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Where Design Meets Life by Alice Rawsthorn
Victor Papanek argued that all men are
designers. None perhaps more effective than the early 18th-century pirate
Edward Teach, the formidable Blackbeard. Teach's reputation as an indomitable
pirate relied on the visual persona he created. Not just the beard itself but
the whole ensemble of heavy coat, big boots and huge dramatic hat with lighted
matches sputtering beneath the rim struck such terror in his victims that
resistance fell away. He had no need of a degree in graphics to realise the
long distance effect on those who saw the Jolly
Roger. This kind of basic human instinct for designing is one of the main
themes of Alice Rawsthorn's lively and stimulating book. This is a welcome
publication for many reasons. First, deluged as we are with ever more enormous
books on architecture, there are very few intelligent books about design. In
this area Stephen Bayley was the pioneer, with a constant stream of witty,
erudite and challenging writings on design from the 1980s onwards. More
recently, in 2008, Deyan Sudjic entered the arena with The
Language of Things. Rawsthorn's approach is different, more socially
concerned, wider ranging in her interests and, yes, more feminine. It was
Rawsthorn, don't forget, who created such a storm during her years as director
of the Design Museum by promoting an exhibition on the flower decorator
Constance Spry.
Another of her favourites is the Hungarian
designer László Moholy-Nagy, a charismatic figure whose students at the Bauhaus
named him Holy
Mahogany. Moholy took to dressing in a boiler suit, not just as a practical
measure but as a symbolic garment, marking his commitment to making the
rapprochement between industry and art. He invented theLight Space Modulator, a
machine for creating the experimental pools of light and shade, an object
Moholy considered so essential to his work that he took it with him in his flight
from Nazi Germany in the mid-1930s. To get this peculiar contraption through
various European customs he described it as hairdressing equipment.
Rawsthorn adopts Moholy's central tenet:
"Design is not a profession but an attitude." She argues that design
is not, as most people construe it, just a matter of superficial styling. It's
not simply the curves on a sleekly covetable sofa or the angle of those
glamorous high heels. According to Rawsthorn, design is "concerned with
the whole process of analysis, visualisation, planning and execution". It
affects all human lives, for better or for worse.
She draws pertinent examples from her own
experience. Rawsthorn, author of a very good biography of Yves St Laurent and
now design critic of the International Herald Tribune, is a seasoned traveller
and she describes the bliss of arriving in the clarity and orderliness of
Zurich airport as opposed to the bewildering chaos of Heathrow or JFK. The
difference is simply a question of the signage, implemented in Zurich back in
the 1970s by the brilliant Swiss graphic designer Ruedi
Rüegg. Where at Heathrow the competing signs and symbols induce panic, in
Zurich the traveller feels calm and in control.
We all have our own examples of innovations
that seem like improvements but turn out to be the opposite. Rawsthorn cites
the espresso pod, the neatly sealed capsule that is faster and less messy than
ground coffee. But what about the packaging of those tiny capsules? Rawsthorn
reminds us sternly that the functional strengths of the espresso pod are
negated by its "environmental weaknesses and death of integrity".
An even worse example of designer overload
is the bunch of bananas repackaged for sale in a supermarket in what is
described as "organic packaging". Repackaging bananas, surely
nature's best example of the perfect pre-pack, and then calling the repackaging
"organic"? Surely that way designer madness lies.
Rawsthorn keeps a sharp historical perspective,
reminding us of how Giorgio
Vasari in the 16th century defined Leonardo da Vinci as an early example of
a designer after seeing his immaculately detailed drawings for machinery and
engines. But her new book is intended less as design history, and more a
succinct survey in 13 brisk chapters of where design is now.
The effect of digital technology is proving
both liberating and unsettling. The things we see and use are changing with
unprecedented speed as attention spans grow shorter, visual awareness heightens
and desires for distractions intensify. New products are being invented almost
daily while others become obsolete. What happened to the telephone? Who needs
an alarm clock when your smartphone will awaken you? For some, these rapid
changes seem baffling. Rawsthorn sees the "elemental role" of design
in acting as our friendly negotiant of change.
Try the doorbell test. The world is now
divided into those who automatically press a doorbell with their index finger
and those who use their thumb. Which you do will, Rawsthorn tells us,
"reveal your age almost as accurately as the way you dance or how wrinkly
your hands are". All right, since you ask, I use my index finger,
originating as I do in a pre-digital age, whereas thumb users are people of a
younger generation whose practice in typing text messages and playing on games
consoles has rendered their thumbs nimbler than any of their fingers – a
pertinent example of how the designed environment changes people's everyday
behaviour.
In this quickly shifting world the
designers' responsibilities become more complex. Far gone are those days of
certainty I knew back in the 1960s when I was design critic for the Guardian.
The subject matter of design was then what were rather primly called
"consumer goods". The thinking of that time was the simplistically
optimistic hope that good design would improve the lives of the deserving
British public. Design was an aesthetic offshoot of the welfare state.
Functionally pure tableware and cutlery,
refrigerators, textiles and clean-lined convertible sofabeds were selected year
by year to receive the coveted Design Centre Awards. The prize-winning
designers were the nation's design heroes. I married one of them [David Mellor]
so I should know.
The scene described by Rawsthorn is
altogether different. Since then designers have endured Margaret Thatcher's
"creative
industries" policy followed by Tony Blair's Cool Britannia years. No
wonder they have turned into such driven, anxious creatures. Never mention
Raymond Loewy's all too capitalist mantra "good design is good
business", still less his sweeping statement that a designer's main
responsibility is "to keep his client in the black". These days such
beliefs seem as outdated and embarrassing as jokes about bra-burning feminists.
Rawsthorn's most subtle and interesting
chapters concern the rise of the designers' conscience, their involvement in a
multitude of projects that improve the lives of "the other 90%" of
the world's population. These are the people who have in the past benefited
least from the design profession's skills.
She mentions the way the speeding up of our
lives has set up a contrasting craving for nostalgia and quirkiness, vintage
fashion, folklore and pretend games. Here she could have made more of the
considerable revival in handmaking of special one off objects at the highest
level of imagination, for example the resurgence of the beautiful book. I also
feel that she underestimates the hidden dangers in increasing design
sophistication, especially in the area of military weaponry. Barnes Wallis's
dam-busting bouncing bombs were child's play in comparison with today's
unmanned surveillance drones.
Rawsthorn's title Hello World is
irritatingly winsome. There is also the question of why the design of a book
about design, with its dizzying vertical page numbers and inscrutable
photography, is absolutely dire.
But this hardly detracts from the value and
enjoyment of a sprightly survey that counteracts the narrowness with which so
many people think about design.
