Zerofee. Good Thinking:

Thorny Issues. Photo: Simeon Eichmann

June 28^th, 2009. Another Sun­day, another ser­mon. Only this one was some­what dif­fer­ent to the Catholic mantra that resided in my child­hood each Sun­day morn­ing. This was given by a woman (which in itself would have caused a stir) but not in a church and not by a priest. We were present at Alice Rawsthorn’s ser­mon on What is Good Design? held as part of the School of Life’s event series.

The set­ting, Con­way Hall, owned by South Place Eth­i­cal Soci­ety, made per­fect sense con­sid­er­ing the topic addressed, and the wood, light and space of the Main Hall took me back to for­ma­tive years and the notion of the speaker being omnipotent.

The 45 min­utes ahead held much promise. Not only because a well-respected design critic was giv­ing a ser­mon on this impor­tant and rel­e­vant topic, but I hoped that the mes­sage would cre­ate a stir and every­one present would leave with much to ponder.

Paper pam­phlets describ­ing the order of ser­vice greeted the con­gre­ga­tion – a warn­ing of the ‘hymns’ to be sung either side of the ser­mon ahead. With Tainted Love (Soft Cell ver­sion) pump­ing through hid­den speak­ers, a chap in tail­coat attempted, with much vigour, to rouse us from our Sun­day morn­ing slum­ber and into morn­ing song.

Hymns aside, clear and pre­cise not only in her deliv­ery, but also her sharp dress sense in elec­tric blue, Raw­sthorn made for a for­mi­da­ble fig­ure in her tech­ni­cal pul­pit on stage, but lack of visual mate­ri­als diluted her mes­sages – appar­ently a Mac to PC incom­pata­bil­ity issue that could have been eas­ily avoided. With pro­fes­sional verve though, Raw­sthorn was able to com­mand her audi­ence and inject some good humour into the situation.

Raw­sthorn cer­tainly left an impres­sion, mak­ing some effec­tive points – unusu­ally, how the Apple iPhone and its ‘apps’ might reduce the need for numer­ous gad­gets, for instance. Her Design for the Other 90% mes­sage was a pow­er­ful one, demon­strat­ing how design over­looks the major­ity of the world’s pop­u­la­tion. Ref­er­ence to the well-intentioned One Lap­top Per Child project was also worth its men­tion, but Raw­sthorn only alluded to the prob­lems the project incurred – spi­ral­ing costs, inter­nal bust-ups and neg­a­tive local reac­tions. A lim­ited, test deploy­ment of new elec­tric FedEx vans was also highly lauded, but focused on aes­thet­ics and only briefly explored from an envi­ron­men­tal per­spec­tive. Don’t we still have to plug these things into a coal/nuclear fueled grid? Aren’t they likely to be ship­ping many designed items of super­fi­cial value around in the first place? Per­haps they’re amaz­ing (and no doubt prefer­able to a diesel alter­na­tive), but I would have liked more detail, beyond the cos­metic, to sup­port the reverence.

Ser­vice design was addressed, deservedly, and the pres­ence of design think­ing in the devel­op­ment of impor­tant, social sys­tems is unde­ni­ably vital to their suc­cess­ful deliv­ery. Per­haps the exam­ple of an exer­cise that ‘dis­cov­ered’ that qual­ity of life for the elderly is enhanced by assis­tance with things they phys­i­cally strug­gle to do, in addi­tion to a var­ied cir­cle of friends was not the most con­vinc­ing for those of us with a lim­ited under­stand­ing of the work in this field. This exam­ple, per­haps an inno­v­a­tive exer­cise lack­ing illu­mi­na­tion here, ran the risk of sound­ing evan­gel­i­cal about the obvi­ous – exactly the kind of thing that attracts anti-design sen­ti­ments from those of a cyn­i­cal disposition.

Omit­ting any mea­sure of the iPhone’s envi­ron­men­tal impact and the design/advertising/marketing sup­ported 18–24 month life-cycle seemed short-sighted, along­side her inter­pre­ta­tion of iPhone app details – should have been 1 bil­lion ‘down­loaded’, not ‘sold’ for instance (a pedan­tic, but impor­tant dif­fer­ence when con­sid­er­ing the real impact and use­ful­ness of the soft­ware con­cerned) – and the notion that Apple responded to ‘ille­gal’ app devel­op­ment with its App Store and asso­ci­ated SDK; a nice story, but improb­a­ble with the ini­tial absence of such fea­tures per­haps bet­ter explained by a race to mar­ket and a desire for con­trol and standards.

I can appre­ci­ate that Raw­sthorn may have felt it nec­es­sary to intro­duce her audi­ence to the pos­i­tive work that was and is being attempted, but there was a sense she was only skim­ming the sur­face and some ref­er­ences weren’t fully explored, or accu­rate, for that matter.

So, despite the anti­quated, beau­ti­ful envi­ron­ment, reli­gious pas­tiche in struc­ture of ser­mon and Rawsthorn’s eru­dite pre­sen­ta­tional style, I came away dis­ap­pointed and with the dis­tinct impres­sion that I’d been privy to a wasted oppor­tu­nity. Why wasted? Alice Raw­sthorn is a high-profile design writer/critic and, as such, holds a lot of influ­ence in pro­fes­sional design cir­cles as well as in the devel­op­ment of future design talent.

In this mock-religious atmos­phere she had sung the praises of an area of design which has, in recent times, expe­ri­enced a much needed upsurge of inter­est. Inex­plic­a­bly though, she made lit­tle, if any, men­tion of design­ers’ com­plic­ity in work­ing for brands and sup­port­ing the out­put of unnec­es­sary goods and thus, per­haps inad­ver­tently – often blindly – assist­ing a cul­ture of mate­r­ial gain and profit before peo­ple. While design­ers – osten­si­bly those in the more tra­di­tional com­mu­ni­ca­tions sec­tors – con­tinue to apply their influ­ence in a com­mer­cial cul­ture of con­sump­tion and cor­po­rate deceit, design will always hold a guilty place in a his­tory of social and envi­ron­men­tal fail­ures. Raw­sthorn quotes, ‘design like you give a damn’. Some­times, per­haps, it’s bet­ter to not design, if you give a damn.

Being in such a strong posi­tion and his­tor­i­cally well con­nected within the design com­mu­nity, I’d hoped that her ser­mon would enlighten more and incite her fol­low­ers to speak in new tongues. Instead, they mum­bled through The Clash’s ‘I Fought the Law’, had no pub­lic oppor­tu­nity to ask ques­tions and were treated to what seemed to be pre­mium, irony-free, Eng­lish tea and bis­cuits, before leav­ing to enjoy a beau­ti­ful, sunny Lon­don Sun­day. Irre­spec­tive of the short­com­ings I per­ceived, I’m delighted she’s onboard and per­haps, for those out­side the indus­try, spear­head­ing a ‘Good Design’ phi­los­o­phy to become a key voice in help­ing shape our design future.