1.3 The current design paradigm

Today, design is the dutiful servant of technological, economic and political interests in almost every area of manufacturing and construction. The products of consumption range from packaging for food to electronic goods, automobiles and leisure equipment. Even today’s new housing is informed by and designed within a vision driven by short-term economic goals. The offspring of this design paradigm are billions of products and buildings, most destined to lead very short lives in order to stimulate (replacement) production. This roller coaster of production is partly driven by an unswerving belief in economic growth as a given cultural good.  The flow of production is encouraged by Moore’s Law, originating in the computer industry, which states that every eighteen months there is a doubling of computing power or halving of price. Moore’s Law has come to dominate strategic corporate thinking and preceptions governing success in the marketplace.  This leads everyone into short-term thinking and short product life cycles leading to a cultural sense of a world speeding up. Brand (1999) shows that Moore’s Law actually results in exponential growth, a phenomenon better known as ‘very rapid change’, to which most humans do not take kindly.

Design is accelerating real and cultural perceptions of the rate of change. Designers are the willing translators of technological concepts and prototypes into desirable, marketable products.  This paradigm of industrial design dominates thinking in the entire design domain (product design, architecture, landscape design, graphic design, textile design).  It was first developed by Raymond Lowey and his contemporaries in the 1930s to enable the USA to create economic growth.  Here was a fundamental shift from the concept of product durability, products designed and built to last a lifetime, to product ephemerality based upon the marketplace and the creation of economic growth through an orchestrated psychological shift from perceived consumer needs into consumer wants/desires.  Psychologists such as Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, were engaged in government ‘think tanks’ whose raison d’etre was to ensure the American people became good consumers leaving the business of governing the country to those who knew best.  Consumerism emerged as the new way of living from the 1950s onwards and went global somewhere in the 1960s when television, yet another consumer product, ensured a communication design channel par excellence for increasing consumption through advertising.

The deep-rooted effects of consumerism on society at large, and design culture, is marked.  Guy Julier (2000) notes that the current culture of design is dominated by the belief that consumers construct their identity primarily from the products that they buy. Today, the way we perceive ourselves is often inextricably linked to our material world of technologically designed consumer goods.  The realm of consumption has even pervaded how we design buildings, houses and spaces and how we spend our leisure time.  Such a culture has created a dominant design paradigm which Alain Findeli (2001) lamblasts as inadequate for the education of new design graduates since it merely replicates the status quo, rather than seeking to find ways of evolving design to meet contemporary needs and challenges.  Findeli sees the current design paradigm as being underlain with a metaphysics of materialism, limited by positivistic methods of enquiry (problem:solution) and as having an agnosticist, dualistic worldview. To quote Findeli, “Design was summoned to absorb the shock of industrialization, and to soften its devastating consequences upon the cultural web, in other words, to make industrialized products culturally – socially, economically, symbolically and practically – acceptable.  Aesthetics was then its privileged rhetorical tool, followed by ergonomics in the mid-twentieth century, and semiotics (i.e. aesthetics again) in the late-twentieth century.  But its almost unique field of actitity has remained the material product; manufactured by mechanical, electrical and/or electronic industries.” Design’s role is nowadays confined to the aisles of hypermarkets, glossy magazines, shop windows and our homes, a vast sea of banal commerciality.  In the post-modern emotional style fiesta of the late 1980s Claudia Donà noted that ‘we live in a world overflowing with our own productions, a world in which objects beseige us, suffocate us, and very often distance us from one another both physically and mentally…..they make us forget how to feel, to touch, to think.  Accustomed to living in a uniform light, we have grown oblivious of the shadows and fearful of the dark’ (Donà, 1988). Plus ça change in the 1990s, although the global brands have added yet more sophistication in blending the semiotics of design retro and last month’s fashion in equal measure to sell ironic, faux, and pastiche products.  The style game gained another layer of complexity.

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