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26/3/2014 Frieze Magazine | Archive | What Is Design?

http://www.frieze.com/issue/print_article/what-is-design/ 1/6

What Is Design?

An agent of change, from prehistory to today

If any museum is equipped to interrogate contemporary

design, it should be the Stedelijk in Amsterdam. The

architectural dbacle of its giant bathtub of an extension

aside, its design credentials are impeccable. Not only is the

Stedelijk blessed with one of Europes finest modern design

collections, its intellectual commitment to design is rooted in

the directorship of Willem Sandberg from 1945 until 1962.

Originally a typography designer, Sandberg proved so

productive a director that he makes Nicholas Serota seem

slack: while establishing the Stedelijk as an avant-garde

champion and one of the most influential art museums of the

era, he somehow found time to design hundreds of posters

and catalogues. Why then, when it came to choosing the

subject of its first major design exhibition since reopening

last year, did a museum with so rich a design history plump

for Marcel Wanders?

Not that Wanders is inconsequential. He is among the most

commercially successful designers of our time and a canny

entrepreneur who has given sorely needed help to younger

designers by manufacturing their work at Moooi, the

furniture company he co-founded

in Amsterdam. But Wanders is an old-fashioned showman,

whose cartoonishly styled objects, often exaggerated in size

or shape, and fondness for publicity stunts (from sporting a

clownish red nose in photographs to throwing a party at the

Milan Furniture Fair at which

his barely dressed girlfriend topped up glasses and fed him

grapes while suspended from a chandelier) have made him a

natural successor to Philippe Starck as a paparazzi-friendly

design stylist.

In other words, Wanderss work has much to tell us about the

consumerist frenzy that has prompted Beijing real-estate

developers to use his bric--brac as marketing props to flog

stratospherically priced condos, but does little to enlighten

us about the more complex and challenging aspects of design

culture that might be expected to concern a museum of the

Stedelijks stature. Its choice is all the more baffling given the

plethora of Dutch designers (Jurgen Bey, Irma Boom and

Hella Jongerius, to name but three) whose work shares the

intellectual dynamism of Steve McQueen, Paulina Olowska,

Lawrence Weiner and other artists who have exhibited there

since the bathtubs construction.

About this article

Published on 20/03/14

By Alice Rawsthorn

Willem Sandbergs poster for the

exhibition Bart Van Der Leck,

1949, at the Stedelijk Museum,

Amsterdam. Courtesy: Stedelijk

Museum, Amsterdam

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So, why did the Stedelijk pick Wanders? The glum truth

appears to be that, despite Sandbergs legacy, the museum

does not apply the same critical standards to design as to art.

Sadly, there is no shortage of artists whose work is as showy,

slick and commercially successful as his, but the Stedelijk

has not championed them. Not that it is the only cultural

institution to fail to treat design with due seriousness. But by

doing so the Stedelijk has missed a valuable opportunity to

critique design at a transformational time when it is poised to

play an increasingly diverse and meaningful role in our lives:

a process that any intellectually ambitious institution should

relish the chance to explore. Had the Stedelijk risen to the

challenge as New Yorks Museum of Modern Art, and z33

in the Belgian city

of Hasselt have done thanks to the curatorial ingenuity of

Paola Antonelli and Jan Boelen respectively, and the Victoria

& Albert Museum in London promises to do courtesy of

Kieran Longs new contemporary design team what exactly

would it be exploring?

Design has, after all, donned so many different guises

throughout history that it has forsaken any hope of clarity.

Indeed, it has acquired so many different meanings at

different times and in different contexts, often mutually

contradictory ones, that it has emerged as a slippery and

elusive phenomenon, prey to muddles and clichs.

The process of design existed long before a word was coined

to describe it. Whenever human beings have tried to change

any part of their lives starting with prehistoric men and

women moulding lumps of clay into drinking vessels, or

sharpening the heads of spears to make them deadlier

weapons they engaged with design, instinctively and

unknowingly. For centuries, design was practised in the same

intuitive manner. Many military conquerors owed their

triumphs to unsung design coups, like the insistence of Qin

Shi Huang, the first Emperor of China, that each of his

archers be equipped with bows and arrows of identical

dimensions in the 3rd century bce. Up until then, the size and

shape of such weapons had varied so greatly that if an archer

exhausted his own arrows he could not fire his comrades

spares from his bow, or vice versa. Standardizing their design

solved that problem, making Qin Shi Huangs forces

formidably efficient, far more so than their foes.

Unheralded design feats also fuelled economic success. By

the late 15th century, Venice was the wealthiest and most

sophisticated city in Europe with an empire stretching almost

to Milan in the west, and across the sea to Cyprus in the east.

Much of its power stemmed from the Arsenale, which was

hailed as the worlds most efficient manufacturing complex,

thanks to the visionary design of the system of prefabricating

battleships and weaponry that the Venetians had been

developing since the 10th century. Design was also an

indispensable resource for people in peril, like the Catholic

priests who tried to evade persecution in 16th century



England by hiding in the priests holes constructed inside

paneled walls and chimney breasts by an unusually ingenious

carpenter, Nicholas Owen. He also transformed pivoting

floorboards into doors, and installed cunningly concealed

trapdoors through which food and drink could be passed to

the fugitives.

By the late 18th century, similar processes were being

applied, knowingly and systematically, by pioneering

industrialists, like the Staffordshire potter Josiah

Wedgwood, to manufacture huge quantities of goods of

consistent quality in newly built factories. From the early

19th century onwards, the practice of design was formalized

and professionalized with the introduction of training

programmes, specialist schools, classifications and

methodologies. Not that the intuitive approach was forgotten

entirely, at least not by radicals like Lszl Moholy-Nagy,

whose vision of design was crystalized in the title of a 1947

essay Design is not a profession but an attitude; or by the

environmentalist R. Buckminster Fuller, who devoted much

of the 1960s and 70s to trying to mobilize a global

movement of comprehensive designers that, he hoped,

would forsake commercialism to devote their skills to

forging a sustainable and productive future for mankind.

Yet despite their efforts (Fuller delivered 42 hours of

lectures at the Pennsylvania Bell Telephone Studios in

Philadelphia during January 1975 to argue his case) design

continued to be seen predominantly in its industrial guise as

a commercial discipline, practised by trained professionals

acting under instruction, typically from their clients or

employers. This stereotype was reinforced by much of the

late 20th century critical discourse on design. The essays of

Reyner Banham, Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard were

chiefly concerned with its relationship to commerce and

consumerism, as were the most thoughtful artist critiques,

such as the works of Richard Hamilton, currently included in

his Tate Modern retrospective. For many, designs impact

on society was summed up by the ibm executive Thomas J.

Watson Jnr. in a 1973 lecture with the axiom: good design is

good business. At its best, say in Charles and Ray Eames

educational films for ibm, the Castiglioni brothers lighting

for Flos and (Hamiltons favourites) Dieter Ramss electronic

products for Braun, the commercial approach to design was

not only good business but enhanced millions of peoples

lives. Weaker design projects achieved nothing of the sort,

and bear much of the blame for the popular misconception

that design is principally a styling tool, something that

Wanderss exhibition at the Stedelijk does little to dispel.



Promotional image for the exhibition Marcel Wanders:

Pinned Up at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 2014.

Courtesy: Marcel Wanders

Yet in all of its multiplicitous guises, design has had one

unwavering role as an agent of change that can help to ensure

that developments of any sort scientific, technological,

cultural, political, economic or environmental are

interpreted in ways that will be benevolent, not damaging.

This was as true of the prehistoric approach to design, as it

was of Qin Shi Huangs, Wedgwoods, Moholy-Nagys, the

Eameses or Wanderss. And it is thanks to designs ability to

turn perplexing, potentially destructive changes to our

advantage that it is now becoming a more potent and

expansive force.

The crux of designs transformation is the resurgence of its

original incarnation as an instinctive process of

resourcefulness and ingenuity that can be applied to such

diverse situations as devising more effective, less expensive

systems of delivering social services or cleaner, safer ways of

managing a citys waste, as well as fulfilling its traditional

functions, such as ensuring that advances in technology are

given constructive applications, rather than being used to

produce, say, unregulated and undetectable 3d-printed guns.

Take the rapidly expanding field of social design. Once, a

designers role in tackling intractable problems like

unemployment, homelessness and the ageing crisis was

limited to producing leaflets or websites explaining what

social scientists, economists, psychologists and other

specialists had decided to do about them. Now, social

designers in groups like Participle in the uk and Project H in

the us are working alongside them by applying their



research, visualization and communication skills to help to

shape the decisions.

Humanitarian designers are adopting a similar approach to

repairing the damage caused by natural and manmade

disasters, and enabling the underprivileged majority of the

global population to escape poverty. Sustainable designers

are developing new ways of arresting the environmental

crisis, and helping us to live more responsibly. Conceptual

designers like Julia Lohmann, Christien Meindertsma and

Studio Formafantasma are deploying the design process as

a medium of research and intellectual enquiry, thereby

helping us to make sense of the world, as artists have

traditionally done, from Hamiltons studies of late 20th

century material culture, to recent works by Ed Atkins,

Omer Fast, Camille Henrot, Helen Marten and Wolfgang

Tillmans.

Designers are now able to work so diversely partly because

digital technology has given them the necessary tools to do

so. By financing projects through crowdfunding and using

social media to raise awareness of them, they have liberated

themselves from their commercial roles to pursue their

political, environmental, ethical and cultural concerns on an

entrepreneurial basis. They have also benefited from the

readiness of other disciplines to experiment with design,

partly because many of the 20th-century methods of dealing

with complex social and economic challenges are now

deemed unfit for purpose.

Not that all of the new design endeavours have been

successful. Humanitarian design is proving to be as much of

an ideological minefield as every other area of economic

development, with projects imploding amid accusations of

incompetence, corruption and misguided do-goodery.

Sustainable design is equally contentious; and even some of

the most productive exercises in social design have been

bedeviled by sudden political changes, like the uks public

funding cuts, which have had a devastating effect on the

ability of local authorities to deliver even the most adroitly

designed services. As for conceptual design, it would benefit

from rigorous critique, as would the work of artists exploring

similar concerns.

Museums can make a useful contribution to this process by

challenging, analyzing and contextualizing design in its old

incarnations, and the new. It is in all of our interests that they

do so at a time of daunting changes, unprecedented in speed

and scale: from the deepening environmental crisis and the

need to replace dysfunctional social and political systems, to

the struggle to make sense of a world of remote-controlled

warfare, driverless cars and digital invasions of personal

privacy from which many once-familiar things

are disappearing. Design is not a panacea for any of these

issues, but it is a powerful tool with which to address them, if

it is applied wisely: which is why there are so many more

important aspects of design for an institution like the



Stedelijk to address than Marcel Wanderss knick-knacks.

Alice Rawsthorn

Alice Rawsthorn writes about design for The International

New York Times and is the author of Hello World: Where

Design Meets Life (2013). She lives in London, uk.

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