Design the guardian of human size
Membership of the international advisory board for Premsela’s Designworld project gives me privileged insight into the country that is the envy of all others for its use of design. For a thorough and spirited essay on this subject, enjoy at Michael Rock’s “Mad Dutch Disease/I heart NL” lecture given at Premsela in 2004. At Tuesday’s meeting in Amsterdam Zuid, where Premsela occupies a mid-20th century monastery, we were asked to help define their proper ambitions to Internationalisation and Globalisation, carefully distinct.
At first I was tempted to say that Holland’s international reputation is a bit like Britain’s - fuelled by the star status of individual practitioners, rather than the whole-culture reputation of, say, Japan or France or Italy or Germany. Then our thoughtful convener, Tim Vermeulen (himself Belgian) mentioned how marvelously and peerlessly simple the Dutch self-assessment tax form is. This is interesting, I thought; now we’re on to something. The reason you have Hella Jongerius and Marcel Wanders and Juergen Bey is no more worthwhile to deliberate – and as over-deliberated – as the reason we have our own assorted design virtuosi and celebrities. But the reason you have the world’s most usable self-assessment tax form is yours alone I want to know why.
The reason we have the world’s best underground transport map is Harry Beck. Well, ok, Harry Beck plus Edward Johnston and Frank Pick and London Transport, mutually supporting for a decent innings. But the singulr genius of the original, by BRS Premsela Vonk (later Eden Design) in 1988, is not an adequate answer to the Netherlands tax form question. What is the design code that penetrates so deeply that designers and citizens feel it and that withstands the modifications of successors? Harking back to an early Design & Society post, what gives the Netherlands its powerful design nerve?
The other nice idea I noted was that design is the guardian of “human size” in a world globalised by economic integration. I predict Premsela will be majoring on this, and will do it well.
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.
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.
Mending, making & manufacture: can we redesign the sock?
In a VoxPop for Design week last week I proposed making a spectacle of myself on the Fourth Plinth by running up samples on my sewing machine in full view of the public; and to their benefit, since I propsoed giving away the fruits of my labour. My stated reason was that we have become distanced from production; our competence to invent or improvise solutions to the practical problems that beset us is diminished in proportion to the increasing quantity of solutions we buy. Jonathan Glancey wrote stirringly about this growing incompetence to make in the Guardian last summer.
I’ve commissioned an essay for the RSA about the renewed interest in making and manufacturing after a period when business and policy have tended to concentrate on knowledge and services. I’m asking for a fresh account of why we stopped making things (if we did stop); what the benefits of making things are; and how making things might become easier. What conditions would foster small, local, manufacturing entrepreneurship? And what are the implications for improvisation and innovation among ordinary citizens who, while they may be making to save money or resources, are not making to make money?
Our understanding of services became rich and metaphysical as the last century turned and the internet came to define so much of business. But Mark Adams, Director of Vitsoe and one of Britain’s most resolute and articulate design-led manufacturers, reminded me that products and services are not an either/or. In a new dawn of manufacturing, on a planet where sense tells us to make and buy for longevity, and in a society with today’s level of personal expectation and individualism, goods and services are critically interdependent.
The service aspect of goods brings us to repair. An obvious symptom of our remoteness from making is our disinclination to repair. In gathering an interest group around making, manufacturing and repair I discovered that my Dutch friends at Premsela are involved with Platform.21 in a Repair project in full swing. In true Dutch style, it emphasises the surprising beauty and surreality of repaired objects; hybrids of style and substance; relocations of meaning and memory; repair as a creative project under artistic direction. Our RSA repair project will be less self-expression and more self-reliance.
Among my own repairs, I confess to darning socks. There’s a design problem: while manufacturers frequently advertise a “reinforced heel”, they don’t address the real stress point which is not the heel but the tendon area above the heel where the edge of your shoe wears the yarn away.
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