Anti-Design
Human beings have a history of fantasizing about technologies that can bring paradise to earth. But like those who sought to harness nuclear power to keep us all warm and cozy through the winter or seek to splice genes so that no one is ever born with a birth defect and cows march happily to the slaughter, the fantasy eventually clashes with reality.
By Hal Niedzviecki
In March, the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) awarded a gold medal to designer/philosopher Bruce Mau. Mau has relentlessly trumpeted the idea that design can be a source of dissent, a way forward to a better world. His giant exhibit of slick new zero emission vehicles and featherless fowl recently closed in Chicago after stints in his home base of Toronto and the exhibit’s inaugural run in Vancouver. That, combined with a Massive Change book, blog and obligatory think-tank institute, has successfully positioned Mau at the forefront of communicating an idea as appealing as it is dangerous.
The concept is this: we should understand design not as the by-product of the corporate need to make everything from the trash can to the smog spewing SUV to the office tower sleek and desirable but, as Mao states on his website, as “the human capacity to plan and produce desired outcomes.” Design will save us from ourselves, and designers–who hold the keys to a
happy future–are sensitive and smart and caring. Like Mau, they want nothing more than to make excellent products that will last a long time and sink back into the land like last year’s potato once we’re done with them.
The AIGA award belatedly recognizes and endorses a design-as-the-future movement trumped not only by Mau, but by other major figures in the industry. Self-dubbed “post-industrial designer” Karim Rashid’s biggest hit is the Umbra-produced Garbo trash can–a sleek chromey vase of a disposal unit that has sold over 2 million units. But that doesn’t stop him from making the case for the primacy of design in a manufactured world. In a series of manifesto-cum-catalogues including the modestly titled I Want to Change the World and its follow up Design Yourself, he seeks to help us improve work, sex and even death through design. (“Why can’t someone order a casket from Gucci or Prada?” he muses despairingly in Design Yourself.)
Then there’s Jane Fulton Suri, chief creative officer at IDEO, who apparently makes a living instructing companies in “design thinking”. Suri’s also got a book/catalogue, Thoughtless Acts: Observations on Intuitive Design, and her own massive change philosophy trumpeting what she calls the “empathic economy”. In this scheme, companies, buyers and everyone else affected will all work together to design a feel-good relationship in which no one is exploited, no one buys something they don’t need for too much money, and everyone cares about everyone else.
Human beings have a history of fantasizing about technologies that can bring paradise to earth. But like those who sought to harness nuclear power to keep us all warm and cozy through the winter or, today, seek to splice genes so that no one is ever born with a birth defect and cows march happily to their slaughter, the fantasy eventually clashes with reality. In reality, the arrival of touchy feely happy design is part of the fast emerging cohort of product-friendly anti-consumers, people who desperately want to shop while being reassured that their purchases will do no harm to anyone anywhere, especially themselves. Design utopia underpins this ideology by assuring us that looking good is feeling good, that you are indeed what you buy, and that, most importantly, buying a product (Body Shop, Tom’s Toothpaste, Ben and Jerry’s, a Karim Rashid designed sex toy, something red from The Gap) will change the world.
The connection between anti-consumer consumer-friendly products and the world of design is most instructively discovered in the favourite mag of the organic toilet bowl cleaner set, Adbusters. Kalle Lasn’s magazine is a lavishly designed glossy brochure for brand Adbusters. Using the techniques of advertising he purports to deplore, Lasn relentlessly peddles an array of deep message sound-bites in the form of collages and slogans. The overall message of Adbusters is that a socially conscious design aesthetic featuring anti-advertising advertising will create jarring disjunctures and bring down the capitalist economy. (Lasn never says what he will replace it with–perhaps some sort of benevolent national socialism?) Lasn’s magazine is a marketing campaign against marketing, and it relentlessly advocates the idea that it is through design–of ad parodies, of the Adbusters brand Black Spot Sneaker (I bought mine on Buy Nothing Day) that the world will be changed.
Pages from the books by Rashid, Mau and Suri could easily have been torn from the latest issue of Adbusters. These thinkers not only share the same visual style, they also seem to all think that for every complicated problem, there’s a simple solution, perhaps a clever marketing campaign to get us all to agree to change our minds. (Look, ma! I’m changing the world without ever leaving my condo, stubbing out my cigarette butt into my empty Diet Coke can, or canceling my credit card.)
Even if you imagine, as Bruce Mau apparently does, a world in which design will make emission-free transportation widely accessible to all urban dwellers everywhere, it’s obvious that design is only ever going to be a small part of the solution to big problems like environmental degradation and massive anxiety and depression. A new look for our garbage cans, cars and sneakers isn’t going to reign in all facets of the excesses of capitalism.
The premise of utopian design–that there’s an efficient, designed answer to every problem–is a delusional apologia for industry everywhere. But it’s also deeply disturbing for another reason. When I first saw the Massive Change exhibit in Vancouver, I struggled to figure out exactly what was so alarming about it, besides Mau’s obvious faith in the market to fix all that ails us. Finally, after encountering Lynn Becker’s review of Massive Change in the Chicago Reader, I realized what was nagging at me. Citing the gulags of Stalin and the concentration camps of the Holocaust, Becker asks: “Can you really overcome the persistent darker aspects of human nature simply by working around them as if they don’t exist?” In other words, can we simply ignore the recent past? Can we dare to once again put our faith in industrial solutions that harness big sounding ideals to efficiently pragmatic technicians?
I’m not saying that design-utopia is a crime against humanity, but I am arguing that simplistic ideas taken too seriously have a way of being co-opted in unfortunate ways. Here’s an example: Three years go, Lasn penned a notorious article entitled “Why Won’t Anyone Say They Are Jewish?” Lasn’s rant against neo-con Jews influencing American governance came complete with a list in which the Jewish neo-cons were helpfully marked by an asterisk or, if you prefer, a star. In this article Lasn lazily links America to Israel, Israel to Jews, and Jews to…well, given that the piece came from the owner of the mouthpiece of the anti-consumer revolution, it’s fair to assume that Jews were being linked to consumerism and capitalism. Is this the sort of dangerous over-simplification and laziness that design-as-dissent gives rise to? If so, then I’ll take a pass on Massive Change. Bruce Mau isn’t Lasn, but both empower us to passivity by articulating the conviction that the world needs more design, more artifice, more ways to convince us that we are the masters of our destiny just by buying a ticket to the show. (Hey Kalle, how about inaugurating a Buy Nothing Jewish Day?).
In the end, Adbusters and the Massive Change exhibit are parodies of themselves, spewing not just simplistic thinking, but requisite product placements in the form of books, sneakers, posters and more. Wrapped in the pretence of dissent and change, these products-masquerading-as-ideas are reaching whole new generations of readers , burgeoning anti-consumer consumers led to believe thatthe fix to any problem is just a photoshopped manifesto away.