1.How did we get here?

1.1 Design in crisis?

Contemporary design, as an activity, profession and materialised outcomes, appears ill-equipped to deal with issues of pressing importance. New questions are being asked of design as societies and cultures confront a globalised political, corporate and environmental agenda, encompassing global warming, pollution, scarcity of water and energy resources, poverty, social malaise and health scares. Can design rise to the challenge or is it a victim of its own success in service to industry, consumerism and a politicised global economic agenda? Has design lost its way? Rachel Cooper, editorial chair of the Design Journal, asked ‘Is design undergoing a philosophical crisis?’(Cooper, 2002) and, in the same issue, Walker (2002) examined ‘the cage of aesthetic convention’ controlling design culture.

Against the background of these questions it seems that current perceptions of design and designers are rather negative. Manufacturers perceive designers as providers of competitive advantage in product value, market share and lower unit production costs, rather than as professionals who play an overall integrative design role in the organisation and its strategic objectives (Bohemia, 2002). Fuad-Luke (2002a) referred to the debasement of the adjective ‘designer’ as it was applied to shallow political ambition, in the phrase ‘designer diplomacy’.

Today, the general public often perceives designers as mere stylists to a (rampant) consumer economy. Designers have successfully converted financial, natural, human and social capital into a new anthropocentric focus of consumerism. In doing so they have been directly responsible for a catalogue of adverse environmental and social impacts and have assisted in encouraging new consumer habits. Shopping has successfully supplanted the old faiths. In the 1980s the artist Barbara Kruger’s astute commentary “I shop therefore I am” (Kruger, 1987 untitled (Fig. 1)) revealed a sea-change in ideas of identity in the ‘developed’, Western world. Self-identity has a new set of references in the consumer world. Even art was susceptible to the forces of consumerism, as writer and critic Suzi Gablik noted in the early 1990s: ‘Our thinking about art [has become conditioned] to the point where we have become incredibly addicted to certain kinds of experience at the expense of others, such as community, for example, or ritual….Not only does the particular way of life for which we have been programmed lack any cosmic, or transpersonal dimension, but its underlying principles [have become] manic production and consumption, maximum energy flow, mind-less waste and greed’ (Cline, 1997). Subsitute ‘design’ for ‘art’ in Gablik’s commentary and the critique outlines core problems with the current design paradigm. Designers, and all those who call their efforts ‘design’, urgently need to examine their role in the early 21st century. How can design deliver more sustainable patterns of production and consumption together with improvements in quality of life for humans and co-existent life forms?

Figure 1. untitled Barbara Kruger 1987

How did design arrive at its current state of affairs?  Design has fulfilled many roles since the emergence of the consumer era in the 1950s.  Hauffe (1998) believes that the history of design and of culture are inter-twined and illustrates Küthe/Thun’s 1995 model for design and society (Fig 2.). He suggests that design history is a record of the forms of life and dominates the history of cultural development (including technical, economic, aesthetic, social, psychological and ecological aspects). Today design in the ‘developed’ world, and parts of the ‘developing’ world, finds itself serving a ‘society of satiety’. In this society Hauffe claims that self-presentation and experiential design are perhaps beginning to find a voice in the culture of design, albeit against the dominant corporate culture within design. Hauffe presents the model as linear, but in the context of ‘developed’ or ‘developing’ countries it is clearly possible that a number of ‘societies’ and ‘design models’ can operate concurrently.

What is also clear is that modernist, organic, post-modern, or any other doctrine with a recognisable semiotics, is easily subverted in the service of industry and to the glory of consumerism and economic progress.  A case in point is the Italian manufacturer Alessi SpA, a manufacturer that intelligently contributed to and, simultanteously, manipulated the post-modern debate in the late 1980s to mid-1990s to create new markets for an emerging ‘cognoscenti’ of ultra design-conscious consumers.  At the same time global corporations created lifestyle products in a pot-pouri of historical, retro and contemporary styles. Style, masquerading as design, is still the great enabler, sequentially packaging the latest technology in new guises in order to sell the next generation of products.  Corporate ambition, encouraged by the capitalist political doctrine, continues to ensure that inbuilt obsolescence, the touchstone of industrial design, keeps producers producing, consumers consuming and designers designing.

Design, and designers, have risen to the challenges of the industrial, consumer and knowledge economies, as envisaged by Murray (Fig 3), but in doing so design remains a lackey to economic ambition and so finds itself in a philisophical and creative cul-de-sac.

Figure 2. A model for design and society, adapted from Künthe/Thun, 1995 from p19, Hauffe, Thomas (1998) Design, A concise histor


Figure 3. Seven Ages of Man, from Murray, Will (2000) Brand Storm

©2004, 2005 Alastair Fuad-Luke. All rights reserved.