Crafting Design
December 23, 2009
During 2009 IASPIS (the Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s International Programme for Visual Arts) has been running Design Act, an experimental project exploring the possibilities of critical design practice. (You can visit the website by clicking here.) One of the texts generated by Design Act explains the project in the following terms:
Design is a powerful force in shaping material culture, societal values and human behaviour. Ideas about how things should be are often embedded within the persuasive visions and forms of design and architecture. As a service profession, design typically operates “in service” to the ideas of its clients. This differentiates it from art, which has a tradition of criticizing its commissioning institutions, and craft, which has long represented a counter-culture to mainstream modes of production and consumption. However, many contemporary designers are countering conventional ideas of what design is, and what it should be about. In emerging genres of “social”, “critical” and “activist” design, practitioners question issues of gender and class, ownership and authorship, power and welfare. The critique posed is not of design, as such, but of design blindly serving historical convention or hegemonic ideologies.
I found the comment about design’s relationship to craft to be pretty interesting, and a good explanation of why contemporary design is interested in craft – and has recently staged a number of incursions into craft territory. If craft has always stood as a counterculture to mainstream production and practices, then craft references within design (think Hella Jongerius) will be very useful in shifting the position and possibilities of design, its relationship to its own history. Critical design will of course be very interested in capturing countercultural positions, just as it will be interested in drawing on the (supposed) freedom of fine art in relation to its commissioning institutions.
Yet design doesn’t want to become craft, since to transform like this would be to lose the sense of contemporaneity that design has mastered so well, and which craft has failed to capture. (Craft trails its daggy and old-fashioned roots like a shaggy wool hanging from the 1970s.) The important thing from design’s perspective is grabbing hold of signs that can stand in for the best elements of craft’s radicality, its countercultural posturing.
I’ve always been suspicious of design’s intentions towards craft, seeing it as a kind of opportunistic theft that leaves craft even worse off. It is not always positive to have more powerful neighbours become too interested in what you are doing. Trade, in this sense, tends to be very one-sided, and looking at the way design craps on craft in order to scramble up to the level of fine art is kind of depressing. Yet maybe design’s interest has been good for craft, if only because it has awoken some sense of indignation within the crafts scene. There’s nothing like a violent incursion to get the pulse racing.
