DISCUSSING DESIGN: Is it busted?

Observer 115

Howdy, still in France, drinking red Coke and at the calisthenics park every day, auctions below.

Wrote a couple of print-only stories the other month, one’s a look, for the Architect’s Newspaper, at the future of design—Future of Vision it was called, my thoughts went to design media—and another, for

FOR SCALE

, print, an appreciation of the brilliance and viscerality of Michael Graves. You can read them in full here:

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If you squint, or relax your eyes. I wanted to spend a bit more time on the AN piece: I’ll include the text here, since it’s short:

Design media, or the informal part of it to which I contribute, needs, I would say, more of everything. More coverage, more breadth, more depth, more insight, more enthusiasm—and, yes, more critique. Every novel approach to talking about design should be out there, even if some of them might seem to have less of a hook.

We’re on the cusp of a new age in which fashion people and young folks are switching over and becoming fiends for design. What’s fascinating about this moment is that these folks, who might subscribe to the suite of new design newsletters, as well as my own, often have developed tastes and nuanced opinions regarding other creative fields. It’s just that, for them, architecture and design are new. And while it’s too early to predict future coverage, there are things design writers and editors can do now to catch these readers up to, say, subscribers of The Architect’s Newspaper. Why not get these readers truly conversant in current design and in vintage, so that they can choose a lamp or flatware as effortlessly as they rifle through Ssense? Or more mass-facing service stories about logistics and manufacturing and scale, which demystify the the buying process for consumers? To be sure, these are broad ideas, but we’re living in a very broad time. It’s not uncommon, outside the design world, to hear van der Rohe confused for Eames. It won’t last for much longer, but the education has to be rolled out at scale.

The premise is one I keep returning to, which may or may not be truly correct. Design knowledge, if surveyed outside professional circles—outside great pubs like AN, the handful of interior designers who have just started new newsletters, the people who know what everything is at 3DD—is… stagnant. Penurious… not really there. Not what’s happening in the field—maybe not even new productions—but the way it’s expressed. Nobody knows anything. I can’t overstate this enough. No one really knows very much. It’s temporary, and it isn’t a judgment call, but things are behind. Names get mixed up, the same pieces of furniture get trotted out everywhere, there are maybe, in cities, a handful, if you’re lucky, of stores. Compared to fashion, where the precision and presentation by some brands is just so intense and dialed in, it’s staggering… furniture is 200-level at best. Where to cast the “blame”—I don’t think this is a bad thing, more on that later—has to do with things outside design’s control. It’s hard (or maybe just expensive) for most people to get good furniture, with a point of view, at scale. (One chair is easy.) Vintage furniture doesn’t scale as well as clothes.

And so the argument above was to catch up people outside the design world to their professional contemporaries and create a consumer class of people who have a a 3D, fluid, tactile and moving understanding of the things that they love. (It’s not unrealistic: people, often young people, who listen to a lot of music, who really care about fashion, and so on, tend to have a more nuanced understanding of the thing that they love than pros, who have to look at the money.) I have been saying this for a few years, and design understanding has only slightly advanced… it’s still mostly in the darkness. It’s hard for folks to jump into design and figure out what’s what. What changes this? How do we figure it out? That’s the question not only for my newsletter but for many others, and press around it as a whole. There’s work to do.

Anyways, 100 or so of items below the jump, paid subscribers only. Welcome to the new age of gatekeeping: the knowledge is out there and available and for everyone, but if you want the real shit you simply have to pay.

Obs 115