Better by Design Museum?
Two exhibitions are running at the Design Museum (http://www.designmuseum.org.uk). The first is in support of the Designer of the year award and the second celebrates design in modern Britain (a period from about 1920 to the present day). While these are both beautifully presented and a very rewarding way to spend a few hours, they both suffer from some peculiar flaws that could be blamed on the name of the museum.
A 'design museum' is a tricky thing, because design can't be canned. It's a bit like trying to create a museum of movement or a museum of poverty: design can be more informatively observed as it happens than after the event. So full marks to whoever laid out the display celebrating the redesign of The Guardian. Here we can see the trial and error, the progression towards a solution, that led to the October 2005 relaunch. The designers are caught in action by the evidence on display. We see stages in the development of the final design annotated by the people who were involved and read captions that document the challenges of the work.
A pity then that furniture designer Tom Dixon and architect Cameron Sinclair, who are also shortlisted for the £25,000 prize, don't put any of their trials and errors on display. The work of Sinclair is so badly explained and sloppily illustrated I get the feeling that he's not a fan of the museum – but why patronise its visitors as not worthy of a more informative display? Could it be that typographers and graphic designers lead the field in exposing their real working experiences to public scrutiny? Or do other design figures not go through these struggles in their everyday work? Perhaps only typographers can make mountains out of 12pt molehills?
As for Jamie Hewlett, he's in the wrong event. Hewlett's illustration work for the virtual band Gorillaz is superlative, and once more in his display you can see sketches (the oxygen of design) on show. But these cartoons and the animations that have come out of them do not represent design. They are firmly outside design because like fine art, music, drama, dance and literature they are aiming at a different goal, expressive, more personal and more private, achieved by different means. What is true is that the totality of this work – t-shirts, record sleeves, and marketing gubbins, put together by a team of graphic designers, marketers, and other types – is designed material because it all has an design brief behind it. But Hewlett is not a designer, he's a storyteller. His original artwork is a 'design' only in name, not in the method or impetus for its production.
Upstairs in the exhibition Designing modern Britain, the great canon of 'British' design is re-reviewed. Penguin books, the Mini, Peter Sutcliffe's record sleeves, the Underground map. Perhaps it is true that as these are the icons of what is seen as British design it's right that they go out on show regularly. But what about all the paperback books produced from 1935 to the present that were not published by Penguin? What about the route map for another metropolitan region other than London? We cannot establish whether such things even exist here as there are no books produced by any other publisher, no map of any other regional transport system. So how can we discover what gave the items on display their iconic status?
And here again there is a confusion over what constitutes design. Concorde, icon that it is, was really an exercise in engineering, project management and politics rather than design. In the scheme of things the design problems were incidental whereas the engineering ones where overwhelming. If design is engineering, then is engineering design? Which aspects of design merge into engineering, so that we can mistake one activity for the other?
It is a brave step to label anything designed, or anything designerly, as 'British'. So many of the roots of design practice were fertilised across Europe during the twentieth century that key components can almost always be traced from one country back to another. And designers by nature are inquisitive and garrulous; like fine artists they are often nomadic, choosing to move from place to place. Sometimes it's the need to avoid persecution or to put food on the table. Although there is furniture designed by émigrés from central Europe on display, we don't see its competitors on the British market or find out how practical or successful it was, and we don't see other foreign furniture to gain an idea about how the new British designs might have innovated internationally, rather than just on the home market. Given the exhibition's title it would be reasonable to exhibit things that contributed to the experience of a designed environment in Britain but which were originated or manufactured abroad, but I saw few explicit examples of design by foreign-owned or multinational companies that might have been sold or designed in Britain. There were references to foreign products in the captions, but where were the photos, the diagrams or even the things themselves?
All in all this is an exhibition that doesn't ever go beyond the conservative, insular attitude to design that it castigates in its captions. While this is bound to cement the iconic status of the items displayed it doesn't help to give direction to those with a casual interest in the history of design. And it carelessly bowdlerises that history. London Transport's management did not commission Harry Beck's map, believing that he would come up with a great new idea: instead, as a drawing office staff member he had to pester the higher echelons with his painstakingly evolved diagram before they conceded that it might have some merit. The work of graphic designer Ken Garland is represented in the show and a read of his book Mr Beck's Underground Map (on sale in the Museum shop) could have corrected that point.
As in the Designer of the Year exhibition, there's not enough material here that shows what the phenomenon of design is. There are one or two dummies and models, plus a piece of camera artwork, but that's about all. How do designers get from zero to finished item? Nothing to tell a college student anything about the human element: the failures, compromises, and progress through thoughtful collaboration so alien to the teenage mind and so nourishing to a designer with a few year's experience under their belt. And little to show that design is a discipline; that is, something learned and studious, at its best when the work is systematic and insightful, economising on future wasted thought and labour for designer, maker and user.
It is difficult to put design in a museum without ending up displaying a whole load of objects isolated in time and space. It's a design problem in its own right. This show tries to escape from that problem by appropriating things that are redolent of real life, like punk fanzines and record sleeves. But it ends up freezing chunks of popular culture, which is made up of much more than designed things, in the same way. The scope is too broad, yet the range of artefacts is too narrow. The captions seek to provoke but the choice of artefacts inevitably reinforces old caricatures. Beautiful visuals, but design has left the building.
A 'design museum' is a tricky thing, because design can't be canned. It's a bit like trying to create a museum of movement or a museum of poverty: design can be more informatively observed as it happens than after the event. So full marks to whoever laid out the display celebrating the redesign of The Guardian. Here we can see the trial and error, the progression towards a solution, that led to the October 2005 relaunch. The designers are caught in action by the evidence on display. We see stages in the development of the final design annotated by the people who were involved and read captions that document the challenges of the work.
A pity then that furniture designer Tom Dixon and architect Cameron Sinclair, who are also shortlisted for the £25,000 prize, don't put any of their trials and errors on display. The work of Sinclair is so badly explained and sloppily illustrated I get the feeling that he's not a fan of the museum – but why patronise its visitors as not worthy of a more informative display? Could it be that typographers and graphic designers lead the field in exposing their real working experiences to public scrutiny? Or do other design figures not go through these struggles in their everyday work? Perhaps only typographers can make mountains out of 12pt molehills?
As for Jamie Hewlett, he's in the wrong event. Hewlett's illustration work for the virtual band Gorillaz is superlative, and once more in his display you can see sketches (the oxygen of design) on show. But these cartoons and the animations that have come out of them do not represent design. They are firmly outside design because like fine art, music, drama, dance and literature they are aiming at a different goal, expressive, more personal and more private, achieved by different means. What is true is that the totality of this work – t-shirts, record sleeves, and marketing gubbins, put together by a team of graphic designers, marketers, and other types – is designed material because it all has an design brief behind it. But Hewlett is not a designer, he's a storyteller. His original artwork is a 'design' only in name, not in the method or impetus for its production.
Upstairs in the exhibition Designing modern Britain, the great canon of 'British' design is re-reviewed. Penguin books, the Mini, Peter Sutcliffe's record sleeves, the Underground map. Perhaps it is true that as these are the icons of what is seen as British design it's right that they go out on show regularly. But what about all the paperback books produced from 1935 to the present that were not published by Penguin? What about the route map for another metropolitan region other than London? We cannot establish whether such things even exist here as there are no books produced by any other publisher, no map of any other regional transport system. So how can we discover what gave the items on display their iconic status?
And here again there is a confusion over what constitutes design. Concorde, icon that it is, was really an exercise in engineering, project management and politics rather than design. In the scheme of things the design problems were incidental whereas the engineering ones where overwhelming. If design is engineering, then is engineering design? Which aspects of design merge into engineering, so that we can mistake one activity for the other?
It is a brave step to label anything designed, or anything designerly, as 'British'. So many of the roots of design practice were fertilised across Europe during the twentieth century that key components can almost always be traced from one country back to another. And designers by nature are inquisitive and garrulous; like fine artists they are often nomadic, choosing to move from place to place. Sometimes it's the need to avoid persecution or to put food on the table. Although there is furniture designed by émigrés from central Europe on display, we don't see its competitors on the British market or find out how practical or successful it was, and we don't see other foreign furniture to gain an idea about how the new British designs might have innovated internationally, rather than just on the home market. Given the exhibition's title it would be reasonable to exhibit things that contributed to the experience of a designed environment in Britain but which were originated or manufactured abroad, but I saw few explicit examples of design by foreign-owned or multinational companies that might have been sold or designed in Britain. There were references to foreign products in the captions, but where were the photos, the diagrams or even the things themselves?
All in all this is an exhibition that doesn't ever go beyond the conservative, insular attitude to design that it castigates in its captions. While this is bound to cement the iconic status of the items displayed it doesn't help to give direction to those with a casual interest in the history of design. And it carelessly bowdlerises that history. London Transport's management did not commission Harry Beck's map, believing that he would come up with a great new idea: instead, as a drawing office staff member he had to pester the higher echelons with his painstakingly evolved diagram before they conceded that it might have some merit. The work of graphic designer Ken Garland is represented in the show and a read of his book Mr Beck's Underground Map (on sale in the Museum shop) could have corrected that point.
As in the Designer of the Year exhibition, there's not enough material here that shows what the phenomenon of design is. There are one or two dummies and models, plus a piece of camera artwork, but that's about all. How do designers get from zero to finished item? Nothing to tell a college student anything about the human element: the failures, compromises, and progress through thoughtful collaboration so alien to the teenage mind and so nourishing to a designer with a few year's experience under their belt. And little to show that design is a discipline; that is, something learned and studious, at its best when the work is systematic and insightful, economising on future wasted thought and labour for designer, maker and user.
It is difficult to put design in a museum without ending up displaying a whole load of objects isolated in time and space. It's a design problem in its own right. This show tries to escape from that problem by appropriating things that are redolent of real life, like punk fanzines and record sleeves. But it ends up freezing chunks of popular culture, which is made up of much more than designed things, in the same way. The scope is too broad, yet the range of artefacts is too narrow. The captions seek to provoke but the choice of artefacts inevitably reinforces old caricatures. Beautiful visuals, but design has left the building.
posted by Ben Weiner at 9:57 PM
1 Comments:
Update about Designer of the Year: today I spoke to somebody who knows about the way in which the exhibits for each candidate were put together. They said that it was a collaboration between the Design Museum staff and the candidate, and that some candidates had probably put in varying amounts of effort (I paraphrase).
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