Design as a choice-path; and more home-made toasters
A provocative afternoon with my Dutch friends in Amsterdam this week where I joined an expert-panel to discuss Premsela’s project The People’s Republic of Design. It aims to enlarge design and fashion to become “open cultural fields”. My session was a full-brain workout on professionals and amateurs in design. A few headlines surfaced.
Dingeman Kuilman, Director of Premsela, and I wrestled with how the process of choice among amateurs appears to be what substitutes for the process of creation among professional designers. Amateur interior decorators, for example, choose between options of style, colour, finish and furnishing and those choices synthesise as their act of design. Similarly people compose their outfits by selecting and rejecting. Of course professional design is a choice-making process as well – between flat or pronounced curve, greater or lesser contrast, reference or abstraction, and so on - but designers’ relatively vast stock of options (if they’re any good) is internalised and empirically formed so they can predict the effect.
George Eastman gave the world, Dingeman argued, a powerful democratic tool in 1888 because the instant camera makes endless choice available in image making. What would be its equivalents in fashion or poster-making, I wanted to know, and how come the photocopier didn’t do for graphic design what the button camera did for photography? Really low skill threshold: making choices explicit allows amateurs to enter the creative process with no barriers at the skill level, somebody said. I believe it was Willem Velthoven who answered that creativity could be construed as having a continuous stream of possibilities; and further, that although the world is a good generator of choices for photography, not so for t-shirts.
It was also Velthoven who classified amateurs in this useful way: the co-creating amateur whose participation in design is facilitated by professionals; the “publishing”, visible amateur who puts their pictures up on Flickr and maybe sells the surplas of what they make for themselves; and the private amateur who strives only for close, local benefit. There was also consensus that “top design domains” for amateur design are local and low-risk: fashion and interior design – everything to do with identity, in fact – while you wouldn’t expect to find many non-professionals in aircraft design. Actually there are quite a few, but would you want to fly with them?
Last week I disclosed my strong feeling that design is actually changing and this is how Dingeman put it for Holland: “The fashion model and the art model that design followed are both worn-out, and the economic value argument that sustained design in the 1990s now needs to be supplanted by thinking in terms of social and cultural value”. I’ve drawn the contrast before between the poweful cultural pleading of the Dutch and “creative industries”, innovation-themed language that finds favour with civil servants over here. This contrast was made stark by my brief attendance at the Design Council’s Design for Economic Growth: Measuring the value of design seminar the day after Amsterdam. Their International Design Scoreboard is a valiant and internationally co-operative research exercise with one ironic flaw: no data is available for Germany, Italy or the Netherlands – three countries we so intimately connect with design.
Actually Premsela had warned me about this. They’d done lots of “cultural mapping” of design in the Netherlands but had not been able to supply the Design Council with any economic data. They had at one point tried to enumerate the designers working in Holland, which sounds rather like more cultural mapping. Premsela themselves have a sense of humour about this, and a great admiration for the Design Council. But they also have an uncommon confidence in the sufficiency of a social and cultural argument for design.
I recommended Helen Lofman’s homemade toasters at the Central St Martins degree show last week and it’s looking like a flush. Thomas Thwaites at RCA Design Interactions actually made his own plastic from raw materials and generated his own electricity to make his toaster.
Design it is a-changin’
First Stephen Bayley himself, for three decades a vigorous advocate of the triumphs of modernism and high design, told me earlier this week he thought design in the twenty-first century needed a whole new set of fictions and fantasies. See the final chapter of his most recent book Design: intelligence made visible.
Then yesterday evening three different people told me they thought design was going to change the world, in those very words. I should admit that this was at the tenth anniversary party of the Helen Hamlyn Research Centre, devoted to inclusive design, so the guests were predisposed to an intimate sense of design’s transformational power. But there’s a new confidence in the claim; it no longer sounds undergraduate or tongue-in-cheek, but somehow self-evident. Look at how the journalists Lynda Relph-Knight and Alice Rawsthorn have both been accentuating the social at both extremes of trade and general interest.
And now, as the final year student design shows go up, I’m not the only one most intrigued by things that break the formal/social barrier. Nice project by Helene Löfman at the Central St Martins MA Industrial Design show. She made her own ethical toasters, electronics and all.
It feels like groundswell. These are very interesting times indeed for design, and it’s not just because the money’s not flowing. I wonder if they say that in all trades and professions right now? They may be all a-changin’ but they don’t all say they’re going to change the world.
Design as ordinary skill and universal everything
I was struck by two beautiful articles in a row on ordinary skill. Declan Kiberd, occasioned by the publication of his new book on James Joyce’s Ulysses, wrote: “Before the industrial age, people made their own music, pictures, ballads, plates;… The energy of life is a desire for expression in the appropriate form.” It’s an attack on artists and bohemians who sneer at “the banal, repetetive quality of ordinary life”, in which Kiberd invokes Joyce’s famous line “The ordinary is the propoer domain of the artists. The extraordinary can safely be left to journalists”.
The ordinary really is the proper domain of design. It made me think contentedly of the perfect syntheses of utility and form that designers have achieved; the heroic embracing of the common and the universal that design can be.
Then Michael Rosen in yesterday’s Education Guardian quoted from his father’s work on the 1950s school syllabus for English. “Whatever language the pupils possess, it is this which must be built on rather than driven underground. However narrow the experience of our pupils may be… it is this experience alone which has given their language meaning… The pupils [must] become confident of the full acceptability of the material of their own experience”.
I tried substituting “design” for “language” in this affecting passage. It doesn’t quite work, because design is a different kind of noun from language, but what if it did? Imagine if we construed design as a universital cognitive facility like language. “Whatever design the pupils possess, it is this which must be built on…”
Deyan Sudjic published a book last year called The Language of Objects. In 1944 Gyorgy Kepes wrote a landmark design book called Language of Vision. Imagine if design were as ready a metaphor for language as language is for design.
Design’s tragic dimension
For anyone who thrills to the sight and sound of mechanical reproduction, Gary Hurstwit’s new film Objectified contains scenes that will be moving: milling and tooling and injection-moulding and even the movie title itself routed out of plastic before your very eyes. All the virtues of Blue Peter’s through-the-round-window footage of milk-bottling plants and Soviet moving-image paeans to industry and technology, framing anew the objects our times (cue Magis chairs coming off the production line).
I’ve often puzzled that designers never make it onto celluloid. Doctors, lawyers, soldiers, captains of industry, explorers, priests, teachers, athletes – they all find their roles accross the gamut from the romantic comedy to the epic, but where are the form-givers of fiction? You might cite saturnine, God-playing Howard Roark of The Fountainhead, or Fred Astaire as a cheery art director in Funny Face, coaxing Audrey Hepburn’s winsomely cropped face from the developing fluid; but I never believe anything until you’ve given me three examples. Neither is there really much hair- or even eyebrown-raising gossip about designers, as far as I can tell. Too tidy-minded, I muse; the grandeur of their destiny constrained by commercial reality, and with the outstanding exception of Robert Brownjohn, lacking in essential decadence.
But in Objectified design stars; designers and their critics have the screen for a full 90 minutes. It’s a serious and thoughtful investigation of product design, wholly resisting the cliches of aesthetic allure in order to examine what is problematic about it. The starting point is semiotic, as Andrew Blauvelt and others extemporise on the “story embedded in every object” (cue traditional Japanese toothpick). We then hear from Dan Formosa and colleagues at Smart Design in New York; about how they don’t design for the average person but for the people at the extremes: the inclusive question (cue Oxo Good Grips potato peeler). Lovely scenes with Dieter Rams advocating so wenig wie möglich (as little design as possible: cue various Braun electronics) and another with Johnny Ive nicely describing a designers’ compulsive pathology, asking constantly “why is it like this and not like that?” (cue Apple keyboard). So far, so innoccuous, but then Alice Rawsthorn comes in with a great one-liner about how the microchip “anihilated the whole principle that form follows function” and the “tensions” in design start to build. Marc Newson appears to speak with the slightly forkèd tongue that is the essential cultural paradox: on the one hand we should be designing things to last forever, on the other, we all want new stuff don’t we?
Chris Bangle of BMW and Hella Jongerius - strange bedfellows indeed - are the ones who really talk about design’s ability to express you as a person. One talked of personal stories, memories and using the familiar in mass-produced products; the other deflated the idea of your “audience” as a consumer by adding “Truth is, on the highway, no-one cares”. I believe Rob Walker of the New York Times gets the last word in the film, improvising on exactly this theme: for in the end, what would you take from your burning house? Only the things that express your “personal narrative” (cue his collection of Barbie dolls sitting in a row).
In between we get to the really interesting idea that design can provoke people’s creativity. Natao Fukasawa puts it slightly opaquely: restraint, he posits, “only what’s there,” is what stimulates people. Obviously the copounded examples of Japanese minimalism and Muji really do the talking here and I only sort of got what he meant by design “dissolving in thought in a world of subconscious actions”. More accessibly, Jane Fulton-Suri of IDEO asks question we’ve been asking at the RSA: “What can we do with people’s creativity, to help them do more for themselves?”
Paola Antonelli says a champion thing, super optimistic, about designers being the reference point between what is high-falutin and what is reality. They should have the status of philosophers in France, she says, the people policy-makers naturally defer to. Amazing to imagine; I hope she’s right.
Alice Rawsthorn gets to be the one who brings up sustainability, with great effect as we watch the mountains of landfill rise, and Bill Moggeridge puts it in context by saying that in some ways “life was simpler for Charles Eames”. Actually Bill Moggeridge is mostly there to talk about interaction design. Describing vividly the moment when he realised the design challenge was not the laptop but the interface, not the object but the ether, he appears to hold a germ of the clue to sustainiablity.
This is ironic given what I said earlier about design’s inadequacy as a medium for fiction and narrative pathos, but late on, and compounded by Dieter Rams prophecy that “the value of design will be measured in how it can help us survive,” Objectified takes on a dimension you could even call tragic.
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