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.
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