Thorny Issues. Photo: Simeon Eichmann

June 28th, 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.

Why I Write. Design Council 3rd June 2009

Only a few days away and months in the making, Wed 3rd June, 7pm brings a smorgasbord of design writing talent together in one room at Design Council thanks to the School of Graphic Design, London College of Communications and sponsorship from Represent.

MA Design Writing Criticism students have invited keynote speakers, Vicky Richardson, Peter Hall and Denise Gonzales Crisp, to present on the themes of Discoveries, Contexts and Meanings, respectively.

With Jeremy Myerson as moderator and a host of known names in the audience, the content should make for an exciting exploration by our panel and potentially shape some interesting debates in the room and globally, via Twitter. Follow the event via @whyiwrite. We encourage other attendees to tag their related tweets with the #whyiwrite hashtag.

Zerofee has a vested interest in this event as one of us is studying on the MA Design Writing Criticism course and played a role in pulling the event together. We feel passionately that the design community needs powerful voices to communicate about design’s role in society. The explosion in availability of technology to the masses has helped create audiences who have fine-tuned their design sensibilities and adapting to that, the role of design writing now needs to step up and justify its position more than ever before.

With an insight into the speakers’ positions the evening has the potential to be another unforgettable milestone in design writing’s fascinating history.

Speaker biographies

Vicky Richardson is editor of Blueprint. Editing Blueprint is Vicky’s dream job. She read the magazine as a teenager, then went on to study fine art and architecture. Realising she was more interested in politics and in the ideas behind design and architecture, she studied journalism at Napier University in Edinburgh and then got her first job on the glamorous trade magazine, Public Sector Building. Later she was deputy editor of RIBA Journal and published her first book, New Vernacular Architecture in 2002. She is a trustee of the educational charity, the Campaign for Drawing, and sits on the Mayor’s Cultural Strategy Group. She recently had her 15 minutes of fame after heckling Prince Charles and as a consequence will chair the annual conference of the campaigning organisation, Republic on 20 June.

Peter Hall is a design critic, and senior lecturer in design at the University of Texas at Austin where he teaches design theory, history and journalistic methods of research and writing at undergraduate and graduate levels. Between 2001 and 2007 he was Senior Editor and Fellow at the University of Minnesota Design Institute, where he co-edited with Jan Abrams the book, Else/Where: Mapping – New Cartographies of Networks and Territories and organized several symposia and workshops on mapping. He has been a contributing writer for Metropolis magazine since 2000 and has written widely about design in its various forms, including gaming, elevators, building graphics, bridges, neon lights and office chairs, for publications including Print, I.D. Magazine, The New York Times, and The Guardian. He taught a seminar class on design theory and writing at Yale School of Art between 2000 and 2007. He wrote and co-edited the books Tibor Kalman: Perverse Optimist, Sagmeister: Made You Look and Pause: 59 Minutes of Motion Graphics.

Denise Gonzales Crisp Denise Gonzales Crisp is a graphic designer and Professor in the Graphic Design department at North Carolina State University. She chaired the department from 2002 to 2006. She was Art Center College of Design’s senior designer from 1997 to 2002, and principal of her studio SuperStove! Her design is published internationally in publications such as KAK (RU), Graphis, Émigré, Metropolis, and Eye (UK), and was featured in a 2002 Paris exhibition East Coast/West Coast Dreams, the 2005 anthology All Access: The Making of Thirty Extraordinary Graphic Designers, and a 2009 exhibition Dimension+Typography (Chicago). Her essays are published in Émigré, Design and Culture Journal, Items Magazine, Design Observer, and several anthologies. Gonzales Crisp has been an invited speaker at The Walker Art Center (Insights design series), GraficEurope, Berlin, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, at the ArtCity Festival, Calgary, and numerous colleges and universities. She is author of *Relational Typography: Systems, Context, Form, Message (Thames & Hudson, December 2009).

Further information:

Discourse This! Designers and Alternative Critical Writing

Two volumes of Emigre (1995) devoted to design and writing, edited by Anne Burdick:

Issue 35 

Issue 36