
A Duralex Picardie tumbler, photo by Gabrielle Esperdy
The time has come to update William Morris and Adolf Loos for the 21st century. A hundred years ago Loos told us to suspend the use of ornament so that design could catch up with modernizing culture. A half century before that, recoiling from the aesthetic horrors of the Great Exhibition, Morris told us to stop using machines so that design could return to its origins in craft and hand production. When Morris died in 1896, the industrial revolution was a century old. When Loos died in 1933, the machine age was at its peak.
Today, the revolution is digital and the age is informational, but design confronts a similar crisis. We have amazing electronic tools at our disposal; culture has modernized at staggering, computer processed speeds. But the tools are abused and cultural change is stupefying. We embrace technology because it is there and embrace change for change’s sake. Our buildings, objects, and graphics suffer as a result. Things are over-designed because new tools must be exploited; here, design says “look what I can do!” Things are poorly-designed because new tools provide templates and shortcuts that are mistakenly substituted for design itself; here, design says “look how easy it is!”
Design Less
To rectify this situation we must Design Less! We must subject ourselves to a period of privation in which we refrain from designing and suspend the very practice of design itself. This clarion call is not a longing for some idyllic pre-digital past, nor is it an angry Luddite-like rant. Rather, it is an inevitable evolution of the theories of Morris and Loos. And it is an evolution that is perfectly in sync with our era — think of Terminator 2: Judgment Day and countless other science fiction doomsday scenarios in which the computers take over. Let us aid and abet them and allow the machines to design for us. They are doing it already; now we are making it official. Is this nihilistic? Perhaps, but it may be necessary if we are to save our buildings, objects, and graphics from themselves. Until then, we must await the arrival of a Sarah Connor of design who, fully-loaded with guns blazing, will put us in control of our machines once more.
Designless
The time has also come to diagnosis design’s place in the global economic meltdown. Like art, design is the superfluous thing, apparently unnecessary in the “I’m a sucker for the working man” ethos of the new austerity. The design world must unite in the face of a world without design. Designers must control their most basic urge — to make the world a better place — because either the world doesn’t need improving or the world thinks it can improve without help from designers. We can accept this scenario with a look of glum resignation, but a knowing smirk might be more appropriate. The nay-sayers may welcome a world free from designers, but the world will never be devoid of design.
The designless world simply does not exist; and it never has. The gatherers who built the seasonal dwelling at Terra Amata; the hunters who drew in the caves at Lascaux — they were designers. As were the literally countless men and women since then, who have created or adapted almost every single thing that surrounds us in this designed world. Perhaps, like Morris, we can blame it all on the Renaissance: it’s Alberti's fault for separating theory and practice and it’s Vasari’s fault for creating the artist as hero. Walter Gropius was on to something when he urged designers to return to the crafts. He understood that the cult of personality and individuality was damaging design’s reputation and undermining its very place in the world. He thought that by returning to making — by heading down to the factory floor — designers might regain what had been lost. The world would become more designful by becoming seemingly designless.
This has, in fact, come to pass. Whether we are sitting at our computers, shopping at Target or Ikea, or walking down the street with our handheld devices, we are effortlessly, endlessly, unavoidably, inevitably, and mindlessly consuming design. Or to put it another way, we are consuming a thing — a website, a font, a screen, an icon, a t-shirt, a store, a sidewalk, a car, the list goes on and on — that someone, somewhere, sometime designed. If this is the designless world we welcome it and, with apologies to William Shakespeare, first thing we do, let’s kill all the designers.
Comments [43]
03.08.09
06:37
Thanks.
03.08.09
07:26
03.08.09
07:31
03.08.09
07:57
Or, if we must write a manifesto, perhaps we should take a queue from the contemporary age and include some specificity with our polemics.
What "things" are over-designed? Are a few star-chitected buildings and over-priced objects representative of an entire field? Perhaps "things" are "poorly-designed" because there is so much more to design nowadays? Or, perhaps, things aren't poorly designed; perhaps technology is used for a purpose, and perhaps reactionary histrionics bore me silly?
03.08.09
08:04
Meanwhile, would someone at Design Observer care to proofread this, fix the grammar and, er — wait, why was this incoherent rant even passed for publication in the first place?
03.08.09
08:15
03.08.09
09:40
It's an interesting concept, and I thank you for sharing this view. It reminded me a little bit of Ayn Rand's novel, Atlas Shrugged. If you have every read it, I think you might understand that comparison. In this instance, it would be the designers who would return to clean up shop after everything has crumbled.
03.09.09
12:06
There's a puritanical element in much design writing - Perhaps a leftover from the 19thC muscular christianity.
Can't we do better than a one size fits all solution
Next thing it'll be a ban on black forest cake
03.09.09
12:07
03.09.09
02:24
The subject is important, so don't hesitate to dig more than this writing.
03.09.09
04:02
Its impossible to agree or disagree with almost anyone of these notions. We say we want to update Morris and Loos, but what about them needs to be updated? Their visual approaches, their social theories, both? I'm not sure from what's said. We love Gropius for making us shut up and and make, but he was just as complicit in the Terminator-ization of the Industrial Revolution as anyone. I could argue that we should update Post-modernism and just leave it as that, nut I think if we've learned anything, is that in this complex world we live in now, there's no way to make it plain in 250 words or less draped in vagueness, much less one person do so. I'm hoping from here on out we can obsess over DIALOGUES the way the past century obsessed over Manifestoes.
03.09.09
04:34
03.09.09
04:55
Keep it up DO.
NB: Although it has no bearing on their professional attributes we also need to contextualise our heroes – Loos died a penniless paedophile, Eric Gill used to rodger his daughter and his dog. Not criticizing, just observing.
03.09.09
06:00
03.09.09
08:23
As you rightly pointed out, a million tools exist today, so designers are simply using them without questioning whether they really need to. Design should be solving problems, not making society and ourselves into a consumerist society, which we have already become. Design is about fulfilling genuine needs, not creating a hundred more needs. If design is to make life on earth better, which I believe is the original intention of design, then the very nature and definition of design needs to change and adapt to the new challenges we have set for ourselves. In some ways design got us in the mess we are in today, but only design can get us out.
03.09.09
12:02
And to the article, I think the world IS moving to becoming more "designful." I see a mindfulness to design, and not over-design, particularly online. But rather than "kill all the designers," who do you think has the talent and skills to use these new tools? Great design may look effortless but it is not.
03.09.09
12:46
The writer is trying to sound so cool that the message is unclear. This very article is over-designed and communicates less. What exactly is the message?
03.09.09
01:18
03.09.09
06:33
I think part of the idea that this article is trying to convey is that perhaps today's designers depend too much on the technological tools available, which can limit their creativity to the limitations of these tools, or over embellish their designs because these tools allow them to do so.
03.10.09
12:44
Life was simpler earlier, people were less greedy.
All the same, the developed world, seemingly, already done with its overconsumption, is trying to find answers. A proclamation like this article invites interesting viewpoints, which is probably not any manifesto, but a step in an evolutionary cycle...
03.10.09
02:26
03.10.09
09:47
The excess junk out there is due to this field's "free for all" approach and lack of selectivity and barriers to entry. We can only wish our built and printed material for consumption today was ALL done by truly professional designers. And it's getting worse.
Read Hal Niedwieczki's 2004 book "Hello, I'm Special" for more on this. Hell, EVERYONE is a creative today, didn't you know!
03.10.09
10:37
03.10.09
11:45
03.10.09
02:21
On the other hand, I can't help feeling that elevating the confluence of a series of shorter-term trends into a full-blown crisis feels a bit elitist in its tone. Perhaps this is the inherent challenge of being an industry of professional outsiders. We can't solve problems without finding them first.
In this regard, we're not too dissimilar from the Orkin man offering homeowners a free termite inspection.
03.10.09
02:48
03.10.09
03:20
If we kill all problem-solvers the would would be a barren rock devoid of all life, for every creature, from single-cell organisms to humans use the tools at its disposal to create and to solve problems.
03.10.09
05:51
How am I the only person who thinks this?
03.10.09
06:32
03.10.09
06:53
03.10.09
07:36
We need to be able to design and redesign the poorly designed in order to make the world a better place..a designless world is completely out of the question.
03.10.09
11:12
03.11.09
08:22
" The proposed approach towards designing less—getting rid of all designers—is obviously paradoxical, but I think I understand and I agree. More often than not, it is the non-designer who wants to add more to an object, message, or piece of communication—something that needs to be designed. As students of design, we were taught how to remove the proverbial ten pounds of shit. But without training, the novice with software inevitably has the urge to try something, anything really. And that anything usually leads to whatever that particular software has to offer, for example excessive drop shadows and beveled edges. Designers fumble around in the beginning, but eventually learn by trying new things and observing, and being taught what works, what communicates. We separate design from technology. By removing all designers, the world would ultimately add and add and add until nothing would be usable, understandable, there would be too much information, and too much design to comprehend.
It's an interesting concept, and I thank you for sharing this view. It reminded me a little bit of Ayn Rand's novel, Atlas Shrugged. If you have every read it, I think you might understand that comparison. In this instance, it would be the designers who would return to clean up shop after everything has crumbled."
03.11.09
04:56
The next time someone (an newbie architect, a design-software-reseller) tells me the computer 'does it for you' - listen - because I plan to scream, loudly.
03.12.09
12:07
03.12.09
12:09
Paul
03.12.09
12:59
03.13.09
06:02
I feel a little like HAL in 2001 but the problem is not just the novice designer but also the consumer who seems addicted to novelty and believes their every whim should be indulged. Products need to be useful, economical and beautiful, not constantly novel.
"I'm talking to you internet."
03.13.09
12:11
03.14.09
03:27
Good design is always about joining the content, the wearer, the audience. "How" is a question of creative leap and sensibility. No theory can supplement that.
Would you shake down human natural desire to create for some cheap, artificial puritanism?
I have no words.
03.15.09
08:23
I believe the writer may have confused the concept of ornamentation with design.
Interestingly as a student, this is the subject of my upcoming thesis. Talking about the cyclical nature of ornamentation with the arrival and integration of computers. At the moment I believe we are heading into another puerile state of 'less is more', which (if history repeats itself) is always a prediction of a new medium.
In the 1990s Roger Black noted that magazine design in the 1980’s was being replaced by a new concern for simplicity .‘We are experiencing a revival of the sixties, helvetica and grids instead of torn paper and randsom-note typography.’ He also states that this backward move ‘towards functionalism is an important preperation for the future, when designers will be called upon… to guide readers/viewers through texts whose structure is not yet known.’ As in, we as designers are unconsciously preparing for the arrival of new mediums, new forms of space, different dimensions of representing information, perhaps its already here. We've seen iPhone and more and more elaborate ways of advertising on spaces are being concocted every day. A need to reduce graphically is inevitable if we are to engage with new technologies. Holograms anyone?
04.10.09
08:29
02.28.12
03:10