Design observer

[imomus]

My weird sideline career as a design commentator continues: I've just been asked to join Michael Bierut, William Drenttel, Jessica Helfand and Rick Poynor as one of the 'site participants' at Design Observer, a design blog which gets 50,000 hits a week, most of them from professional designers. This means I'll be posting some of the stuff I might have put here over there instead. Or rather, I'll be sifting ideas and deciding whether they go to Index magazine, AIGA Voice (currently leading with a story about Roy Kuhlman's covers for the excellent Grove Press), Tokyo's Metropolis, Design Observer, Click Opera or any of the other mags I occasionally contribute to.

I don't think I'll necessarily be spreading myself too thin -- I'm a great believer that the more ideas you shuttlecock about in public space, the more ideas you get. When I started Click Opera, it seemed like a daunting task to do a 'daily essay' -- I'd been used to coming up with one a month. But it's been surprisingly easy and a lot of fun, mainly thanks to the brilliant quality of the responses you've been giving me. Even the anonymous detractors have been challenging in a valuable way -- one made me read a charming essay by Lorca! With enemies like that, who needs friends? (This attitude will probably help me weather criticism in the comments section of Design Observer; professional designers can be somewhat brittle and nettlesome.)



If there is some disgruntlement at my somewhat polemical pronouncements over on Design Observer, I have a flank wide open to attack from design professionals: I have no training as a designer, and my practical design work experience is limited to a few record sleeves and a couple of websites. But I've always felt very close to the design world, and followed it with interest. As a teenager I really thought I was destined to be a graphic designer, and my greatest joy was to sit huddled by the radiator in the 6th form art room reading copies of Design Magazine (the British Design Council's rather elegant magazine, now defunct). I was all set to study graphics at Central St Martin's... then bottled out at the last moment, and went off to Aberdeen to do literature instead.

To the teenage me, design seemed futuristic, progressivist, rational, exciting, trendy. It seemed to be 'the acceptable face of capitalism', to represent capitalism as a restless, perfectionist, streamlined beast always trying to come up with better products. Design was glamour -- why else would I sit with tracing paper, copying magazine ad layouts, except to capture the evanescent, reified glamour of commodity fetishism? -- but it was also a way to reconcile the aesthetic and the practical, the ideal and the real. God was in the details, and utopia was right there in the latest product launch. Like a Melanesian Cargo Culter, my interest was not in products per se, but products as manifestations of divine energy, magical fragments from another world, laden with the aura of otherness.



Design (at least the racing-car-chic cutting-edge design featured in design magazines) was also an acceptable way to express Bourdieu-esque social snobbery. For design criticism, and the world of competitions and prizes and bursaries and subsdiy, was a concrete manifestation of confident and assertive taste judgements, instances of 'scrutiny' and 'distinction' at work. Whereas sociology (my other love) would never dare proclaim an American farmhouse-style kitchen range 'worse' than a sleek, futuristic, buffed steel one, Design magazine was perfectly clear on the matter. Farmhouse-style kitchens were bad design, and that was it.

Of course, I'm talking about the late 70s here, before postmodernism really hit big. We still seemed to be in the era Adolph Loos had heralded in with his 1908 essay 'Ornament und Verbrechen', which declared ornamentation a crime and claimed that only primitive people and criminals resorted to it. Imagine the sociologist-relativists' horror at that sort of statement! And yet in design, back then, it seemed like you really could get arrested for using drop shadow or messing with Helvetica, and be sent, if not to prison, at least to some sort of design borstal or purgatory.



To this day (most clearly in essays like Metaphysical Masochism of the Capitalist Creative and Design Zen) I'm fascinated by design as a liminal nexus in culture, a problematical place full of telling contradictions. How can creative aesthetics be reconciled with a big machine that's only interested in production and profitability? How does the capitalist system, described by sociologist Max Weber as a form of 'worldy asceticism' and obsessed with exchange value rather than use value, deal with design's fetishistic attention to quality, its interest in texture, its concern with sensual pleasure? Are designers the last artisans in an age of increasing 'division of labour'? Are there conflicts between the ever-lowering threshold to creativity (thanks to digital developments like desktop publishing, amateurs can now design) and designers' need to be seen as professionals, consultants, experts? And how do we justify taste judgements in a world ruled, in academia, by relativism and, in capitalism, by market research?

Each one of these questions, to me, is as intoxicating as a big mango margarita with a slice of melon on the side, salt around the rim, and a cherry in the middle. And they're all there in design. Who needs payment when you get to sip on this stuff?