Design as Politic
Posted in thoughts by will - Apr 23, 2010We cannot think of design as a single community. We cannot think of good or bad design.
I so often hear people talking about the design community, the design world, or pretending to offer criticism of design objects. I see design blogs that pretend to address significant design news.
These are all absurd concepts.
Everything made is designed, every opinion has a physical manifestation; the physical world manipulated after human opinion is the very definition of design.
Design is nothing more than physical opinion.
A design defines a value set, or is defined by a value set. Values are personal qualitative things, they are not subject to objective greatness or meanness. Design belongs to the realm of culture. Cultures are expressed by their design, culture is a large part of what separates man from animals. We humans are tool makers, and our tools are made to various ends and by various means as defined by their design, as defined by value sets.
Cultures are groups of individuals with common values. These shared values often find themselves made manifest in common design motifs, shared sensibilities about things like the function of clothing, about how food should be grown, distributed and prepared, about the form of music and art and when it should be used, about architecture and infrastructure.
in the old world we found first shared opinion and then common design arising from isolated groups, the developed ritual, custom, language, costume, folksong, vernacular architecture, etc. Through hundreds of years of being forced to trade and speak with and support each other, they arrived at common opinions.
In the new world we find cultural groups forming from dispersed people who already share values, they now choose to support one another, because they see their own sentiments manifest in the sensibilities of others, and realize support that design both to support their people and enhance the impact of their values, and also to identify themselves with that group.
Designers themselves should not be in a club, they should form clubs. They should be opposed to one another, working to build different worlds for different people in the same place. Design should be polemic, forming specific cultures.
It is in bad taste to cater to the mass opinion, to copy what big companies make successful with marketing dollars. It is good to search in your soul for what you believe is beautiful, show it to everyone, and take part in that small but vital community that arrises from mutual love, understanding and common vision.