It’s hard to argue with commercial art
Well, Alice Rawsthorn summed up the state we’re in with the practised clarity we would expect from one of today’s foremost design journalists. It went something like this: while the modern movement led us to associate design with tangible things, design is increasingly about immateriality – software, systems and design-thinking. I know for a fact that at least one civil servant pricked up his ears upon listening to the Today programme’s feature on the London Design Festival last weekend.
At Experimenta (see my last post) Rawsthorn’s Open Talk was, similarly, conceived with mind-cleansing logic. She asked her three guest speakers to name 1. the most unfairly neglected figure or phenomenon from the history of design, and 2. & 3. the two most pressing themes for the future. Her own contenders were 1. Muriel Cooper, 2. de-materialisation (neither the economic nor the paranormal version but the one best signified by the i-Phone with its myriad functions and apps) and 3. design for the other 90%. Joseph Grima followed up elegantly with 1. Soviet architecture, 2. land-grabbing and 3. supermayors. Ben Fry’s contribution was fascinating, though less strictly adhering to form. His 1., Mark Lombardi, the savant data-draftsman, was the main feature from whom we drew conclusions by a combination of our own inference and a sprinkling of pregnant insights from Fry: “the risk is that the designer becomes saturated by the beauty of an image before he fully understands the data contained in it”. The architect Lindy Roy did herself no favours by not simply following Rawsthorn’s instructions, but it was fun, up to a point, to conjecture what on earth she meant about making deep history tangible.
Back to the Today programme: when Alice made the lamentable point that the better-funded Stanford d-School and Eindhoven are seizing the intellectual baton, rather than our own universities, her co-respondent Sir John Sorrell weighed in with an irrefutable fact in the UK’s favour: that international designers of all stripes – from the intellectual to the artisan to the brand consultant and the jobbing photoshopper – continue to set up business here in London.
I was immediately reminded of an observation that stimulated a seminar we’re holding next month about the “subject” of D&T in schools. The RSA has strong traditions in education. Ten years ago we established a new curriculum for secondary schools called Opening Minds, which has now been adopted by close to 300 schools. It’s not about learning discrete subjects and skills in the traditional sense – 35 minute-units of geography and maths and soft double-periods of art or PE. It’s a multidisciplinary, project based curriculum that pursues five areas of competence which are all about readiness for life – encouraging young people to believe themselves capable of action in the face of shifting circumstances and problems, a fast-changing world. We’re looking hard at how design – or Design & Technology as it is currently framed – serves this purpose. By looking at it as a subject, for example, alongside other subjects: geography, science and art.
Design’s an interesting one here, because isn’t really a subject in the sense of History, with a body of content to be transferred; nor is it properly a skill like literacy and numeracy. We think the fact that design is well understood as a professional activity perhaps limits its understanding in the curriculum – as though you learn design in order to become a designer rather than to become educated.
John Sorrell’s point resonates with this. Whatever the intellectual strivings of research universities and design’s intellectuals, will design always be better understood as the practice of commercial art?
Experimenta’s ten-year synthesis of the state we’re in
Experimenta, the Lisbon design biennale, dubbed EXD’09, feels relatively free of the hostilities and anxieties that characterise similar meetings of the transnational design élite. Am I in or am I out? Am I clever enough? Is our show as good as their show? Under the leadership of co-founder Guta Moura-Guedes – beguiling, intense and impressively networked – the multidimensional tenth anniversary edition (themed “It’s About Time“) included a star-lit and -studded dinner in a ruined abbey on Saturday night graced by the Mayor of Lisbon and the Portugese Minister for Culture.
Paola Antonelli’s Open Talk, New Forms of Design, on Friday was an accomplished encapsulation of the state we’re in with design, analogous to the pre-industrial era when design hadn’t and didn’t need definition. At least this is how it looks from the perspective of high-technology, represented by, for example, Neri Oxman of MIT. An advance glance revealed her Material Ecology website to be more or less incomprehensible and it didn’t start well when she said she hoped what she’d said about thinking about the process of process helped us to understand what she meant by the Second Derivative. But in the end I was quite won by her descriptions of how design might synthesise structural and environmental performance by looking at how things like plant structures and butterfly wings configure their stiff and soft “monocoque“parts. She ended with a magnificent elision of being and process the likes of which I’ve never heard: ” Technology is only destructive in the hands of people who don’t know they are the same process as the universe”. Wow!
On to Oren Catts, he of victimless leather and disembodied cuisine notoriety. His tissue culture project at the University of Western Australia has ambitions to change the culture from manufacturing to growing; applying the engineers’ logic to biology, he says, is what allowed the Surrealists’ dream to come alive. His tales of foetal calf serum and frog steaks grown in his own lab are hair-raising but I wouldn’t argue with his point that society is good at hiding the victims of consumption. As the growth of MacDonalds co-incides with the decline of the bullfight in modern Spain, one kind of violence substitutes for an other. Brrrr!
So by now I’m wondering what all this means if you don’t work in an institute of technology but in, say, Hackney Housing or the West Yorkshire Police. With practised congeniality, Paola saw this coming, and threw something a bit more analogue into the “minestrone” that is design today; more social than technocratic. Next up was Kevin Slavin, games designer-turned-urban-consultant, trying to make us see how games are merely systems with people at the centre; that the software of cities is what runs on the hardware of buildings and roads; that Urban Sport is something real. Get this: the postindustrial condition is the mutation that results from a cycle of monoculture, isolation and incest. And this is really good: “the challenge to designers is to build the systems that will propagate and feed us, not things we will consume”.
About town: the collection of commissions by Clare Cumberlidge, Catherine Ince and Alison Moloney for the British Council in the Timeless exhibition were luminous interpretations of EXD’s exhortation that we must not make more, but more with less. Thus Linda Brothwell repaired public benches around Lisbon with new wooden thwarts, painstakingly inlaid; Fabien Cappello investigated what could be made by manufacturers in the uncharted outer reaches of Lisbon and came up with encoded ceramics; and Anthony Burrill gave the people of Lisbon their own proverbial utterings, in their own stencil type, on silk screen posters wheatpasted about the streets.
Emily King’s exhibition Quick, Quick, Slow is a complex consideration of word, image and time in design. A graphic design exhibition starting with the early 20th century avant garde’s attempts to convey space, time and motion on the page (for “a page represents a passage of time”) and ending with insights into the exponential growth of the fourth dimension that electronic technology has made possible. And finally some great films which you have to guess are the tip of a very large iceberg and to that extent a slightly puzzling selection, but which also make you realise that you’ve absorbed all this time in design without a second thought. Emily King has given it a thorough workout, reminding us at the deepest point that time is in fact political: “to be in control of time is to be free”.
Emily King and I interviewed Peter Saville together about time and design for the Lisbon Conferences – a gratuitous provision, perhaps, for an interviewee whose eloquent narratives of “mimetic-moment”, “the over-occupied landscape” and “post-pop commodity parody” require minimal prompting. The double-Emily conceit ran and ran – or I, at least, was congratulated several times on her exhibition.
And who knows, perhaps some mistook me for Emily King as I joined the panel for the Swedish IAPSIS event, Design Act, on Friday evening. Along with the elegant and persuasive Joseph Grima from Storefront in New York, I had the honour of commenting on the critical roles for design in society; following an afternoon of presentations by architectural interventionist Ana Betancourt, fashion “hacktivist” Otto van Busch, historian/theorist Helena Mattsson and inter-breeder of architecture and performance Tor Lindstrand. Matsson said that my briefly-stated design-as-resourcefulness thesis was reminiscent of the way the Swedish government promoted design in the 1930s. Unfortunately I’d missed her presentation so I couldn’t tell if this was good or bad – she said neither; simply a reflection. Hmm…
Our own project, Action for Age, was a bilateral evolution of the original Design Directions student brief we developed with Gulbenkian last year. Three of our UK finalists – Vincenzo di Maria, Ayda Anlagan and Katy Shields, worked fast and furious with six Portugese design students to create a spectacular event – a sort of story-telling street party – with the elderly community of Lisbon’s Graça neighbourhood. Under the leadership of Susanna Antonio, Rita Filipe and our own service impressarios thinkpublic! (Ian Drysdale, Alice Osborne and Deborah Szebeko), and in the space of about five days, the team brought all they know about visual communication, user research, manufacturing and production, electronic technology, and social networking to bear on the production of a celebratory community spectacle. One of the characteristics of service design is to reconfigure existing resources. In this instance, the knowledge and experience of the longest-serving residents of Graça were transformed into a new kind of social currency. Full-house for the conference at the Fundaçäo Gulbenkian on Saturday evening.
Cornish crimpers; convivial tools; filtered coffee
Down to Truro yesterday for a Dott workshop. The newly-apopinted Programme Director Andrea Siodmok presented the Dott Shot concept – a nice device to spread the word of Cornwall’s design bienial as widely as possible so that the people of Cornwall know it’s happening. Dott Shot is a competition to identify the best images of Cornish creativity and ingenuity, open to the public in four categories – Design, Lives, Places and Talent – with all entries uploaded to Flickr. We workshopped how to move the various target groups from the low-motivation/hard to reach corner of the matrix (young NEETs, farmers & fishermen, cornish pasty crimpers, older people, etc.) into the upper right (with the designers and surfers and hospitality people) and settled on some quite exciting priorities in this respect.
Interesting that Dott should identify image-making – or image finding – as the most expediently inclusive analogy for design once you cast the net wider than the industry itself. In an earlier post I described how Dingemann Kiulman of the Dutch design foundation Premsela was also pre-occupied by the massive democratisation of something – creativity? composition? critical observation? – represented by George Eastman’s invention in 1888 of the button camera.
The train journey allowed me to read Ivan Illich’s Tools for Conviviality, which proposed (back in 1973) a post-industrial, popular recovery of the “tools” radically monopolised in the industrial period by corporations and states; this by means of political process, language, law and – most interestingly to me – a searching revision of the use of professional experts. My perception is that his his use of the word convivial (and others – austerity, vernacular…) never really took off and has remained idiosyncratic. This is a shame since it has so much more elegance than the analogous terms we currently use for the ”responsible limitation” or re-distribution of tools and expertise among professionals and ordinary citizens: democratisation, access, collaboration, co-design and co-production. At any rate, I’d be happy with the idea that our new Design & Society account (You know more than you think you do) presents design as a highly convivial tool.
Meanwhile back to coffee for a second. If you ask either of the two cheerful South Asian staff of the Bagel Factory kiosk at Paddington Station for a black coffee, they ask you to refine your choice: Americano or filter? A brief ensuing discussion of relative merits revealed their discretion to be not merely uncommon, but genuine.
RSA Bookshop
The RSA Bookshop, in partnership with Blackwell's the UK's leading academic bookseller, offers Fellows and friends an opportunity to purchase books and to explore our speakers’ ideas in greater detail. Visit the RSA Bookshop.
Current RSA Events- RSA at the Birmingham Book Festival - State of Emergency October 20, 2010
- RSA at the Birmingham Book Festival - Reporting Live From The End of the World October 15, 2010
- The Flaw October 11, 2010
- RSA at the Birmingham Book Festival - Dispatches from the Dark Side -The Death Of Justice October 8, 2010
- RSA at the Birmingham Book Festival - Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No-One Can Pay October 7, 2010