It is a rare occurrence when the vague ideas that might circulate in the back of your mind as a kind of wave of unconscious ticks are suddenly made to coalesce, not by some particularly brilliant insight of your own, but by someone else’s lucid and provocative statement. Purely through a combination of boredom and serendipity (does the internet work any other way?) I stumbled upon an article for the International Journal of Design by Meredith Davis which offers some uncomfortable insights into design as a ‘profession’ (as opposed to its usual function as easily scapegoated cost-center, aesthetic hobbyhorse, or that-thing-kids-do-with-photoshop). Admittedly Davis’ intent is to make a case for doctoral study in design, but by way of making a very effective argument for the necessity of research and doctoral programs she makes a rather remarkable assertion. Responding to a 2005 survey by Metropolis magazine regarding the role of research in design education she notes:

Clearly, the history/criticism model is one many designers are accustomed to when thinking of design research and there is organizational infrastructure (e.g. Design Studies Forum) to support faculty and student exchange on these topics. There is, however, no evidence that design practice makes use of such research, so its contribution appears to be mostly at the level of the discipline.

That is a fairly stunning remark, although I think it is more of an observation than any sort of interpretative statement. A quick scan of the Metropolis survey doesn’t offer much more hope, other than giving me the very strong impression that ‘haphazard’ and ‘ad-hoc’ are not words that should be associated with any kind of research or criticism. Apparently the ‘discipline’ and ‘practice’ of design are the proverbially disjointed left and right hands, just barely connected through some body, however tenuous and ghostly that body might be.

Outside of the academy the idea of design criticism being subsidized by a daily paper or monthly print publication is beyond the pale. In the US with the exceptions of The New York Times and the usual trade glossies (and perhaps the occasional business, lifestyle or tech magazine) I can’t think of a single staff design critic. Film and art critics are still in abundance even in these Great Recession times. Even architecture criticism is still alive at some of the major dailies, although one wonders how long that will persist seeing that the funding for most architectural projects larger than say a dog house came to a screeching halt about a year ago. Not much point in retaining a critic if there is nothing left to criticize.

At the level of practice I think Davis is dead on. Designers often have have a strange indifference to the idea of criticism that can border on antipathy. In a recent interview on the ISO50 blog the Dutch studio Experimental Jetset offers up a very peculiar form of antipathy. The interviewer Alex Cornell asks a very interesting and pointed question about design criticism mid-way through the interview:

Khoi Vinh wrote an article not too long ago about the state of honest criticism in design. At one point in the article he asks, “are we really having the kinds of meaningful, constructive, critical discourses that we really should be having?” I’m curious to hear your thoughts on this issue. Do you find there is a dearth of honest and effective design critique happening in the field? How does your studio approach criticism when it comes to your own projects?

The answer Experimental Jetset provides is at once tantalizing and vague, instead of design criticism they view design itself as a critical act:

We’re much more interested (sic) graphic design AS criticism: the idea that a piece of graphic design is a manifestation of a certain way of thinking, a certain way of ordering the world, and that, by functioning in that way, that piece of graphic design is effectively critiquing the dominant way of thinking, the existing way of ordering the world. Or, in a similar way, we also very much like the fact that two different posters, hanging next to each other in the street, are in fact critiques of each other. To refer again to ‘The Arcades Project’: at a certain point, Walter Benjamin describes the flaneur, walking around in Paris, being confronted by the posters, signs and slogans in the streets of the city: “Under these conditions, even a sentence (to say nothing of the single word) puts on a face, and this face resembles that of the sentence standing next to it. In this way, every truth points manifestly to its opposite. Truth becomes something living; it lives solely in the rhythm by which statement and counter-statement displace each other in order to think each other”. So that is the sort of critical discourse that we find most interesting: the dialectical exchange that exists between designed objects. We’re much less interested in this whole sphere of graphic designers publicly criticizing and attacking each other on weblogs and forums.

What they appear to be saying is that design has achieved an autonomy that no previous artform has ever achieved. Criticism is useless since design itself IS criticism. Mere words need not apply. Even if one assumes the “dialectical exchange that exists between designed objects”, who exactly will delineate this exchange? Designed objects appear to have agency and sentience (I assume they are classed similarly to corporations as ‘artificial persons’) and are capable of “critical discourse”. Their invocation of Benjamin and the flâneur is troubling at best. Do they really want to imply that the flâneur is their ideal audience? An idea that Benjamin lifted from Baudelaire as a kind of critical reconstruction of a roving, urbanized 19th century gaze (that remains manifestly white and male). Their reference to ‘dialectic exchange’ is either naive, anachronistic or a joke. In this era of network culture: atemporal, pluralist, globalized, mashed-up and clearly beyond any kind of history Marx or Hegel might have envisioned; it is hard to imagine ‘dialectic’ having much intellectual or theoretical purchase. It’s more like vacuous doodling in the margins as the empire burns down around you. ‘Statement’ and ‘counter statement’ is pointless when there are a million different ‘long tail’ variations of just about everything available at your fingertips. Reality may be in the process of being completely digitized, but it is not reducible to simplistic, oppositional binaries.

They go on to frame criticism as if it were gossip, not something that occurs between trained professionals as part of a body of knowledge of their chosen discipline. Criticism is an ‘us or them’ stratagem:

It’s also interesting how Khoi Vinh, elsewhere in his essay, makes the connection between criticism and honesty. While, in our personal experience, there is a really strong link between criticism and dishonesty. A lot of the people who have publicly attacked us (calling us lazy, cynical, false, nihilistic, whatnot), have later contacted us, to ask us if we wanted to contribute to their design book or little art project, or if they could drop by at our studio, to visit us. In their mails, some even described themselves as “big admirers” of our work. This phenomenon has always struck us as very bizarre. Publicly they attack you, but privately they admire you. To us, it shows that criticism is often a pose, a facade. It’s certainly not always honest.

Apparently any kind of critical discourse is by definition name calling, comprised of ad hominem attacks, and ultimately dishonest. Design criticism in their view is mere angling for status and one-upmanship. Machiavellian even. However they save their best for that abject tribe of scurrilous outcasts known as ‘the working professional design critic’:

The professional critics, well, that’s a whole other can of worms. Don’t get us started on that. For now, it might be enough to quote Brecht, who described critics brilliantly: “They are, to put it bluntly, enemies of production. Production makes them uncomfortable (…) They want to play the apparatchik, and exercise control over other people. Every one of their criticisms contains a threat”.

In other words design critics are BAD COMMUNISTS. That is the only conclusion I can draw from their rather bizarre quote from Brecht. It does not take much of a Google Books search to find the original context. The Brecht quote is not a direct quote, it actually comes from a diary-like piece ‘Conversations with Brecht’ in Benjamin’s “Understanding Brecht.” In essence it is Benjamin’s recollection of Brecht’s old feud with György Lukács: Mr. Theatre of Alienation vs. Mr. Socialist Realist. Fascinating if you’re into 20th century theater and literary theory. But this is hardly relevant to design. The parallel is bungled, the historical mapping absurd. There is no directorate of design criticism. Those master narratives (if they ever existed) are long dead.

There is nothing wrong with designers attempting to locate their work in areas outside the standard model of service to clients. Experimental Jetset has at least the ambition to situate their work in a theoretical framework that reinstates some form of criticality to their practice. But they stumble when they choose to do so using frameworks that are solipsistic, obsolete and of questionable relevance. It is not possible to completely eliminate critical discourse from design without doing massive damage to the discipline as a whole. There is ample evidence of the fluidity of boundaries between criticism and creation/production. Brecht himself had a large body of critical and theoretical writings, never mind the fact that the vast majority of design and architectural production in the 20th century is defined by practitioner’s critical statements, manifestos and theoretical elaborations. Outside of design, France in the 1950s offers a multitude of compelling examples: the nouvelle vague emerged from the Cahiers du Cinéma. Godard, Truffaut, and Rivette were all critics before they were directors. Alain Robbe-Grillet was both the leading theorist and novelist of the nouveau roman.

Perhaps Meredith Davis is ultimately correct in her assesment. Criticism and history are really only for the ‘discipline’. One hopes that the notion of a design discipline can do more to encompass both the academy and the body of practitioners, recalcitrant or otherwise. ‘Uselessness’ is maybe a spurious way of framing a post on design criticism, but I hope it is not an epitaph.

#thebauplan