Design Culture

Design loves a depression?

Last week, Michael Cannell wrote in the New York Times that design was getting its come-uppance. Too big for its britches, Cannell suggested. A little, how shall we say it…frivolous.

Straight out of the gate, Cannell seems steamed; there’s a cynical, hostile chip on his shoulder, but what’s it really all about? Opening the article, Cannell says, “Few of the arts benefited from the late economic boom more than design. After all, when the wealth is flowing, people don’t covet the concerts you see or the books you read. They covet the couch you bought, and then they buy a cooler one.”

But Cannell seems to come to the table with some rather peculiar assumptions. Is it true, for example, that when “the wealth is flowing” people automatically engage in cool couch competitions? And if that is so today, has that always been the case? Does affluence mean, automatically, a decrease in interest in what the wealthy folks read and see? Would a decrease in wealth mean that a bookish turn to the world of ideas is just around the corner?

And most importantly, when did design sneak into the world of the “arts?” Just a few lines later, he points out angrily that certain furniture was selling “for the kind of prices more often found in the art world.” That sort of price encroachment is bound to get certain folks jittery, but for a design writer to evince this level of disgruntlement speaks to a deep ambivalence within the design community about design itself. Cannell thinks “excessive” pricing must speak to “excessive” design. Offering righteous indignation, he points to a party given by the Dutch designer Marcel Wanders to showcase his latest lamps. During the festivities, Wanders’ girlfriend, Nanine Linning, “hung upside down half-naked while mixing vodka drinks from bottles affixed to a chandelier.” The only palliative, Cannell suggests, is to reinfuse design and designers with a puritanical austerity and an attendant humbling of pricing structures.

It seems Cannell is saying that only “art” can lay claim to inexplicably astronomical prices, even though fine art itself is often irrelevant in today’s world . Design is topical and relevant; it touches our lives every day and yet “arty” pretense in design is considered to be beyond functionality, therefore deplorable. Marcel Wanders’ party may have been frivolous, but the lamps still work. There’s no shortage of functionality there. But what must the artists be thinking? Creators of functionless, irrelevant work upstaged by designers, their girlfriends and their outsized lamps. And that was when times were good. Seems like designers are having all the fun, and Cannell, schoolmarmishly, wants no more of it.

He’s not happy, either, with the notion of designers loudly laying claim to their creations. Why should we know Rem or Phillipe, alongside their works? Who do they think they are? Bono? Oddly, Cannell conflates bang-on trend designers with those who are interested in the questions of our day, even though one would think of it is his job to suss out the difference between the two. One can hardly trumpet, as he did, S, M, L, XL as a paragon of excess (except in its intellectual scope and breadth) when it nearly bankrupted the graphic designer who put the book together.

Hoping that designers and the objects they create “come down a notch or two” is an odd wish, since Target and Ikea, by Cannell’s own admission, have already “democratized” design. What he apparently wants, as designers make their descent, is a more focused application of principles of sustainability to the things we make.“ One way or another, design will focus less on styling consumer objects with laser-cut patterns and colored resin and more on the intelligent reworking of current conditions,” he says. “Expect to hear a lot more about open-source design, and cradle-to-cradle, a concept developed by William McDonough and Michael Braungart that calls for cars, packaging and other everyday objects to be designed specifically for recycling so that their parts and materials are used and reused without waste.” In his focus on sustainability, Cannell is on target.

What Cannell misses here, however is that “frivolity”—colored resin, or laser-cut patterns— and cradle-to-cradle manufacturing can exist simultaneously in the same object. Droog Collective—with whom Wanders worked during the late 90s, and is not known for their austere design—developed a biogradable outdoor seat called “Garden Bench” in 1999; other “name” designers are also at the forefront of sustainable design even today. Consumption, as we’ve noted elsewhere, in this blog, is not the problem, per se. It’s waste. And a sustainable object does not have to have functionality as its primary motivation. A plate or a chandelier (with or without the half-naked bartender) can be produced with cradle-to-cradle manufacturing methods and still fulfill the designer’s aesthetic goals, austere or not.

It’s shocking, actually, how incoherent Cannell’s commentary is. As the former House and Home editor at the New York Times, one expects more due diligence and logical consistency. Scattered thoughts like his aren’t out of place in the comments section of a blog, but are surprising in one of the nation’s premier newspapers. The irony of Cannell’s functionalist claim for design is his ideological, irrational and inconsistent approach to his topic.

Part of the purpose of the design is to convince us of the merits of sustainability. Design can integrate the object made with cradle-to-cradle in mind seamlessly into our lives, improving and informing the experience of our day-to-day activities. Making the stuff that surrounds us shouldn’t lead to the decimation of our surroundings. Design leads the people with both the carrot and the stick. Fortunately, we don’t have to be so sober while we do it.

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© 2009 k. kanan design news and commentary.