The problem with design
In a recent essay, Fear of Small Numbers
Problem-solving is the methodological bedrock of design and the semantic key to designers’ belief that they are in a position to change society. Social problems and design form a symbiotic relationship, something which politicians and cultural commentators alike have found alluring, leading many to a fascination with the role of design in contemporary culture. This role of designer-as-cultural-mediator has an established history in the West: in Britain you can trace a clear line from the Great Exhibition in 1851 to the Festival of Britain in 1951. During this period, the designer’s role as cultural mediator – capturing the zeitgeist – has evolved into the ‘problem-solving’ or ‘social engineering’ conception of design we increasingly witness today. The trouble with the notion of problem-solving is its contingency. The problem in question could be anything: global warming, social housing, over-consumption… even ‘the Jewish problem’. Indeed, the scar of the Holocaust is incised, in part, by the work of designers who (often unintentionally) created the blueprints for mass killing. Today, it should be remembered that one person’s problem is another’s home, or fight for freedom, or means of transport…
Much contemporary design has taken on the role of cultural beautician or plastic surgeon. This provides a global parlour plied with consumer goods, manicured with designers’ good intentions, plucked from a repository of standard modernist thinking. It is like 1980s Alessi, with a social conscience. Recently, Wallpaper magazine listed the Ten Commandments of good design: at number 4, ‘Good design helps a product be understood’ and at number 6, ‘Good design is honest’. Here – albeit fashionably repackaged and editorialised – we have the old modernist dichotomy; design’s raison d’être of moral instruction alongside its decorative, consumptive self.
And it is here, when you begin to pick at the stitches, that you find the dilemma for all design: its relationship to commodity and the dialectical tensions between use and life-function. Every design will add to the flow of design, creating an ever-greater distance between its actual use and the symbolic order it falls within: an upturned box, a picnic table, an Ikea table, a Habitat table, a John Lewis table, a Heal’s table, a Marcel Breuer table, etc. The list expands and design becomes a series of eBay ‘tag’ words; and meanwhile your dinner plate falls to the floor! Likewise, a pair of non-branded trainers or an anti-globalisation t-shirt validates the very system it is intending to critique. But this is a well-trodden trail for criticism, so let us move on….
Given the dilemma faced by design in a modern capitalist world, where the route to direct social influence is pock-marked with the fallout of political spin (remember Cool Britannia?) and the unrealistic assumptions of design and its public impact (e.g. the Millennium Dome) – what voice can design have?
Design will need to go beyond the rhetoric of manifestos. The manifesto has become the bored patter of fingertips on the table while you wait for your coffee to arrive and the next big idea to come along. Design needs to be a series of small ideas – mini explosions; eureka moments – which atomise and settle in unexpected places. Think of architectural collectives like FAT: Fashion, Architecture and Taste; or muf, a collective of architects, theorist and artists; or designers like M/M Paris, Front Design, and the long established Droog Design – all of whom share more than a love for fashionable mono-syllabic/acronymic names. Altogether, they present work of completely different and often-opposing stances as to how design should live in the world – whether architectural or product; art or utilitarian. All share a love of the ‘process of design’. Their work is as much about ‘process’ than problem-solving.
Front Design, a practice of four Stockholm-based women, has created a collection of work which, although eclectic and often ephemeral, has a coherence shaped around exposing the invisibility of process. They use the latest technology in digital processes and rapid prototyping to provide work that can be violent, whimsical or performative. In Sketch they take the motion capture software created for the animation/gaming industry and fuse it with rapid prototyping technology (RPT), allowing them to create sketches with a pencil in thin air which are digitally captured and materialise via RPT into physical products. They have also produced work which resonates with our violent times, including a lounge chair – created from the mould left by dynamite detonated in the woods outside Stockholm, and a lamp shade – its stretched material perforated by a salvo of live bullets. These brutal production methods echo a theme established around a decade ago when Droog Design introduced brutality into the home with its Do collection. Its product designs included a metal armchair that owners bashed into shape with a sledgehammer and a rubber-lined (and unbreakable) porcelain vase that gained character the more it was dropped or smashed against a wall. Droog was investigating process, not commenting on a global condition. But they are equally likely to engage in ‘changing the world’. A current Droog project is Urban Play, which is described as ‘an international project… [that] believes that street-level inventiveness, energy and innovation is the future of creativity in the city… [c]reated as a catalyst to inspire creativity in the public domain…’ Both Droog and Front Design are interested in new materials and the cross-fertilisation of technologies and processes. For them, design is quintessentially a temporal phenomenon – a ‘moving forward’.
FAT meanwhile balance any earnestness in their work with a self-belief and a mocking critique of the world they live in, like their artefacts designed for the Konran Shop – a series of products exhibited and for sale at the V&A Museum which mimic design icons like the Apple iPod. Made out of clay and rudimentarily formed, the items only make sense in the realm of commodity fetishism, their weight and blank form taking on a surrealist, nightmare quality. FAT’s architectural work is always technologically precise and cognate, but the overall impression is filmic, a collage of the visual objet d’art of urban experience, remixed and presented back to us, to love or to hate. The Blue House, an office/apartment building in London completed in 2004 has become one of their iconic works. The FAT practice, and its methodology, is the antithesis of New Urbanism. The latter is a movement that uses the paucity of ideas in much contemporary architecture as a cleavage to colonise with old thinking, old architectural forms and old class divisions. New Urbanists often argue that their gated communities are in response to the needs and wants of their occupants, rather than the top-down communication of the modernist building programmes of the 1950s and 60s where, the argument goes, ideology was imposed on the dwellers of new housing projects. Small practices like FAT and muf are aware of this criticism and their work is designed to grow from the middle; it is about communication. muf’s small-scale urban design projects are a good example of this working ethic. Design needs to look to its role of reflecting the mores of its times rather than producing a banal B-movie of an imagined community.
Networking and a cross-fertilisation in methodology between the digital and analogue worlds (which is a separate thing from inter-disciplinarily practice) will become increasingly important to design thinking – whether it is the new digital networks of Facebook and MySpace, or the more tangible network of projects in inner city areas across the world. Good design develops incrementally, and in an unavoidably globalised community, good design projects bounce off of other ones. In these small explosions of technical nous and creative spirit you will see the materialisation of over-arching social concerns – environmental issues, globalisation, consumerism, ethics, etc. – not as doctrinaire monoliths, but as small, individual investigations into contemporary culture.
A designer’s social responsibility – if he or she feels the need – is to ask questions rather than to place emphasis on problem-solving. Designers need to stop making simplistic overtures to saving the world; stop the mantra for ‘socially-responsible design’ that ignores the issues of religion, politics and personal taste; and stop seducing the consumer into believing that the choice of one particular design over another equates to sound ethical/political judgement. Finally, designers must stop measuring the impact of design solely on how big is the problem and instead focus on how important is the question.
Colin and Monika 2007/08
This paper was originally published as part of the Battle of Ideas Conference, Royal College of Art, London. November 2007
To me, there was once a time when designers were warriors—trained and battle-hardened. They honored their craft, and practiced their bodies and minds to perfect it. The weak died, the strong lived and everyone in between knew that line. Designers, like the ancient warriors, stood with valor and were honored for their skills. I am afraid that mentality will die out, just as they did. Or be overshadowed. Guns, cannons, missiles, bombs and technology destroyed the principals of ‘honorable’ combat, and so will the technologies of our time continue to change our craft. The gun leveled the battlefield then and so the new software and accessibilities of our times will level the battlefield for us—with the average joe, the high school student, the indie band member, etc.
This is the age of accessibility. Voices, ours or anyone’s, echo farther than we can possibly imagine in today’s landscape. Messages travel down unknown corridors and around unforeseen corners. The inter-connectivity of our world is growing so fast, due to the drastic development of technology, that it changes the battlefield. Rebels, guerrillas and mercenaries erupt from shadows to cry their name and play our game. And they are getting good. Piracy of software, accessibility of hardware and affluence of knowledge enables them to stand a chance. No longer will people look to us to champion their cause. They will look instead, to their brethren. They will look instead, to those with the heart and will to rise against the opposing forces and stand arm in arm with them. They will look to their own—people who understand them and know them better than they think we ever can. They will be capable too, everything they need can be found on the internet.
It will begin from the bottom. The accomplished firms, and ‘professionals’ won’t see it, but from where I stand, at the base of this skyscraper, I can see the tension in the landscape around me. Perhaps it will never reach farther than this level, and it would be a long time from now, but I am afraid.
Where does that leave me? I honor the principals and theories I have learned. The methodology and the craft of design intrigue me immensely. I read and research everything I can and will continue to do so, but I question whether this will be enough to survive against a rising force. Deep down I know that the core principals I learn will provide sustenance and sustainability, but for every one of them that fails, a hundred will replace them. Will they overwhelm us? And if so, how will design, and our roles, be affected when everyone becomes a ‘designer’?
/Lap Le | Student of Graphic Design Program at Oregon State University 05/02/2008