D is for Design - B is for Bauhaus, Y is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World from A to Z (2015)

B is for Bauhaus, Y is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World from A to Z (2015)

I went to a school that was both theatrical and sporty. Lacking proficiency in either field, I took to spending my free periods in the library as a self-defence strategy. It was there, through the writings of Reyner Banham in the long-defunct weekly magazine New Society, that I discovered design for the first time. I was meant to be reading the key text for my A level in art history, Nikolaus Pevsner’s Pioneers of Modern Design. It struck me as slightly musty. By comparison, Banham, once a student of Pevsner, seemed like an electrifying literary stylist. He had a way of putting half-formed thoughts that had already occurred to me into words with a sharpness and wit that made an indelible impression. I remember that he once described the clipboard as the ‘power plank’. He was pointing out that the meanings of an object sometimes go beyond what its designer intended. He seemed to be offering a new way of looking at things: a modern way of understanding the modern world.

Banham could claim as his greatest achievement his transformation of the conventional Anglo-Saxon view of the modern movement. He demonstrated the significance of figures as far apart as the Russian Constructivists and the Italian Rationalists, who had previously been excluded from the usual narrative of mainstream twentieth-century architecture. In so doing, of course, he made room for himself as a new critical voice to supplant his predecessors.

In the 1950s he was one of the first to discover the work of Peter and Alison Smithson, the so-called Brutalists responsible for two of Britain’s most internationally celebrated buildings of the time: a school in Hunstanton, a steel-and-glass evocation of Mies van der Rohe’s Chicago, mysteriously transplanted to Norfolk; and the Economist tower, a travertine slab just off St James’s in London. Banham championed Cedric Price, architect of the aviary at London Zoo, for his pragmatism. For Price, every building was out of date by the time it was finished. Banham was attracted by what he saw as the Smithsons’ sceptical view of monumentality. Later on, he was clearly disappointed by the reluctance of his protégés to conform to his idea of what made architecture culturally relevant. He turned his attention to the young Norman Foster, who was capable, in those days, of telling potential clients that the answer to their needs might not be to build anything at all. Most unsettlingly of all for those who took a conventional view of architectural aesthetics, Foster spoke of his admiration for the maverick visionary Buckminster Fuller and his geodesic domes.

As time has passed, design history has emerged as an academic subject, somewhere between cultural studies and social anthropology, a shift that I don’t find particularly appealing. But design keeps changing shape, which is why it matters. The clearest, but still not entirely satisfactory, way to define design is through its relationship with mass production. Some objects were mass-produced far earlier than the late eighteenth century, when the Industrial Revolution is conventionally understood to have started - coins, amphorae, Venetian galleys, bullets and arrows, for example - suggesting that design has a longer history than is sometimes claimed. But these exceptions apart, before the coming of the factory system, there was an intimate connection between the maker of an object and its user. Industrialization broke that link, and created the role of the designer in its modern sense. Now that the kind of factory where rolls of sheet steel go in at one end and completed cars come out at the other has gone, design has not disappeared, but it is being redefined once again.

Before the Industrial Revolution, a skilful craftsman could create a piece of furniture shaped to accommodate the individual needs of a specific user. He could craft a weapon for a left-handed swordsman, or make a piece of farm equipment tailored to the particular landscape in which it would be used. Objects made in this way existed in the mind of the maker before they took on physical shape. They were based on inherited forms and skills. A craftsman could make a chair working from a combination of memory and intuition. Just as a skilled cook does not need to follow a pre-planned recipe, or a musician can play an instrument without being able to read music, the craftsman does not need a drawing or a prototype to test his intentions. Such a process arguably does not involve anything that can be called design, or if it does, it is the synthesis of designing and making into one single seamless process that is closer to craft than to design. For more elaborate projects - a suit of ceremonial armour with an inlaid, elaborately figured breastplate, never intended to be used in battle, commissioned for the start of a new campaign, perhaps; a set of silver candlesticks to make a wedding dowry; or the baptistry doors for Florence’s cathedral - it was different. In such circumstances the commission might involve an artist as well as a craftsman.

The artist’s role was to provide the creative direction through drawings, or ‘designs’, that could be used to guide a network of makers who would physically carry out work to create pieces with a cultural ambition that less elaborate vernacular objects lacked. Such ‘designers’ were often engaged in a range of creative activities from art to architecture, by way of sculpture. They were commissioned to transform functional objects, to embellish them, and so to give them symbolic significance. Such objects could be used in a ceremonial or ritual sense, to mark a marriage, a diplomatic alliance, as a memorial, or simply as a display of wealth and status.

From the perspective of the decorative arts the relationship between maker, user and artist continues to define the essential nature of design. It is the spark that brings skill to life. But although Lorenzo Ghiberti, the goldsmith, sculptor and architect, and rediscoverer of the lost-wax casting process that was used to make the baptistry doors, can also be called a designer, looking at his working methods and ideas does not offer much help in understanding the rather different version of design now practised by Jonathan Ive at Apple, say.

When mass production severed the connection between maker and user, design started to take on meanings other than those given it by the decorative arts. Design became an assertion of modernity.

It was mass production that demanded the emergence of a new role for an individual who came to be called the designer, an individual who was not the physical maker of an object, any more than a contemporary architect is a stonemason or a carpenter or a mixer of concrete, even if their profession has its roots in these craft skills. Art too has moved in this direction, as so many artists sever any connection between art as a conceptual idea and art as the physical realization of that conception.

The factory system required the marshalling of sufficient information from the designer to define a design in enough detail for the object to be made efficiently. That is to say, it needed the drawings, or designs, that represent an object before it exists. The system also requires an understanding of how an object will be manufactured. This understanding may come from the production engineer, or it may come from a challenge by a designer who has an instinctive predisposition to ask why something cannot be done rather than to accept the limitations of a method. In either case, a prototype will be made before a production version.

The designer was needed to give a definitive form to the new categories of object that industry was inventing, and to give them a character that would persuade consumers to buy them. It became the role of the designer to create the signs that could make an object look and feel valuable enough to justify its price, and to give those objects a sense of gender when considered appropriate. A hairdryer or a razor aimed at male users, for example, could be made to look different from similar devices aimed at women. The stereotypes are insultingly obvious: soft and rounded forms are supposedly feminine. Objects aimed at men are given aggressive forms, and hard materials. The designer was also required to make an object intelligible, to equip it with the signals that communicated its purpose to a user, and the way in which to put it to use.

Vestiges of an older relationship between maker and user still linger, in the shape of a tailor-made suit for which tape measure, chalk and thread chart out the pattern for a set of clothes that will shape the perception of an individual. A similar connection is to be found in the work of those jewellers who make to individual order. It is much the same in the furnishings of a house for a wealthy patron, or in the continuing appeal of the limited edition. Such work is based on skill and expertise. In the past, this was built up often over several generations, passing from one to the next through the process of an apprenticeship, or of folk memories. The pace of change is much quicker now and the range of materials and techniques available to makers has expanded enormously.

Craft, presented rightly or wrongly as the outcome of a constant process of modest refinement, of one generation building on the precedents defined by their predecessors, was effectively contrasted by John Ruskin and William Morris - who inspired the Arts and Crafts movement - with the shallow industrial pursuit of lifeless novelty made possible by machinery.

In fact craft has its egotistical aspects too. To call yourself a craftsman or a maker is not to amputate the ego. Dale Chihuly’s ubiquitous and unnecessarily energetic art glass, or John Makepeace’s furniture, is as signature driven as Philippe Starck’s designs, and is neither modest nor anonymous. And that is true of every generation. It seems unlikely that, let’s say, a virtuoso goldsmith such as Jacques Bilivert from sixteenth-century Delft, known for his work with Bernardo Buontalenti on a lapis lazuli vase, or Roger Fry and the amateurs of the Omega Workshops, or an eighteenth-century English cabinetmaker such as Thomas Malton were any more reticent about their accomplishments, no matter how much William Morris might have wished the contrary.

The emergence of industrial design in the modern sense has done a lot to weaken the practice of craft. When craft skills lose their practical underpinnings and become the preserve of the self-conscious craftsman, or maker as they now call themselves, rather than the traditional artisan, the urge for self-expression pushes once functional objects into baroque excess. Potters now make vases that can no longer hold flowers; bookbinders bind books that cannot be read. Look at the glasswork of a Chihuly, and you may see skill, but very little in the way of taste. Such objects bring home the sense that without the intelligence of design to provide a template for an object, skill by itself is not sufficient to produce a convincing object. Without the intelligence of design, craft has become a cultural backwater. Skills have migrated to different areas: the fibreglass pattern cutters at the McLaren car-building plant, the blades of a turbofan jet engine, the toolmakers for the presses that mass produce castings.

Skill is an accomplishment that enjoys an uncertain status. The fact that something can be done at all may be impressive, but it is the use to which a skill is put that really counts. And it is this distinction that accounts for the continuing insecurity of craft’s position. There were two currents to the twentieth-century’s rediscovery of its craft traditions. One, which paralleled the folk-music revival, was about the preservation of threatened traditions. The other was the sense that for craft to remain vital it had to reinvent itself, to innovate in form and materials. The former was the less problematic approach. It depended on the acquisition of the requisite skills, and could then rely on the formal archetypes developed by tradition. Innovation was more troublesome. It required more than the skills to turn wood, weave baskets, shape porcelain or chase metal; it also needed the conceptual intelligence and the formal perceptions to be able to put the skill to work in an appropriate or creative way.

The most pressing issue for the contemporary crafts is the way in which visual imaginations have been shaped by the industrial world. When we are accustomed to the forms that injection-moulded plastic or pressure casting make possible, there is a sense in which they have shaped our visual imagination, and it is hard not to see handwork through the same filter. These precedents provide a repertory of forms and materials that easily come to overshadow the possibilities of a craft maker, even if the materials and the tools he has to work with are unsuited to them. In the 1970s, the tensions between design and craft became more complex. When art schools started to produce more industrial designers than Britain’s shrinking industrial base could possibly support, some of those graduates put their skills to work to produce objects in small numbers or batches in their own workshops, as a survival strategy. They were careful to emphasize that what they were doing could not be described as craft. They had been trained to do something else, and to understand that there were negative connotations to the word ‘craft’. This was noticeable in how they looked to find ways to achieve the physical quality of machine-made production given that they had no means of investing in the costly tools on which true mass production depends.

It was what Jasper Morrison began to do as a student, when he put together a pair of salvaged bicycle handlebars, a piece of wood and a glass disc to create a table. And at the Royal College of Art, he made a series of wing-nut chairs and tables using the techniques and materials used for manufacturing laundry baskets. It was a strategy caught in the cracks between art and design and craft. For some it became an end in itself, for others it was a stepping stone.

David Redhead’s exhibition in 2001 at the Crafts Council had the succinct and suggestive title ‘Industry of One’. It perfectly captured the curious history of the relationship between ‘making’ and ‘designing’. Making is intimately connected with skill, but design is, or ought to be, about ideas. There is in the word ‘craft’ a sense of defending traditions threatened by industrialization, yet also of connoisseurship. Craft continually oscillates between the impulse to reinvent, to innovate and to safeguard; while design has been seen as both a threat and an opportunity.

Few designers have had a closer acquaintance with this dichotomy than Konstantin Grcic. He began by studying at the John Makepeace School for Craftsmanship in Wood at Parnham in Dorset. Grcic remembers the gradual transition from seeing the world from the perspective of a workshop to that of a studio. To be a maker, to use the word ‘craft’, is in some senses to take an oppositional stance to the world around you. It is to question the values of mass production, and your place in the world that it brought into being. When Grcic arrived at Parnham, a school that could be understood as the last gasp of an arts and crafts tradition that had seen semi-utopian communities taking to the Cotswolds and the backwoods for the better part of a century, Grcic had that view, and then lost it. As he puts it, after a while at Parnham,

‘even the word “making” turned into design. It includes the question of what you make, how you make it and who you make it for. It was a process. At the same time, I discovered the history of design and the work of certain designers and began to understand the larger picture. Design evolved from manufacturing, from craft and small industry. It could not be a local craftsman who drew the chair he would build. It became more complex and specialized, whether it is furniture or the more sophisticated varieties of industrial design or services. But in the end the idea of design always comes from the reality of making, it’s not just a theory.

‘Design can be a form of creative self-expression. That’s the way I work, it is what distinguishes design offices like mine from the ones that have a more pragmatic approach. We don’t just offer a service to somebody who needs a product. We can add something extra. Authorship is part of good design, it’s something that we appreciate. It’s what we want in a product. A design may be good in how it functions, but it isn’t interesting unless it has something that makes it appealing. Only the design can give that quality, whether or not you know the name of the person who did it.

‘Design is an added value. Maybe that means the price is higher. It certainly is sometimes used in a cynical way, and people do sometimes mistrust it. A “designer” something does not stand for more quality, it is perceived as a marketing trick or as fooling us. I am not sure what the way out of this problem is. Design should still be a signature, but one that represents quality.

‘There are no “non” designed products. But look at the ones where you can see that someone has sat down and tried to be original. At their best, they are reassessing, refining and rethinking - taking an object on to another level. Design can be anonymous but still represent real development. Designed products are the best ones. It’s interesting how “design” has lost credibility in the product design sector, but in services we use technology design to create credibility. You design a timetable to be more reliable. In this context, design still means something. It stands for all the virtues, somebody is trying to improve things, to make them more efficient, that is how I see design.’

Design is not sculpture, although it does have a formal aspect. It is a discipline that has had much of its ideology shaped by architects, which is curious because the essence of architecture must be an interest in space. Designers have different concerns. But the two do have important things in common, which are used for similar ends, to create a sense of identity, to convey a message. This can be, at its most blatant, to give objects sales appeal, to make them appear novel and desirable.

But design is now increasingly about the need to create an experience. The sequence of questions that you are asked in order to identify yourself when calling a credit-card company. The means by which you cast your vote. The way in which you check into a hotel. The way that you pay for a mobile phone, the deliberate obscurity of the tariffs you are offered, these are all examples of experience design.

And while design has been defined by mass production, the way in which the world is making things is also in rapid transition. The system of factories, the role of the designer and the technology of tooling, they are all vanishing. The impact of digital fabrication and the process commonly described as printing will radically change the way in which things are designed and made. Sooner or later, a small box in the living room, or the shed, will have the power to allow an owner to select a design for almost anything and produce it for themselves. It’s hard to imagine this as a way to produce a chair or a laptop, but it is already the way in which America’s aircraft carriers replace spare parts while at sea. Elon Musk, the entrepreneur behind the Tesla electric sports car, is determined to manufacture cars in this way.

When this does become the norm, design will undergo another change of direction, one that will have consequences even more far-reaching in their impact than the coming of the factories.