Words by Kate Marlow
Words
Tess Wicksteed
Let’s start with the worst-case scenario – the difference between art and design at its most unflattering. Art is autonomous, has aura – a space around it in which to practice and encourage criticism; art is free.
In contrast Design is in chains. Design is capitalism’s slave, tethered to its commercial purposes which means it has no agency as a critical medium. Art is aimed in the direction of social ends – design commercial.
Design takes all our experiences, sensations, thoughts and desires and carefully crafts them into commercial products. It builds a smooth and surfaceless landscape of fulfilled desire where critical autonomy vanishes amid a kaleidoscope of depthless imagery.
Art arrests, prompts thought, challenges, stands apart and creates - through its distance and its intimacy - a space with which to question and understand our world, and ultimately change it. Whereas the headiest praise we can think of for design is for it to be effective.
We believe that good design has never been restricted to the effective fulfilment of functional objectives and that part of its aspiration lies in its role in the performance of beauty.
Beauty is a good thing. Beauty is transcendent - uplifting - and two things have happened in recent times that mean we are starved of beauty. The first thing, according to Victor Margolin and Richard Buchanan, is that “Design appears to have replaced nature as the dominant presence in human experience.”
The thing we see most – the thing that conditions, effects, affects our experiences is design - that’s a pretty serious responsibility on the shoulders of designers.
“Design appears to have replaced nature as the dominant presence in human experience.”
The second Thing is that there are no longer any ideas but things. We pull down lofty stuff and elevate the mundane. Our grotty little rationalist consumer society reduces everything lofty to the commonplace - idealism to realism; authority to parity - one-offs to reproductions, art to manufacturing. It then sets about raising up the lowly: brands, products become ideas and aspirations and ideals. So if art has been commoditised and nature marginalised where do we get our beauty from? Is Kate Moss enough?
At Here Design we believe we have a responsibility to ensure our designs are beautiful. When we design, we set out to solve problems like all designers. But while we do it we also set out to create something beautiful, something life-enhancing. We solve problems and try to create objects or environments or books of beauty. We are proud to be problem-solvers but we also see ourselves as something more. As harbingers of beauty.
Design is different from art - its relationship with capitalism problematises its critical faculty - we need to leave criticism to art. But as art increasingly loses interest in beauty, design can and should take over.
What does this mean for designers? Practice good design-thinking but I encourage you to sneak in a bit of beauty whenever you can. And remember that, yes, design is still capitalism’s slave but importantly capitalism is also our slave. We can harness its greed, its ambition, its reach and make it the loudspeaker to beauty. I encourage you all to have a covert mission: to fill the world with things that are not just useful (solving a problem) but are also beautiful.