design questions

Oh dear I promised this blog wouldn't simply spend its posts citing external reference points, but Anne Galloway is on fire this week!

I get very frustrated when artists and designers demand I give them something useful to work with. That I tell them how to make better objects. That I effectively shut down discussion and debate instead of opening them up. I've been asked to bring more social and theoretical concerns to the table, but when I don't give them what they expect or desire, they dismiss the validity or relevance of my work, of sociology, anthropology, history, philosophy...

This echoes the frustrations I felt in my own education. Why must all work, solve a problem stack a shelf (this echoes my header quote a bit). This leads to a slightly reductive way of looking at the world does it not?

I still don't understand why I should set out rules for more socially and culturally responsible design. I don't believe in universalism. Plus, it implies that designers are separate from the objects they produce. That regardless of their own everyday values, their own worldviews and ways of living, there are external, relatively objective guidelines that will make it all better.

Something I also don't understand / That there are 'objective universal guidelines' by which to we design things better. The praised, famous designers of our age seem to be designs terrible children, rule breakers such as Stark and Rashid. Now very recently it seems to be people like James Dyson and Johnathan Ive who we put on a pedestal, they uphold the view that design is a process, that its rational, and exists to solve problems, not as self expression.

In any case the designed objects I love seem to express something unique to their creators. When this happens successfully their creations seem to be imbued with life and poetry. Even if their beauty isn't visible to the majority of the population, does this matter and why? I love George Walker's work because it feels like self-expression, not artefacts flattened to universal norms. But then I despise Karim Rashid's for exactly the same reason; his work is a clear expression of a persona a find mildly repulsive.

There are writers, musicians, painters who have moved me deeply and influenced the course of my life. It would be absurd to argue that art should solve a problem, be understood and consumed by everyone, when its affect upon some people, some of the time is so profound. But then contemporary art often feels like a big “so what” precisely because just "producing a discourse" doen't really feel like enough -

"Within theory, history, and other aspects of the humanities, it's enough to produce a discourse, to frame a debate, AS a discursive statement. In art, there seems to be more expectation of locating the work IN discourse, not AS discourse.

Furniture design also feels a bit lame at times. Is it really enough just to establish a beautiful form and an efficient means of manufacturing that form? But at the same time I do admire that sort of hands on connection with your craft which it advocates. Product designers commonly seem to view themselves as part of a larger process, and the meanings of the objects they create have already been established, they just produce another variation on the torch or mobile phone.