I spend a lot of time thinking about a sort of design epistemology, its a practical way for me to map history and to place my own work and thoughts in the context of a larger design trade and/or discipline, not to mention mapping the trade to the social and historical forces that drive it. The points of friction between design epistemes are what excite me most, the power that this dialectical process has is thrilling. As a few examples, think about the rejection of printing as ugly among the arristocracy in the 15th century, the controversy over John Baskerville’s radical letterforms, the aggressive program to end ornament carried out by modernists and so on. I organize my history by plotting these ruptures and analyzing the results.
I have a general opposition to wholesale ideology, but I think its important to have a critical position. As designers, we need to be active participants in our trajectory through history. Without this we might as well just be picking colors because they remind us of our grandmother’s sofa.
Now, I have to confess, I was educated in, and to a certain degree still subscribe to a loosely defined and mostly disfavored body of knowledge that, with some reservation among its adherents, is typically referred to as postmodernism or deconstructionism. Its hard to admit that you’re on a losing side, and I’m a little bitter about it. Its astonishing to me that Massimo Vignelli is once again a star and the McCoy’s are more or less unknown to a whole new generation of designers. I try to explain it away. On a good day my reasoning is that deconstructionism as a formal school was a byproduct of a more important and still evolving critical framework, that by letting go of formal associations we’re free to pursue design theory in a more rigorous way that isn’t beholden to fashion. Sometimes I resort to a flattering combination of condescension and pathetic whining by saying “people just didn’t get it”.
The worst part is that so many designers I meet don’t have a position at all, not just in my pet arguments, but in any design argument. In fact, when I talk to younger designers I’m surprised to discover that they don’t even know there are arguments. I’m not so concerned about my own design beliefs having lost favor, but I believe that all designers have lost fuel for our own development. Its like I caught the tail end of a war that my side was destined to lose, and now that a virulent but intellectually vacuous strain of neo-modernism has triumphed none of us have a purpose. I still don’t believe in the winners, but the argument for most people seems to be over.
I want a new discourse, (not a new “New Discourse“) a thing that designers can love or hate, that will spawn new radical interpretations and rejections. I want to find something that will focus our work and give internal meaning to our discipline, because without this sort of discourse we’re not a discipline at all, and while there’s nothing wrong with design as a trade, I believe there is more to this profession.