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: thrill-seeking or slow-burning?
I had been wondering recently what you could exchange design for in a “time-bank” system of skills bartering. A conversation with Deborah Dawton of the Design Business Association at a dinner on Tuesday to mark the 20th Anniversary of Central St Martins put the question in vivid relief. We agreed on one obvious problem: you probably need your plumbing fixed more urgently than your plumber needs a logo. Deborah speculated on what she could offer the roofing contractor in exchange for restoring her shelter from the elements. Some storytelling perhaps; a visualisation of his narrative? A tool that will take two years to prototype, test and produce? I wobbled for a moment. Can it be that our need for design is not immediate, practical and universal? Compared to plumbing, I guess not. And yet, when you look at Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, you want to put design only one level up from the physiological. Maybe the crux of this is speed. Is our need for design in fact strategic rather than practical, distributed rather than universal, and above all, not immediate but slow. Many have said so, especially Ezio Manzini, and I’m mostly with them except that I think this limits our ambitions for bold improvisation and lacks the thrill of the practical, immediate and universal gauntlet. I throw it down – examples, anyone?
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