It’s quite fashionable, indeed, to talk about DESIGN LIFE NOW, this year’s National Design Triennial at the Cooper-Hewitt, and we’re nothing if not fashionable here at WDC. This piece will appear in the forthcoming June 2007 issue of 2+3D, in Polish translation, with an English summary.

If you’re a student in any sort of design school today, you are probably sick to death of hearing people ask “What is design?”¹ Foundation-year art school instructors will frequently trot this one out to kickstart discussions. Arbitrary definitions (“Graphic design is essentially typographic!”) will doubtlessly follow, which will be countered by contradictory edge-case refutations (“Oh yeah? What about Tomato and Ed Ruscha, then?”) … From there, the conversation will invariably devolve into pointlessly circuitous bickering and the wanton splitting of argumentative hairs, which is great if you’re trying to avoid doing any actual design work. The truth is that the nature of design is tautological: design is what you get when you design².

The rather slipshod arrangement of work at the National Design Triennial, currently up at the Cooper-Hewitt in New York, is like a physical manifestation of the classic “What is design?” conversation. It has the same basic ethos: a bunch of circumlocutions that, while entertaining, fail to assert any useful conclusion. The individuals whose work is on display have produced things of fantastic value, wonder, and scope, but the show incoherently fails to bring them together them in any meaningful way.

The show is called “DESIGN LIFE NOW”, with the emphasis squarely on “LIFE”. In writing her catalog essay, “Intelligent Design”, Barbra Bloemnik goes to great lengths to prove that design equals life, to the point where she compromises basic scientific facts³, as well as her own authority: Bloemnik’s starry-eyed praise for the iPod is unflinchingly sycophantic, and the subsequent comparison of the market systems surrounding the iPod to a living organism comes off as a stretch.

Many of the items on display are similarly overreaching in their context: one of the Triennials’ entries is Apple itself. It is not specifically the iPod that has been honored with inclusion; nor Jonathan Ive, the oft-lauded designer of the iconic music player; nor the iPod’s distinctive advertising campaign. It’s just Apple. Apple has been installed down the hall from a few prints of elaborate compositions that Joshua Davis, designer and programmer, had a computer generate for him. Davis’ images are rather unremarkable; to judge from the accompanying copy, they were included primarily to illustrate the stochastic processes Davis harnessed in his code. On their own, they are confusingly bland and meandering, and as such they rely on their accompanying texts to connect them back to “DESIGN” and “LIFE”. The Apple display is similarly confounding, as its broad scope weakens the link to the Triennials’ ostensible theme. I would hazard that these displays would benefit from inversion: simply showing us the iPod (rather than an invocation of the entirety of Apple Computer), and an installation with Davis’ software at work (instead of flaccid prints), would make more sense.

Figures 1 and 2 (from left). iPod Nano, Apple Computer, 2005; “022 – Coast of Kanagawa”, Joshua Davis, 2005.

The same thing is true about most of the specific selections that comprise this Triennial: a little nudging would considerably reduce the “WTF?” factor. Some of the elements are truly important, like Ben Fry’s Processing, the display of which was handled quite well at the show. A product of the MIT Media Lab, Processing is an open-source programming environment, created with artists and designers in mind. The inclusion of a codified framework that gives rise to specific instances of design work was a smart curatorial move. Processing itself needs little introduction, and it easily fits into the show’s conceit. Its presence actively broadens the scope of what a gallery show can call “design”, and its inclusion naturally extends to the rather fantastic schmorgasbord of visualization work which Fry and his contemporaries have done with the system. The nature of the system itself encapsulates the potency of open-source and collaborative education as forces in contemporary design.

Figure 3. Articulate (detail), Casey Reas, 2005. Reas rendered this image using Processing code; infuriatingly, this is the only example the museum has furnished to illustrate Processing.

Unfortunately, most of the other entries don’t betray this sort of consideration. What is worse is that the entries themselves don’t readily speak to one another. That’s theoretically OK, as many an interesting story has been concocted from disparate parts. But there is no story here. The show reads like a junk drawer; little apparent curatorial regard shows through for the overarching relationships between the panoply of items on display… relationships that could have been coaxed out and leveraged. Samples of high-tech building materials appear next to some interesting artisanal glasswork, which is next to yet another paean to Chip Kidd’s book covers. There is a robotic lobster, and there are cartoons that teach you science pragma, and there is an assuredly comfortable chair (DO NOT TOUCH!), and there is a model of a building that looks interesting. But so what? There are no thematic groups or subgroups at all. The Army’s million-dollar AI soldier simulation⁴, for example, is across the room and down the hall a bit from Nicholas Blechman’s self-published war-themed book of satirical illustrations. These two are not close enough to be engagingly dissonant, nor are they far enough away from each other to create a sense of spectrum. Generally, you’re left with more questions than answers: why is this kayak suspended in the room tiled with intricate microprisms? Why are these proposal boards for an unbuilt super-sustainable laboratory complex in the same room as this flagrantly maximalist chandelier? Why are there 10,000 or so⁵ random entries related to OMA, who are based in Rotterdam?⁶

Figures 4, 5, 6, and 7 (Clockwise from top). Basket office furniture, David Ritch and Mark Saffell (for Hermann Miller), 2004; ICT Leaders Project, University of Southern California (for the US Army), 2006; Scintilla wall paneling, Abhinand Lath / SensiTile, 2005; Empire (Nozone IX), Nicholas Blechman, 2004

The show’s curators and shepherds have attempted to preempt such questions with a bunch of ex-post-facto lexical handwaving. Aside from Bloemnik’s aforementioned catalog essay (which screams “LIFE!”), Brooke Hodge (“CRAFT!”), Ellen Lupton (“HUMANS!”), and Matilda McQuaid (“TECHNOLOGY!”) all weigh in with an essay of their own, in which they each attempt to shoehorn the show’s participants into a specific big idea. Each tract glosses over a fact here and a fact there, in an effort to pull together a cogent theme. Preceding these, an introduction by Paul Warwick Thompson, director of the Cooper-Hewitt, explains away the inclusion of international starchitects as a strike against the “artificiality” of a curation program focused on American design⁷. That’s funny, because that “artificiality” is encoded in the Cooper-Hewitt’s stated mandate as “the preeminent museum and educational authority for the study of design in the United States”⁸, to say nothing of its history.

The denial of the museums’ past is further echoed in the exhibit’s complete and willing disregard for its formal context: hardly any of the work has been integrated into the Cooper-Hewitt’s ornate Georgian interiors. The book’s first and last four spreads, together with the covers, are all glossy full-bleed amateur-grade photographs of various designers in their workspaces. This works out a lot better than it does at the show proper, where the same images are blown up to super-human size and hung on panels in the museum’s front hallway. Unlike the 2003 Triennial, where printed patterns were hung so as to be consciously framed by the baroque moldings, the massive image panels scorn the walls on which they hang, suborning their visible history with the anti-aesthetic of the generic white-box gallery. Most of the individual exhibit installs follow suit in their lack of engagement with their environs. There are a handful of notable exceptions, of which the most visible is Electroland’s reconfiguration of the museums’ central staircase into a digital xylophone. The few standouts fail to alleviate the sense that the show is at odds with the museum that contains it, which in turn exacerbates the pervasive cacophony.

Irritatingly, the Triennial seems to want to compensate in attitude for what it lacks in vision. The haphazard treatment of the subject matter, further drawn and quartered (as it were) by the curators’ essays, allows for the easy weaponization of the loose theme of “DESIGN LIFE NOW” against would-be critics. “But, that’s what LIFE is all about!”, the Triennial seems to shout. “LIFE is random! LIFE doesn’t make sense, and so neither should we! Evolution, not revolution!” Yes, perhaps, but that sounds like an argument I’ve heard before, back when I was an undergrad.

Footnotes:
1. … Or, indeed, any of its variants: “Yeah, but what is design, anyway?” and “What’s the difference between art and design?” and “What are the boundaries of contemporary design practice?” are all equally rubbish. [back]

2. As Grace Lee, art director for Conde Nasts’ erstwhile Portfolio magazine, put it to a friend of mine, “design is design is design. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing.” [back]

3. The authors’ assertion that “Full-scale cloning of small animals using DNA to recreate new DNA has become a familiar occurrence” is demonstrably false in several ways. First of all, there is no “full scale cloning of small animals”. Perhaps the author meant to say “breeding”. Regardless, it’s important to note that you can’t just create an animal from a DNA sequence. Dolly the sheep, for example, was cloned through a process in which the entire nucleus of a cell was transplanted. The cell nucleus is a highly organized and complex structure, with millions of specific proteins bound to precise locations across the genetic material. This comment rather disingenuously implies that you could, say, email your dog’s genome to your local molecular biologist whenever the poor bugger runs into traffic and you need to clone up a new one. [back]

4. Incidentally, this thing failed the Turing test right out of the box. The setup consisted of a rear-projected realtime rendering of a convincingly 3D-modeled American soldier, and a microphone you could speak into, ostensibly to ask questions for the soldier to answer. I had this conversation with him:

ME: “Are you self-aware?”
AI: “You’ll have to use less big words and ask again.”
ME: “Do you know who you are?”
AI: “You’re asking about something beyond my jurisdictional boundaries. I can’t answer that.”

… afterwhich I gave up. He was exceptionally rude, and nonfunctional to boot. [back]

5. This is an estimate; I lost count at some point. [back]

6. Perhaps the line of thinking here was that the championing of the underdog a very American trope, and everyone wanted to see what might happen if this unknown, shy little-architecture-firm-that-could finally had a shot at the limelight. [back]

7. I’m not slavishly committed to a US-centric agenda or anything. But American capitalism frequently subjugates art and design to the whim of market forces (as compared to, say, the Netherlands, where design has been institutionalized as a de facto benefit to the society in which it is couched) and so I think it’s an important (nay, ballsy) decision to run a cultural institution with an American focus. Because American design practices are predicated on market-subjugation, American design institutions, like the Cooper-Hewitt, are essential in providing much-needed circumspection in the discipline. That’s why I find the decision to break curatorial form in order to include OMA rather troublesome. It seems like the curators were pandering to the name-brand recognition Koolhaas’ studio brings, rather than attempt to unearth influential local practitioners. I would be less riled by a decision to override the museums’ mandate if it didn’t smack of a marketing ploy. Was it worth giving the likes of Nader Tehrani and Michael Maltzan the finger in order to laud a firm that has laurels to spare? I can’t say, really, but I do wonder.

The issues invoked in this note are rather beyond the scope of a review of the Triennial, so I will redirect you to Michael Rock’s “Mad Dutch Disease”, which discusses American capitalism in the context of the design world. I will return to the subject in an appropriate forum, should the opportunity arise. [back]

8. Quoted from the museum’s own copy. [back]

Please welcome James Chae, RISD GD ‘06, to Writing Design Criticism. James works at Tank, in Boston, MA. He has something to say.

image via style.com. This dress was also on display this summer at the Centraal Museum in Utrecht, NL.