all about chairs. So last century.
Seeing, believing and the priesthood of architecture
Robin Nicholson last night likened the education of architects, so sacredly single-minded, to training for the priesthood. This was at AND NOW WHAT, one of a series of edifying round-table discussions organised by the Architecture Foundation. Dickon Robinson expressed misgivings that so few people trained in architecture end up distributed evenly through the system in non-architectural jobs. Robert Mull painted the dismal prospects for this generation of architectural graduates in unequivocal terms. I tried to weave these three threads into a silver lining: if all these graduates come out of school and there are no jobs in architecture, they’re going to have to do something else, aren’t they? This would fulfil both Dickon Robinson’s vision of greater distribution of architecturally minded generalists, and address the worser characteristics of the priestly vocation. The transferability of skills is well rehearsed in design, because our universities have for years produced more design graduates than the design industry can possibly support as designers, but in architecture it’s had much less of an airing. Maybe this recession is an opportunity to find out what, apart from architecture, architects are good for.
Gerrard O’Carroll pointed out that all exciting progressive intellectual movements in architecture – from modernism to superstudio to NATO, MUF and FAT - start in hard times and Irena Bauman, having decisively renounced architecture’s glittering prizes in favour of sustainable community enterprise, is upbeat.
The contest between the formal and the social came under scrutiny, but Nabeel Hamdi’s sleight of hand resolved it, for me at least. “What”, he asked “would a housing project look like that was rights- or gender- driven?”. He later bristled at the claim that social conscience and committment cannot not express itself in buildings. I’m with Nabeel. “What would a housing project look like…?” is more than a figure of speech. Seeing is believing, in participation and inclusiveness.
Greg Penoyre said he wanted to “shorten the distance between me and those who might want what I can do; for example by getting rid of the PFI system once and for all”. I also want to contract the distance between the professional and those who want and need design., but I wouldn’t put it so technically. Somehow we need to persuade people they know more than they think they know – as Benjamin Spock said of new mothers – about style and structure.
Dickon Robinson talked of a new role for architects, helping communities and groups to get the built environment that they need; neither in the public nor the private sector but in the local and distributed zone between the two. Sarah Ichioka raised the risk of parochialism which, she reported, had been the previous day’s round table’s anxiety about the “local”. But I don’t think anyone’s proposing the banishment of all architectural grandeur and virtuosity, or recommending the wholesale pursuit of new vernaculars. More that the in absence of market forces, other impulses might take root.
I retold my story of design as resourcefulness, and asked how the idea that the professional might find a new role guiding non-professionals into a condition of self reliance could obtain in the priesthood of architecture. Fred Manson had already cautioned us with the harsh economic truth that “nobody earns money by giving other people advice”. Not so fast. Even if the economic situation doesn’t force us to a new orthodoxy on this, the traction gained by “service design” – usually a question of designers helping others to help themselves, and making business out of it – suggests that that we should keep an open mind.
Design: the ultimate renewable
A handful of us were just treated to a preview of Cameron Sinclair’s talk at the Barbican debate Ethics in Architecture this evening. I took the opportunity to quiz him on design and self-reliance; and particularly on architecture as the final frontier for the notion that by giving people the insights and processes of design, you enable them to become more resourceful. In construction – as opposed to other areas of design and making - the threshold at which you bring in a professional seems to be pretty low. There’s so much at stake – the cost, the physics, the longevity – that most people, sensibly, shrink from the idea that they could put a roof over their own head. Or so I explained it to myself. But among many fascinating facts, Sinclair told us that 98% of structures on the planet have not used the services of an architect in their construction.
Cameron Sinclair and his partner Kate Stohr are best known as the people who started the charity Architecture for Humanity. Their associated enterprise, the Open Architecture Network is an open, distributed network dedicated to helping communities build for themselves using “the ultimate renewable resource” of design. While the notorious sharp end of their activities are the reconstruction of villages in the Indian Ocean after the Tsunami, or New Orleans after Katrina; everyday sites include schools and factories in Africa and American industrial cities in decline. By the open-source sharing of design, construction details and funding mechanisms, they aim to make ordinary builders everywhere into master-builders.
Sinclair talked about the When there is no doctor series of books that are ubiquitous in parts of Africa and South Asia where self-reliance is a necessity in healthcare, and asked why there isn’t such a series for architecture. A computer-based system of sharing processes and plans is the Open Architecture Network’s answer; a kind of electronic pattern-book of architectural adaptation. For the third time this month I was hearing about pattern-books. The earlier conversations were in relation to volume housing in the UK and the revival of the kinds of reference guides that enabled 19th century builders endlessly to replicate quite nice houses. Process guide or style guide, the pattern-book aims to put knowledge and choice in someone’s hands other than the architect. Meanwhile Sinclair says “recession is killing the idea of what an architect is now”. I wonder how this will all go down with the architects tonight at the Barbican.
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