The design dilemma of hot beverages
In her New York Times column today Alice Rawsthorn reports thoughtfully on the dismal experience of trying to buy an electric kettle. So true, although her thesis that countertop appliances represent the low-rent end of product design doesn’t explain why most mobile phones look like crap.
But well done Alice for getting the kettle repaired – a triumph in contemporary terms – and back to the seemly boiling of water:
I resolved long ago to evade the electric kettle by going for the old-fashioned, whistling stove-top device. Partly because of the shop of horrors that Rawsthorn identifies electric kettle design to be: the stovetop kettle is inherently a simpler thing. Also because a vigorous cook naturally avoids cluttering her vital work-surface with electrical cords and cordless launchpads. When my anonymous and functional stainless steel kettle finally disintegrated I went – with some misgivings – for le Creuset, and with it a modicum of design. Not, as it happens, the ersatz “Traditional” version Rawsthorn rightly scorns but the Kone, more post-modern armaments factory than “witches’ coven”. I don’t love it, but I don’t mind it.
My own dismay in the electrical department of John Lewis came as I entered in search of a new filter coffee machine. My years in the United States accustommed me to insist on filtration. Beats me how the Cafetière became that icon of late 20th century meeting-chic when it pours forth sludge. And although one admires the natty Bialetti Moka Express, staple of all Italian high-street hardware merchants in an awesome range of sizes, and its more stylised scions, I think in England it makes foul coffee.
The Krups filter coffee machine we acquired as a wedding present disintegrated after ten years, and my, how the domestic coffee landscape had changed! Apart from one gigantic filter machine, parodically elaborate in its functions, John Lewis had nothing but countertop espresso-makers as far as the eye could see. Urbanely, I sneered at those who make their own when how much more cosmopolitan to get one at the corner and consume it shoulder-to-shoulder with other citizens. I shivered, moreover, at the apocalypse of energy is must take to push water and steam through these things, although this may be an illusion stimulated by the prevailing ersatz, age-of-chrome, industrial styling.
I left with a Krups coffee mill instead, a compact and single-functional concession to countertop appliances, trusting that somewhere – somewhere – in London you could still buy a 1 x 4 plastic or ceramic coffee filter. Curiosity led me to the Monmouth Coffee House, where, sure enough, there’s a plastic filter and a pyrex jug from an anonymous Eastern European manufacturer, winsomely boxed up as the “Continental Filter”, for about a fiver.
We simulate the warming effect of a filter machine with the small burner and a heat diffuser. I’m pleased to say that this morning ritual of grinding and hand filtering yields a good volume of coffee, richly aromatic and sludge-free.
The cinematically intractable heroes and heroines of design
I’ve written before on the mysterious scarcity of designers in cinematic fiction. Notwithstanding this underpopulation, I received notice the other day of the forthcoming British Film Institute/RIBA season of architects and architecture on film. It’s an impressively full and enticing list but it’s certainly not long on personalities. The blurb betrays this rather disembodied character: “a varied programme of documentaries, features, silent classics and European cinema gems that demonstrate how the cinema uses architects and the built environment to influence our emotional responses”. This suggests a rather indirect connection between the architect and the emotions.
Alice Rawsthorn’s been whiling away the August doldrums turning up the 20th century’s design heroes on YouTube – real gems here, and heroic, for sure; but it’s not the stuff of fiction and fantasy. It’s archivally thrilling if you’re a design afficionado to witness Paul Rand describe his imperious handing over of the IBM logo to the importunate client (an unequivocal, single proposition), but I think not universally moving.
So what of Coco Before Chanel? Well, there’s a wonderful scene in which she stands on a beach in Normandy watching fishermen haul in their nets, and the designers in the audience know she’s studying their unique elegance. Sure enough, Coco shows up in the next scene in a fishing smock, and in the following ones looking utterly chic in a stripey matelot. Quite soon after this, her boyfriend Arthur “Boy” Capel rumbles her trying to filch his polo shirt and as she hands it back she asks what it’s made of. “Jersey” he replies, and a century of Lacoste and Fruit Of The Loom and Uniqlo flashes through our minds. But generally I felt a want of design in this movie.
We examine her progress from orphanage to indifferent singing double-act in a bar with her sister to the inglorious concubinage from which Capel’s capital rescues her. Through all this Gabrielle-Coco remains enigmatic – of course she does, her armour-plated persona concealing the indignities of youth and provenance. This makes her infatuation with Capel less than convincing (if Alessandro Nivola’s rabitty teeth and nasty period moustache hadn’t already). Although she cries at the news that he’s been killed in a car crash, she’s already admitted she’s not the marrying type.
Naturally I yearn for the more full and convincing a story that could have been made of her evolution as a designer. Yes, there’s the fishermen and the polo jersey, and a couple of other scenes in which she insists on sartorial sobriety against the taste of the times. But I wanted more clues to the trajectory from the full-length, meringue-hatted Edwardian style, at once blousy and corsetted, which she resolutely rejected, to the neat, knee-length, narrow shouldered, high-armholed, three-quarter-sleeved bouclé suit we know and love. Didn’t Chanel also invent denim as a fashion fabric after admiring the indigo-overalled workers of Nîmes (de Nîmes)? I suppose that was Coco After Chanel, but cinema has license doesn’t it?
The film ends rather abruptly. One minute Coco is presiding over her celebrity hat-trimming atelier; the next she’s sitting on the now famous staircase of the Rue Cambon watching the descent of a sublime first collection. I suppose how she got from one to the other just doesn’t make good fiction. Sigh.
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’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.
Only a design feature
October 27, 2008: If you looked at the Ten Greatest Designers in Britain feature in the Observer you’d be forgiven for thinking that design is principally the coercion of consumers into buying more stuff. OK, buying lovelier stuff. But unequivocally the handmaiden of consumersism. We all know it doesn’t make a great lifestyle feature in magazines, but what of design’s more metaphysical power? A designer’s ability to thwart consumerism by encouraging us to reason the very need for a product? Design’s ability to help us remember the experience without buying the souvenir. While we should give thanks for the 10% nod to the ability of design o breathe new life into something old which is represented quite gloriously by Stuart Haygarth; we need to advance the magazine discourse of design so that you can turn heroic deeds into a lifestyle feature. So it’s not a magazine, but we should certainly give thanks for Alice Rawsthorn’s Monday column in the International Herald Tribune which is a weekly intravenous feed of design seen in the large perspective of global business, society and technology. All this while at the same time making design seem smart and lifestyle-ey as well, just like magazines do, even in the August doldrums.
Kazakhstan’s estimated 12,000 newly-minted millionaires can now be rewarded with a credit card that has an inlaid diamond and gold leaf details, gratifyingly gendered with a winged horse illustration for rich men and a peacock for rich women. The Observer reported: “The bank has said that the embedded diamond is only a ‘design feature’ to demonstrate the status of the customer”. Only a design feature. Harmless enough then, and no more than a signifier of wealth and status. Sigh.
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