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.
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