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]

What separates Moss consumers from the masses is that they are paying for more than just ownership of designer housewares. They are paying for the right to experience them.

‘Please Do Not Touch.’ That’s the slogan Murray Moss has adopted for his chic SoHo design store, Moss. In style points, Murray wins. Moss has been at the cutting edge of household hip since its inception in 1994. Over the years Murray and his enterprise have gained international renown for their discerning selection and presentation of highly designed ‘everyday’ objects and furnishings. Amidst a stark white backdrop of lacquered platforms and polished glass cases, designer household products are elevated to the level of art in Murray’s museum-like setting.

Printed signs stating, ‘Please Do Not Touch,’ are affixed to each display and continue the age-old museum tradition of disallowing physical contact with the work. The omnipresence of smartly-suited salespeople wards off the wandering hand, in case the metal guardrails don’t do the job for them. Whereas museums discourage touching to prevent the degradation of delicate artworks, Murray Moss has imposed this system of separation in a retail store for household furnishings, products that in their essence are meant to be purchased and used. While over time, touching might degrade that Noguchi sofa, or leave smudges on a Jacobsen teapot, the real impetus behind the ‘Please Do Not Touch’ campaign resides in the depths of the human psyche.

The purpose behind separating people from objects is to nurture the desire that Murray Moss sees inherent in all of us. In denying the basic human instinct to reach out and grab that which is visually appealing, Murray and his team promote an inner tug-of-war of longing and frustration, thereby increasing the value of the unattainable. Lacking a tactile perception of the object, we are left in a mental and emotional frenzy to wonder about its experiential aspects. Enter Murray as our counselor and personal guide.

As Moss shows, inaccessibility does wonders for social value. By emulating the standards and practices of the modern museum, the Moss ethos blends culture and shopping while unabashedly cultivating desire, the hook that keeps design professionals, celebrities, students, and even tourists at its door. What separates Moss consumers from the masses is that they are paying for more than just ownership of designer housewares. They are paying for the right to experience them.

On a warm Saturday in spring, I wandered down to SoHo to check out the scene. Moss had just opened its new arm, Moss Gallery, one year ago in order to provide a dedicated arena for highly curated collections of limited editions and prototypes. In only a year, the distinction between the gallery and the store is becoming thinner and thinner. Michael, a salesperson of six years, informed me that these days, both sides of the business are based on themed exhibitions curated by Murray Moss. Objects that have been displayed in the gallery may certainly later appear in the store, with their retained exhibition history as added social value.

Within the store I was dazzled by case after case of pristine cutlery and kitchenware, as the lingering aroma of leather upholstery tantalized my senses. While walking through this designed wonderland, I began to wonder if indeed these objects retained the chronicle of their past lives as art, once removed from the glass vitrine and taken from the context of Moss. Moss was sleek. It was sexy. And amidst its minted spectacle I felt slightly intimidated. I left without touching anything, and the allure of Moss persisted.

At home I turned to the Moss website, and that’s where I discovered the ‘Gifts Under $100’ corner. In the store I had completely dismissed the idea that affordability could even exist in the presence of $17,000 seating. It seemed almost indecent. But according to the Moss website, it was possible to enter Moss and witness for instance, ‘a Hella Jongerius embroidered ceramic pot next to a stainless steel Fisher space pen next to an Edra pink leather Flap sofa.’ It was in this sentence that I laid my best hopes. That was no ordinary pen. It was a highly covetable Chrome Bullet Fisher Space Pen, advertised in the under $100 section of the Moss website as being able to, ‘write upside down, under water, over grease, in freezing cold, boiling heat, and in outer space.’ I imagined it sitting pretty behind the glass case at Moss, surrounded by other more expensive but equally enticing wares. From there, I might not ever know if the space pen could indeed live up to its lofty advertising. In the vitrine it existed as no more than a desirable shiny object, but the fact that both NASA and Murray Moss had endorsed it made its polished chrome-plated brass seem all that much shinier.

One week and $50 later, a drab gray-brown cardboard box landed on my doorstep. Measuring in at 10” x 12” x 8,” the box had endured a significant amount of abuse in the exchange between couriers and handlers. I maneuvered my way through layers of tape to reveal an endless shroud of brown craft paper. Nestled within its folds lay my treasure, neatly encased in a candy-bar sized plastic snap-box and surrounded by a thin cardboard sheath. With $50 I had acquired more than just a fancy new pen, I had partaken in the aura of Moss.

The casing was smooth, adorned with the glossy image of an astronaut standing beside his roving moon-lander while a brightly colored American flag floats proudly in the gravity-free vacuum of space. From our vantage point on the moon, we see a glowing blue Earth in the background beyond the craters. Sliding the case from its packaging revealed the simple black and white Moss decal self-consciously branded to the cardboard’s interior. Only now, it was mine, and I could do whatever I wanted with it. A small printed leaflet offered a guarantee of the space pen’s abilities and 1960’s advertising information about the merits of its sealed-pressurized ink cartridge. Words like ‘precision’, ‘thixotropic’, and ‘tungsten-carbide,’ wrenched the space pen from its stature as art object and immediately thrust it into the realm of science and use. My gut reaction was to tear the pen from its felted plastic crater bed and lick it before running rampant around the city, terrorizing every bathroom wall and bus window in sight with bad poetry.

Once in my hands, the first thing I noticed was a giant smear on the space pen’s formerly flawless casing where my fingers had touched it. My heart sank a little, the way it does when spaghetti sauce falls on a new shirt. Perhaps Murray Moss had it right. And like that the myth was shattered.

There is an inherent disappointment that comes with purchasing at Moss. While there is an initial elation of having received a shiny new object, this momentary euphoria can never compete with the imminent descent of an object from art, to the levels of human use and abuse. The space pen writes like a dream, and I imagine the Verner Panton cradles the human figure just as well. After subjecting the pen to the cold depths of my freezer, and a pot of boiling hot water, it still wrote (even upside down). Without venturing into space, I was satisfied with the Fisher Space Pen’s ability to withstand the most extreme environmental conditions I could fabricate. At the conclusion of my testing, the chrome-plated casing had lost its luster, and was scratched from the ill-effects of capping the lid to the back of the pen. Even so, at one point the space pen was the very object of my desire from where it sat under Murray’s guidance at Moss. Through shifting the balance between function and style Murray Moss once again holds a captive audience in wait of the next best thing to appear on his horizon.

If You can Make it Here…Then why make it anywhere else?
A new design annual portrays local prejudices at work.

They say that in New York, the world is at your fingertips. Drink your morning coffee from a Greek paper cup, buy dazzling chinoiserie and knock-offs in Chinatown, and eat an unforgettable meal at one of Second Avenue’s indistinguishable Indian restaurants: Walking through this city, I see a miniature version of the entire planet, a planet situated at the center of the universe.

Approximating my everyday experience is Typography 26, The 26th Annual of the Type Directors Club, released this month. The publication’s design is a tour of New York’s tribal artifacts: The cover features a posterized silk-screened image of a daily Chinese calendar, with pages torn off to reveal the 26th of the month. Endsheets include tightly cropped scans of ornate Indian and Chinese food packaging. Section dividers are close-ups of printed ephemera and food packaging in Arabic, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Ethiopic, Greek, and Laotian, picked up from convenience stores and specialty shops. The exotic characters and dazzling printing remind me how fortunate I am to be living in such an international city, looking at a book with such an international view of typography, from such an internationally minded organization.

But the design also reveals something about the jury selections: A smorgasbord of New York ethnicities does not a worldwide cross-section of typography make. Indeed, the majority of the book’s entries come from New York—nearly double Germany’s 30-odd entries; German typographers double the wins from the United Kingdom and Japan. The remainder of Europe (sans Germany) and Asia tally 16 entries each. Australia and New Zealand garner three entries each. Africa has one, and both of South America’s come from Sao Paulo.

Could it just be that New York City is the center of the typographic universe, too? The overly tidy numbers suggest otherwise. Typography 26 was an exercise in filling quotas.

As much as annual competitions encourage achievement within the discipline, their sponsoring organizations depend on them for income. Submissions cost about $40 per entry; winners pay another $40 or so to appear in the book, and then that sum once more to have work hung in the accompanying exhibition. In addition, each entry form usually includes an area to join or renew yearly membership: $100, give or take.

Every organization has a budget goal in mind, and with it, a minimum number of winners its competition must name. Judges fill their quota of winners (hopefully with a meritocracy in mind). The chosen entries must maintain core membership while simultaneously encouraging entries from non-members. Striking this balance is of the highest importance. If the existing membership base feels marginalized, there will be fewer membership renewals and fewer entries next year, jeopardizing the future of the organization. Acknowledging international entrants is an easy way for an organization to expand its earning potential without alienating existing members.

As an aside, here’s how not to grow revenue: I remember one competition where, assisting in tallying scores, I was instructed to round up marks to hit target dollars. (The judges thought it unscrupulous. Perhaps not coincidently, the organization’s Executive Director has since been charged with grand larceny, to the tune of $150,000.)

The Type Directors Club does not suffer from a tarnished reputation. In fact, even though their number of winners increases annually, they receive complaints that their judges are too selective; unlike other competitions, judges are not allowed to enter work; and Carol Wahler, Executive Director of the TDC, informed me that more than half of next year’s Typography 27 winners are from outside the U.S., and that “there aren’t that many winners from New York.” While this is seemingly a step towards internationalism, I am more skeptical. The numbers tell a different story depending on point of view: Looking outward, this year’s winners were evenly split between the United States and abroad. Looking inward, they mostly came from New York.

Typography 26, is particularly unique, because it also reprints the first Type Directors Club catalog. In a time before annual budgets clouded judgment, it was okay for New Yorkers to claim all the winning entries. The contest pushed forward the discipline, and geographic identity just happened to be a telling coincidence.

As a designer living in New York, it’s easy to confuse diversity and internationalism. But Chinatown is not China: New York could not be what it is without the rest of the world. To celebrate the finest typography, the TDC’s jurors should have been instructed to possess a truly global vision—or better yet, a blind eye. In Typography 26, their suspiciously methodical attempt to de-emphasize local talent accomplished just the opposite.

Here’s the earlier piece on the Piano’s remake of the Morgan. The PDF is here, click “read more” to comment and read.

salud,

-fish

Here’s the working draft of my piece on the Antenna Design show in we saw in Chelsea… go to “Read More” to see the whole shebang. Here’s the PDF if you’re the red-pen type… Feel free to comment it up, rip it apart, etc. I am at your mercy.

Specifically I need a good title. I almost called it “But Is It Art?” but then my gag reflex cut in, and I refrained.

Yes!

-fish