Design observer
Nov. 27th, 2004 11:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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?
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(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-27 12:18 pm (UTC)Isn't it a case of lure the eye and the purse will follow?
- Protractor -
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-27 12:20 pm (UTC)The other day Michael Beirut had that entry The World in Two Footnotes, noting a possible separation of designers into The Agents of Neutrality and The Aesthetes of Style. Well I for one think there might be one too many agents over there! And certainly too many Republicans.
And don't worry for a second (and I don't get any sense that you do) about your self-proclaimed lack of formal design training. I think I've learned quite a few things I can apply to my own approach to design from reading this site. And furthermore, designers need to learn to respond to anyone's voice that speaks to them, regardless of if it is backed up by awards and accolades, inside the design canon or out.
-shane
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-27 12:38 pm (UTC)It looks like a website from 1998, with broken links all over it too. Who designed that?
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-27 12:50 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-27 02:04 pm (UTC)Actually there's often an air of authenticity to web pages with interesting editorial content but absolutely shit design. But since you seem so concerned with aesthetics, maybe it is time for a redesign?
-shane
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-27 03:22 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-27 03:36 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-27 03:52 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-27 04:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-27 05:08 pm (UTC)There's fresh vegetables in the fridge. Don't forget to feed the cat.
W
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-27 05:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-27 05:15 pm (UTC)design is not objective, souless for me. on the internet it seems this way. everyone has access to software which is marketed as creative, but really it's not. when people use it they feel they are being creative, that's all. i went through this stage of creative feelings when i was first interested in design. the internet is experiencing a sort of child's first words stage where so much stuff gets published. if the internet was like the library imagine what it would be like! thousands of carelessly written and published books with wrong information.
as for livejournal, look what goes on here. it is thought very juvenille to have an account. there is lots of existential drama andescaping reality and meaningless affirmation and affection.
i have always thought the internet to be the last metaphysics. people talk about heaven and hell, about the matrix and all these fanciful philosophies aof the unknown. what about the internet? is it not something like these? it seems many things go to the internet to die. it seems that 99% of people using the internet do not understand the code that makes it.
do you know of m/m paris? they have inspired me greatly. they are graphic designers and we have in common a feeling that graphic design is not objective.
i do not look at design pages, or read design reviews, or enter awards competitions. i have yet to find someone who shares my views about design. maybe you do? i'll keep reading.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-27 05:18 pm (UTC)I would agree that Click Opera is more readable than Design Observer, and yeah, there is that glaring error of not being able to tell immediately if the responses are from the name listed above the post or below. Maybe your first article for them can be a rip on their web design, heh.
But you know the only possible defense for the typography in Design Zen for instance is that you're just waiting for a shitty web design chic movement to come in style :P
-shane
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-27 05:23 pm (UTC)(I still regret not having my navel photographed by him. I knew I should've shaved before that party!)
W
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-27 05:33 pm (UTC)here is lots of existential drama and escaping reality and meaningless affirmation and affection.
Is that LiveJournal you're describing, or life? Sounds okay to me, either way!
Glad to have you reading, anyway!
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-27 06:37 pm (UTC)http://12121.hostinguk.com/bingo2.jpg
kabuki kuhlman
Date: 2004-11-27 06:41 pm (UTC)the cover of the kabuki theatre book by roy kuhlman. notice the swastika like figure above the actors head.
ps. how do you post pics so that they will actually appear in your comment?
Re: kabuki kuhlman
Date: 2004-11-27 06:53 pm (UTC)Replace {} with <>
Re: kabuki kuhlman
Date: 2004-11-27 07:06 pm (UTC)Re: kabuki kuhlman
Date: 2004-11-27 07:09 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-27 07:25 pm (UTC)I do, 'cause I wanna buy all that well-designed stuff.
Re: kabuki kuhlman
Date: 2004-11-27 07:54 pm (UTC)thanks!
Question for anti-metaphysicists/materialists
Date: 2004-11-27 11:11 pm (UTC)What, in your view, is the purpose of sleep?
Regards,
Gabriel
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-27 11:29 pm (UTC)It doesn't do an indepth analysis of capitalism and design, but what can one expect from a magazine like this, I suppose? The article is a fun thing to read, nevertheless. Though the one in the physical magazine is more fun because of the crazy images.
And it's funny 'cos many of us loves us our Ikea, even Jack White. I take pleasure in his downfalls, which is a bad thing. Though I suppose we both have a common like: cheap furniture essentials.
Good luck with your ventures into the design world.
x
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-27 11:29 pm (UTC)Form follows function?
Coinneach
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-27 11:35 pm (UTC)As the web ages, more and more of it will be outside of any maintenance cycle. Old web pages in these outer regions will still live, old flash will be dead.
Re: kabuki kuhlman
Date: 2004-11-27 11:45 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-28 05:15 am (UTC)If you've been paying attention to flash sites over the years, I'm sure you've seen the work of Hi-Res (http://www.hi-res.net). And if you think about the kind of sites designers like that are creating, no, they are never going to be maintained, and yes, they are going to age fast, because they are highly thought out objects of design (and experience) which stood for one idea, brand, or product at one moment in time. So if you're going to design complex flash sites, the more important question becomes whether design should aspire to be timeless or not. And personally I am an occasional flash designer who believes the idea of a timeless design is passed its time.
-shane
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-28 06:00 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-28 08:57 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-29 02:17 am (UTC)Not least because a lot of Flash content doesn't get indexed by search engines.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-29 06:34 am (UTC)Recently I stayed at the Hotel Claskia (http://www.claska.com/) in Megura, a concept hotel designed by Showa Tei (Towa's brother) which opened last year. My initial impression was extremely positive. Everything looked great! For a bit more than the price of staying at a business hotel I had a room with an unusual unique layout. I immediately thought of Ryu Murakami's film Tokyo Decadence: I could look through a glass wall past sleek sink, shower, toilet at the city skyline and the Tokyo tower. The hotel instructions were designer-ironic with a pictorial alphabetic list to services available, D = dog salon, H = hookah etc... (If anyone's interested I'll post a snap of this list).
The problems started when I tried to use things. The sink wouldn't drain. The toilet handle had to be jiggered to stop the water flow etc... The water pot looked designed but when examined and used, turned out to be inferior quality to the potto usually available in business hotels. When I propped a pillow up against the headrest on the bed, it quickly slipped to one side knocking a lamp to the floor. I started to feel like the dupe in a fifties b-grade satire of the comical aspects of improved living technologies.
The massive design boom of the 90's has meant that a lot of what gets passed off as 'design' is really public relations (aka hype) - how to cut corners (and costs) and still get the publicity that will attract customers. We're at the stage where there is nearly a requirement for products to look like they have been 'designed', or advertisers and consumers will simply not be interested. In other words, camouflage has become a factor.
I wonder if there is an anti-design movement in the design community yet?
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-29 07:02 am (UTC)I meant to say anti-'design' (or anti-design-mimicry) rather than anti-design. The point is that it now seems every product wants to cry out "I am designed!" whether or not it is in fact good quality. And there are many who call themselves designers whether or not they are actually knowledgeable about solving problems of industrial production or have good aesthetic sense.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-29 02:47 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-29 04:10 pm (UTC)I've seen products showing up in 100 yen shops lately that look like they have been 'designed' (rather than just designed). That's a sure sign of the ubiquity of 'design'.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-29 04:34 pm (UTC)A contrast to the Hotel Claska is given by a micro-hotel (http://www.marcelamsterdam.com/) in Amsterdam, designed, built, and operated by a graphic artist, who has evolved the space over a period of 30 years and lives there for part of the year himself. This implies a high level of committment to the operation - much higher than can be expected at a hotel run for commercial purposes alone.
Re: kabuki kuhlman
Date: 2004-11-29 11:33 pm (UTC)See, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika
"In Japan, the swastika, called manji, is an ancient religious symbol. A manji appeared on a certain Pokémon playing card sold in Japan. Because of its resemblance to the Nazi swastika (see below), the card was altered for Western translations. On Japanese town plans, a swastika (left-facing and horizontal) is commonly used to mark the location of a Buddhist temple."
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-01 05:49 pm (UTC)help pls!
Date: 2005-01-12 08:39 pm (UTC)I am so looking forward to your reply soon. Cheers.