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

To the touch, Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby’s snow-white mohair-wool cushion has the innocence of a soft toy soothing an anxious child back to sleep from a waking nightmare. At first glance, it seems to come as close as designers can ever get to giving an object the more appealing characteristics of a domestic pet. But look at its shape, and another, far from innocent aspect becomes apparent.

The cushion’s silhouette has the unmistakable form of a mushroom cloud, taken from that troubling series of photographic images of atomic tests carried out in the atmosphere in the 1950s that summed up a particular moment in history. In the increasingly desperate climate of the Cold War years, nuclear armageddon looked imminent, overshadowing every journey to school or the supermarket with a sense of unfocused but profound dread. Was this going to be the night that the horizon, lit by yellow sodium street lights, boiled with hot clouds of radioactive vapour and dust? The question was continually, distractingly, on the edge of conscious thought.

Dunne and Raby made their reputation teaching design at the Royal College of Art in London. Huggable Atomic Mushroom, as it is titled, has a hemispherical domed seat, and beneath it, impaled on a slender stalk, is a second corona-like disc forming a kind of skirt. Experts describe this as a condensation ring. William Butler Yeats, who used the words ‘a terrible beauty is born’ in his commemoration of Dublin’s Easter Rising in 1916, might have put it better. There were other versions in different fabrics, colours and sizes.

There are several possible ways to understand this object. Despite its title, it might be considered as just another piece of mute furniture, an ottoman stool to be compared with all the other stools in the same category, on the basis of comfort, looks and price. It might be regarded as a piece of extraordinarily offensive kitsch, like one of those inflatable representations of Munch’s screaming figure that seeks to make a novelty from the unspeakably tragic.

Is it an example of the current wave of objects that take the form of design but ask to be treated as art? Or do you take Dunne and Raby at their word when they suggest that ‘Huggable Atomic Mushrooms are for people afraid of nuclear annihilation.’ They claim that the basis for the stool is in the clinical treatments devised to treat various kinds of phobias, inoculating sufferers against their fears by subjecting them bit by bit to limited exposure to unthreatening doses of snakes, spiders or air travel.

Their cushions come in a range of sizes. ‘Which Huggable Mushroom you might need to buy depends on the size of your fear.’ The cushion emerged as one of a number of objects that were produced for a project conceived as ‘designs for fragile personalities in anxious times’. As they put it, the project ‘focused on irrational but real anxieties such as the fear of alien abduction or nuclear annihilation. Rather than ignoring them, as most design does, or amplifying them to create paranoia, we treated their phobias as though they were perfectly reasonable and designed objects to humour their owners.’

But that is not really what the cushion is about either, any more than, when Dunne and Raby’s students at the Royal College of Art proposed breeding pigs to grow heart valves genetically compatible with individual human-transplant recipients, they were actually planning to carry out a medical procedure or to get involved with animal husbandry. What they were doing was trying to make a polemical point. Despite the deadpan tone, Dunne and Raby are not really expecting that they will actually be soothing the genuinely troubled with their atomic cushion. I am not sure that they would want to, even if they could. Atomic annihilation, along with a lot of other things from climate change to the destructive potential of overpopulation, really is something to worry about. Anxiety is an entirely rational reaction to all these manifestations of the multiple threats we face.

Dunne and Raby have a rather narrower objective in mind. What they hope their work will do is persuade us to consider design in a different way. They want us to understand that design goes beyond the superficial optimism of engineering consumer desire. The pig-transplant project looked at what is at stake when a living creature is bred to share some of our genes and is then sacrificed to ensure our own survival. If the human recipient is to survive by the harvesting of the valve, it can only be at the expense of the pig, a fraction of whose tissue will live on in its by then slightly piggy host. Dunne and Raby’s students contrived an object, trough at one end, dining table at the other, that human and animal could share, signalling their intimate connection, making explicit the relationship between them and inviting the recipient to reflect on the essential nature of the transaction. It makes a more convincing case than the mushroom-cloud stool.

Dunne and Raby’s works are not meant to be understood as pieces of design in the way that design is conventionally represented. They are not intended as achievable propositions or blueprints for actual products. They belong instead to the rather more nuanced category of design that wants to ask questions about the purpose of design. Design as it is traditionally defined is affirmative. Dunne and Raby see their version of it as critical. Mainstream design is problem-solving, while critical design looks to identify problems. Design that attempts to serve the market tries to provide answers, while Dunne and Raby use design as a method to ask questions.

Precisely what are the questions posed by the mushroom-cloud cushion? The most persuasive is that it asks us to interrogate the way in which design manipulates our emotional responses. ‘Conventionally, design is used to create objects that make us feel better about ourselves, to suggest that we are cleverer, or richer, or more important, or younger than we actually are,’ say Dunne and Raby. The mushroom-cloud cushion is a mildly sinister demonstration of the essentially ridiculous nature of this process. Our fear of the prospect of nuclear annihilation will no more be resolved by a cushion than a new kitchen will rescue a failing marriage.

For the market, design is about production, it is not about debate. Mainstream design looks for ways to be innovative; Dunne and Raby want to be provocative. As they put it, rather than looking for concept design, they offer conceptual design. Rather than treating design as science fiction they say they are interested in social fiction. They don’t want design to make us buy things, instead they want to use design make us think; they are less interested in the process of design than in the idea of authorship. They see their work as critical design.

On one level the idea that design can be a critical activity, used to question the industrial system that brought it into being in the first place, is perverse. It is as unlikely a concept as critical civil engineering or critical dentistry. But critical design has a history almost as long as industrial design itself, certainly going back as far as William Morris.

Design is not entirely synonymous with industrialization. There were forms of mass production that had demanded the use of design before the Industrial Revolution: coins and amphorae, for example, which date back thousands of years. But it was nineteenth-century factories, which depended on design in the modern sense, that eventually created a new social class, the industrial proletariat, uprooted from their traditional rural communities and herded into urban slums. Social critics were horrified by what they saw as the degradation of work in the factories and by the squalor of life in the industrial cities. Cultural critics deplored what they saw as the banal and shoddy ugliness of what the machines produced as they destroyed the skills of craftsmen. William Morris deplored everything. He wanted revolutionary change, and he wanted to design beautiful wallpaper.

Morris was one of the most unforgiving and eloquent of the many critics of the industrial system. He was against mass production and the moral void that he believed it represented. But paradoxically he has also been characterized as one of the founders of the modern movement. Nikolaus Pevsner’s book Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius portrayed Morris as a key figure in the evolution of contemporary design, partly, at least, in an attempt to make modernism palatable to his British audience by giving it a home-grown pedigree rather than characterize it with a litany of German and Dutch names.

And it is perhaps because of this that Morris’s work has been misunderstood. It has been taken as a series of practical propositions in the classic modernist sense, and judged on that basis it was a protracted failure. He wanted to make design that offered the masses dignified objects of a certain quality. But by rejecting industrialization he made it impossible to make them at a price that they could afford. Unless one regards his work as essentially critical, as asking a question rather than offering a solution, it is hard to see Morris as a forward-looking designer. But if his furniture is understood as critical design, in the sense that Dunne and Raby mean it, as asking questions about the place of design in society, about the relationship between maker and user, then it is anything but a failure.

Morris looked back to a pre-industrial vernacular, while others were ready to embrace the contemporary world with results that made his contempt for machinery seem irrelevant. He wanted to create the sort of objects that depended on skills that the industrial world was making obsolete. He wanted craftsmen to have the chance to take pleasure in their work, because he believed in the dignity of labour for its own sake, and because he saw it as the route to achieving the highest aesthetic qualities. And he wanted ordinary people to be able to furnish their homes with worthwhile possessions.

It was, of course, a violently contradictory position. Craft-made objects were too expensive for the working class to afford them. Morris’s clients necessarily had to be wealthy, and the mismatch between his ambition and the reality proved intolerable for him.

While Morris was working on the interior of a house for Sir Lowthian Bell, his client heard him ‘talking and walking about in an excited way’. When Bell went over to enquire if anything was wrong, ‘he turned on me like a wild animal and replied, “It is only that I spend my life ministering to the swinish luxury of the rich.” ’ And yet Morris was prepared to employ children in his weaving workshops; their fingers could do finer work. The contradiction here is almost as glaring as the one that saw Morris struggling with the knowledge that his own freedom of action was dependent on the income he inherited from his father’s investments in mining shares.

The Industrial Revolution was the cause, as Morris saw it, of the impoverishment and alienation of the daily lives of the vast majority of people. Morris’s socialist impulses went hand in hand with a distaste for what he saw as the inferior products of machinery and the wage slavery that came with it for the worker. Through his company, Morris & Co., he aimed to create robust and well-made products for an enlightened proletariat, and to offer an alternative to the corrupting influences of ornamentalism run riot from the newly established factories. ‘Our furniture,’ he wrote, ‘should be good citizen’s furniture, solid and well made in workmanship and in design, and should have nothing about it that is not easily defensible, not monstrous or extravagant, not even beauty, lest we tire of it.’

Industrial methods produced affordable objects that craft techniques could not. Morris & Co. opened for business some four years after Morris’s polar opposite, Michael Thonet, built the first of his furniture factories, at Koritschen, on the edge of the Austro-Hungarian empire, conveniently placed for its supply of timber and unskilled but cheap labour. By the start of 1914, Thonet had made seven million examples of its Number 14 design, the armless bentwood and cane-seat café chair. Morris & Co. made its products in batches seldom more than a few dozen at a time and barely outlived its founder.

Thonet depended on deskilling the making process, and reducing craftsmen to the role of machine minders on a production line assembling components. Its chairs were beautiful, elegant and affordable; and how they were made was not the issue in their appeal. Morris’s workshops produced small numbers of objects which were never affordable and were not always beautiful.

Perhaps the biggest and most hostile postbag I had as a journalist was when I reviewed Fiona McCarthy’s impressive biography of Morris. I found myself tentatively pointing out the curious echoes of Morris’s loathing for cities, machines and all their works, expressed in his vision of an anarchic and bucolic utopia in his prophetic novel News from Nowhere, and the forced depopulation of Phnom Penh by Pol Pot. Morris enthusiastically described an abandoned London. Parliament Square had been turned into a dung heap, with worthless banknotes fluttering across it in the breeze. I wasn’t suggesting, of course, that Morris was a mass murderer, but that there is something of the Khmer Rouge’s loathing for urban elites in Morris’s distaste for the modern city. As I have got older, I find myself becoming less impatient with Morris. Walking through the bleak pebble-dashed streets of Bexleyheath to find the Red House, the home he built for himself when he was first married, it’s impossible not to be moved by what Morris had achieved. There would have been orchards here once, stretching all the way towards the Kentish hills. Now there is nothing but the joyless detritus of a brutal economic system based on expediency and mean-spiritedness, dreary terraced houses and joyless shopping streets. There is nothing spirit-lifting anywhere in the town until you find the now mellowed sheltering red-brick wall that curves around what had once been Morris’s home. And it is then that you understand that you are being offered a vision of life as it should be rather than as it is. You see a remarkable experiment by a remarkable man, who was ready to invest time and money to show what a house could be. It’s a house endearingly full of mistakes. Philip Webb, who designed the Red House for his friend, wrote much later that no architect should be allowed to design a house until they are past forty. He built the Red House for Morris when he was twenty-eight, and he conceded that it was facing the wrong way to get the best of the sun. But it was a manifesto that was to prove enormously influential. And here the house still sits, a mute reproach to all that surrounds it, a reminder that architecture at heart has to be about optimism.

Morris’s furniture was political, but at the time few understood the political point that he was trying to make with it. And in the end, how political can any object be, when set against making a manifesto, or a speech, or a street protest, or starting a political party? It is not surprising that Morris ended up doing all of those things, and doing rather less as a designer and an entrepreneur.

The idea that it is possible, even an obligation, for design to criticize itself is a continuing one. Victor Papanek, the Austrian-born critic, began his book Design for the Real World with the ringing declaration ‘there are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a few of them’, and then suggested that ‘by creating whole species of permanent garbage to clutter up the landscape, and by choosing materials and processes that pollute the air we breath, designers have become a dangerous breed’.

Papanek’s view was that the job of the designer is to work on socially useful projects, not to help their clients to sell overpriced consumer goods to people that neither need nor can afford them. He was a forerunner of the environmental movement with his interest in designing radios for communities without access to mains electricity, recycling and wind power.

Papanek described his position as being anti-design, which though it might sound close to the kind of critical design now practised by Dunne and Raby, actually has a rather different character. Papanek took the overheated view not just that any kind of formal design language was essentially manipulative and dishonest, but that almost any relationship between design and commerce was unacceptable. Given the roots of design in the Industrial Revolution it was an ultimately self-defeating position. His books are consciously artless; the projects he set his students, the consultancy work he did for Third World governments, all were inevitably low technology, utilitarian, unambiguous, entirely without guile and mostly futile. Dunne and Raby are critical too, but they are also interested in understanding and working with the formal language of design, and in using it against itself. This is an approach that emerged in the Italy of the late 1960s and 1970s, a troubled and narcissistic society in which the idea that the children of the rich could kill policemen, in the name of the revolution, or that millionaire yacht-owning publishers might attempt to dynamite electricity pylons to undermine capitalism did not seem far-fetched. In a climate such as this, design could become pure research, freed of the demands of production, price or brand. Designers could stop listening to anything as tiresome as a brief, or a budget, or a marketing strategy, and get on with the altogether more congenial task of speculation and criticism instead.

Not every design culture approaches this division between production and dissent in the same way. Some take a more ideological view than others. Italy gave designers the chance to work on industrial projects, within the system, but at the same time to try to explore the idea of what was sometimes called anti-design, or radical design, and which is now more commonly described as critical design. At the same time as they were designing the sofas or cutlery that furnished bourgeois Italian living rooms, Alessandro Mendini and Andrea Branzi were also working on objects that subverted and mocked bourgeois taste. Italian mainstream manufacturers were ready to commission designs that they had no chance of making in industrial quantities to demonstrate how culturally sensitive they were, and to attract media coverage.

Berlin in the 1990s took a more militantly anticonsumerist viewpoint than Italy. The Netherlands developed its own aesthetic, mostly by a process of deconstructing the language of contemporary design. Britain, or perhaps more accurately London, had a complex enough local ecology to allow multiple approaches to design to coexist.

Bit by bit, critical design managed to carve out an independent territory for itself. There were enough faculty positions in design schools, commissions for installations at the Milan furniture fair, galleries selling limited editions to collectors, and to museums, to make critical design a feasible career proposition.

Critical design has seemingly had more appeal to those museums that have taken on the role of shaping our understanding of design than the mainstream represented by technical and formal innovation. Of the eighty-four acquisitions made by the Museum of Modern Art in New York between 1995 and 2008 that could in even the most tangential way be described as British design, only a handful are industrial design in the conventional sense. The charismatic E-Type Jaguar roadster or the Vincent Black Shadow, the motorcycle manufactured from 1949, the Moulton bicycle, and a collection of work from the Cupertino studio of Jonathan Ive - culminating in an iPod, which, of course, natural British modesty prevents anybody from claiming as being an example of British design. And there are one or two pieces of design history. Gerald Summers’s remarkable armchair made from a single sheet of bent, moulded and cut plywood is the highlight of these, but by far the larger proportion are the product of the critical thinking of Dunne and Raby, and their students, or those of Ron Arad, whose work is less obviously polemical but no more ready to be complicit in conventional readings of design.

These are all objects that are produced as limited editions and which present themselves as challenging the status quo. The question that arises is whether this is a redefinition of design, and the introduction of a new discipline of critical, or conceptual design. Or is it an abdication of design’s responsibility to engage with the world? From this perspective, design has moved away from centre stage, as an economic and social force, and retreated into the museum and the auction house.

Dunne and Raby’s strategy has been to use design as a provocation, as a means of inoculating their students against the market, to encourage them to ask ‘what if?’, to invite designers to confront the uncomfortable and the disturbing, not just to unquestioningly provide a shape for an object.

We need to move beyond designing for the way things are now and begin to design for how things could be, imagining alternative possibilities and different ways of being and giving tangible form to new values and priorities. In the field of design, users and consumers are usually characterized in narrow and stereotypical ways, resulting in a world of manufactured objects that reflects an impoverished view of what it means to be human. This project set out to develop a design approach that would lead to products that embodied an understanding of the consumer user as a complex existential being.

The issue, though, is how many times the same questions about design can be asked until the answer becomes predictable even before it is posed.