Writing Design

Words and Objects

Grace Lees-Maffei, Grace Lees-Maffei

• Publisher: Berg Publishers
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781847889577
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Kunsttheorie & -kritik

How do we learn about the objects that surround us? As well as gathering sensory information by viewing and using objects, we also learn about objects through the written and spoken word - from shop labels to friends' recommendations and from magazines to patents. But, even as design commentators have become increasingly preoccupied with issues of mediation, the intersection of design and language remains under-explored. Writing Design provides a unique examination of what is at stake when we convert the material properties of designed goods into verbal or textual description. Issues discussed include the role of text in informing design consumption, designing with and through language, and the challenges and opportunities raised by design without language. Bringing together a wide range of scholars and practitioners, Writing Design reveals the difficulties, ethics and politics of writing about design.

Part 1 Righting Design—on the Reforming Role of Design Criticism

Introduction

Grace Lees-Maffei

Just as the processes termed ‘Web 2.0’ enable professionals and amateurs alike to publish writing about design (and everything else) with unprecedented ease and reach, design criticism is currently undergoing a process of professionalization with a group of new master’s degrees having been recently launched in London and New York.¹ These parallel trends are not coincidental, nor are they contradictory. The greater accessibility of design criticism, for readers, authors, editors and publishers, facilitated by electronic delivery, has stimulated interest in design commentary and provided a practical outlet, beyond the purview of the editorial gatekeepers of the print publishing industry. The freedom from commercial constraints offered by self-publication on the Web should liberate design criticism from serving as little more than an extension of manufacturers’ public relations and marketing departments. However, tutors in design writing Anne Gerber and Teal Triggs have lamented the fact that ‘these virtual spaces, while increasing the number of outlets available for writers, have fostered yet more descriptive commentary rather than developing an agenda for any sustained critical discourse. The technology, while encouraging immediacy, is lacking a rigorous and disciplined approach to written (and visual) communication.’² Moves to professionalize design criticism may be regarded as consistent with a shift towards ‘Web 3.0’ whereby experts reclaim authorial control, rather than the variant meaning in which computers independently generate content.

As design criticism proliferates, so the need for a reflexive literature on its nature and practice is felt. Writing Design contributes to that literature an ontological meditation on the relationship between words and objects, and in designing, reading, knowing and communicating. Part One, specifically, approaches the theme of writing design through the homonym ‘righting design’; it considers the ways in which writing about design has tried to improve, or reform, design practice and designed products. In the first chapter, ‘Writing about Stuff: The Peril and Promise of Design History and Criticism’, Jeffrey L. Meikle provides a long view of the history and historiography of design criticism of the last 150 years, while the three following chapters provide case studies of twentieth- and twenty-first-century design criticism. Meikle reprises his self-reflexive consideration of the part words, images and objects have played in his own research and writing³ before turning to the design reformers of the nineteenth century, such as Owen Jones and William Morris. Design historians have privileged Morris’s work as a designer, design reformer and maker, but he is at least as well-known for his literary output as a poet, novelist and socialist. For Morris, words were one medium among many through which he spread his message. Meikle brings his discussion up to the present with a consideration of Design and the Elastic Mind, a recent exhibition on design and science, thereby prefiguring the treatment of exhibitions (including Design and the Elastic Mind) and the link between technology and the body presented in the final chapter of Part One.

In our second chapter, ‘Design Criticism and Social Responsibility: The Flemish Design Critic K.-N. Elno (1920–1993)’, Fredie Floré shifts the focus from the genre-level account provided by Meikle, to the oeuvre of a twentieth-century individual.⁴ Elno campaigned against the creeping dominance of consumer culture and design’s role in its reification through his writing and editorial activity, but his ultimate sanction was a self-imposed and gradual cessation of design criticism. While Floré’s chapter examines the work of one design critic, Kjetil Fallan’s case study ‘The Metamorphosis of a Norwegian Design Magazine: nye bonytt, 1968–1971’ takes a single magazine title as its focus. Both Floré and Fallan show how magazines have been the vehicle for design reform criticism harnessed to an anti-consumerist cause, with an initial burst of energy and enthusiasm ceding to an alternative approach. While Floré notes that Elno’s withdrawal from the debate left a vacuum of design criticism in Belgium which has yet to be satisfactorily filled, Fallan charts the way in which Norway’s premiere channel of professional design discourse ceded to the commercial impulse, as Bonytt reinvented itself as interior design magazine nye bonytt. Fallan does not seek to privilege a discourse aimed at professionals, or producers, over a discourse aimed at consumers, nor does he prefer a discourse aimed at the (male) designer over the (female) householder and reader of consumer magazines. Rather, like Floré, he laments the dearth of design criticism which followed Bonytt’s reinvention.

The history of design criticism collectively provided by the chapters in Part One is brought up to present with Stephen Hayward’s ‘Writing Contemporary Design into History’. Hayward’s analysis considers a rarefied group of objects which challenge definitions of ‘design’ and the affordances offered by utilitarian objects, to the extent that they are perhaps best described as ‘design/art’.⁵ Like Meikle, and the treatment of exhibitions provided by Léa-Catharine Szacka in Part Three, Hayward shows how exhibitions of design can be instrumental focal points for design debates. The exhibitions discussed in Writing Design demonstrate a range of techniques for combining word, object and image to tell a story, educate and persuade.

The chapters in this section address the development of design criticism across Western Europe and the United States. While Meikle’s and Hayward’s chapters make transatlantic comparisons, Floré and Fallan provide case studies in which design criticism is bound up with the development of national identities in Belgium and Norway, respectively. Design criticism has displayed an enduring concern to reform design, but there remains a pressing need to reform the reforming discourse of design criticism itself, especially as a response to globalization, if greater recognition is to be paid to the diversity of design practice around the world. Some worthwhile work has been undertaken in this direction, more is ongoing⁶ and—although online access is not equitably distributed throughout the developed and developing worlds—the relatively easy digital dissemination of design discourse promises much potential in this task.

NOTES

1. Both an MA in Design Writing Criticism in the School of Graphic Design at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, and an MFA in Design Criticism at the School of Visual Arts, New York, were launched in 2008. The Department of Critical Writing in Art & Design was launched at the Royal College of Art, London in October 2010 to provide MA and research degrees.

2. Anna Gerber and Teal Triggs, ‘Comment,’ Blueprint (October 2007): 80.

3. Jeffrey L. Meikle, ‘Material Virtues: On the Ideal and the Real in Design History,’ Journal of Design History 11, no. 3 (1998): 191–9.

4. In this book about words and objects, names play an important role. While Meikle’s opening chapter touches on the work of Norman Bel Geddes, a man whose name incorporates that of his wife, the subject of the second chapter—K.-N. Elno—also adopted a contraction of spousal names.

5. See Barbara Bloemink and Joseph Cunningham, eds., Design ≠ Art: Functional Objects from Donald Judd to Rachel Whiteread (New York: Merrell and Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, 2004).

6. For example, Glenn Adamson, Giorgio Riello and Sarah Teasley, eds., Global Design History (London: Routledge, 2011).

1 Writing about stuff: The Peril and Promise of Design History and Criticism

Jeffrey L. Meikle

To understand the concept of ‘writing design’ is a complex task because the phrase encompasses a multitude of motives and methods. One might interrogate how critics write about objects and environments, how designers write about work processes, how college instructors define design practice for students, how theorists contextualize material objects, or how these different verbalizations in turn shape the material world. Despite this diversity, all these discourses share a common reference point. Each engages with a fundamental gap, disjunction or transformation occurring at a single problematic meeting point—that of things and words. Once we talk or write about a specific object, it loses existential purity and becomes part of a verbal process at least two times removed from physical reality. To consider writing design requires grappling with the question of what’s at stake in translating objects into words.

Thirty years ago I published a cultural history of the industrial design profession in the United States during the Great Depression. Only later did I realize I had not actually interrogated the objects I wrote about. In fact, while researching Twentieth Century Limited, I rarely saw, touched, used or otherwise physically interacted with the material objects and environments I purported to describe, analyze and interpret. Instead, my knowledge came from monotone photographs whose purpose was to publicize products in magazines, trade journals and advertisements. Standing alone, often spot-lit as if on stage, these images reflected a cool abstraction at odds with reality. More to the point, many of the photographs came with text pasted to the back or printed underneath. It was hardly surprising that I attended to such images and paid close attention to their definitional texts because, I later realized, I had not approached my task with the object-oriented expertise of an art historian or curator. Instead, I applied techniques from training as a literary historian to analyze forgotten writings of industrial designers, advertising agents, product engineers and business executives. Despite lacking direct experience of the objects themselves, I was able, by interpreting the words of in-house memos, publicity releases and magazine articles, to reconstruct cultural metaphors and a utopian agenda shared by designers, corporate patrons and ordinary consumers. My use of literary analysis both hindered and helped, reinforcing an ironic blindness to material artefacts but enabling me to situate an emerging commercial design profession within broader cultural contexts.¹

Meditating on writing design, I realize the process of constructing verbal discourse, the placing of one word after another, differs markedly from the design process that yields material objects. The very thinking of things by a designer occurs, according to the historian Eugene Ferguson, in ‘the mind’s eye’, which he believes perceives spatially and organizes associatively in a manner not open to rational explanation.² Designers rely on visual images—sketches, elevations, isometrics and computer-generated modelling—to manipulate potential characteristics of material objects at all scales of size and complexity. Consumers and users of objects and environments rely on non-rational visual and tactile cues to navigate the world of designed objects. Few people actually engage in the difficult process of translating objects into words. I recall struggling as a novice design historian to find precise phrases for verbally representing the photographic image of an Art Deco shop’s stylized ornament. The description I came up with is forgettable, though the pain of constructing it remains vivid. A reader of my book manuscript, after confessing he could not visualize any of my descriptions of objects, complained that it would take a Zen master to penetrate them. The ‘mind’s-eye’ consciousness of a designer—non-linear, multidimensional, spatial, associational—does seem similar to the popular concept of Zen ...