Published in: form Design Magazine, No. 280, 2018.
Design is principally a positive proposition, I was recently informed at a design school. So taken aback was I by the matter-of-factness of this blithe pronouncement, which came in the context of a conference talk on the fundamental premises of aesthetics and design, that I decided to explore my antipathy towards it in more detail.
Of course, it could simply be that this reaction was informed by my professional bias as an art critic, a profession that has over the years skewed my view towards the contrary, the incomprehensible or the absent. Perhaps it was this perverse outlook that bothered me, the fact that, rather than accentuating the positive, I have become accustomed to taking aesthetic pleasure in negativity, to viewing any focus on the positive in matters of aesthetics with scepticism. Putting these possible objections to one side, it is the, in my view, rather more interesting question of whether design discourses avoid or even deliberately emphasise negativity that I want to discuss here, though in the process I will also be touching on the polemically contested space between design and art, a space in which the social role of the aesthetic is interrogated. So what’s wrong with positioning design as a driver of positive change? Firstly, it disregards important design effects and secondly, it prejudges the debate over whether design has positive or negative consequences, allowing no room for debate. It neglects, for instance, that the fruits of design not only positively enable their use, but also negatively exclude other forms of use in the process [1]. This doesn’t just effect the individual; with industrial-scale distribution, it also has a social impact. The design discipline gained a reputation as a normative force that shapes the mainstream in society and influences social actions. It should, however, have long since become clear, not least since postmodernism’s critiques of functionalism (see form 270, p. 83), that this normative effect is by no means just about the correct and therefore good use of a design. Instead, the initial perception of design, coming long before it can potentially play a role in everyday actions, is via its aesthetic appearance. The purchase and subsequent use of a mobile phone is thus preceded by a variety of aesthetic selection processes – be they via online comparisons, discussions within social circles or interactions in a network operator’s retail outlets. Obviously, preconceptions about how I expect to use the device play a part; with their manifold potentialities, however, the aesthetic aspects associated with certain experiences of a category of objects, surroundings or surfaces, however, are not the same as actual use. Moreover, preconceptions about the device’s use are just one part of the consumer’s perception. In fact, given the secondary role this aspect plays in the presentation and communication of many products, you might even say that other contexts are far more important: the association of a design with a particular lifestyle, for instance, the aesthetic opinions of peers or the linkage of a design with a particular social issue. In cultural terms, one could even see such associations as the next stage in the production process, design having, since the advent of industrialisation, established a par-ticularly close connection between social and aesthetic factors [2]. It is this relationship that has historically been both a source of great hope and a cause for scepticism.
In the mid-20th century, the disastrous consequences of totalitarian regimes and the continued pursuit of a capitalist logic of value creation dampened the hitherto boundless expectations that modern design would act as a driver of positive social change. Instead of helping to create a better life for the many by integrating aesthetic and social factors as seamlessly as possible, the merging of aesthetics and sociality instead contributed to political crises and ecological disasters. During the 1960s, design attempted either to banish the purely aesthetic in favour of a technologically-driven, socially-orientated planning theory or – as with Italian radical design – to make it the primary purpose of the practice. Given recent history, the dangers of a close alignment between aesthetics and sociality seemed too great – a message underlined by the aesthetic theory of the time. The diminished reputation of such an association thus had its roots in the work of commentators such as Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, and Max Horkheimer, who, in the 1930s and 1940s, were already urging caution regarding the exploitation of the aesthetic by politicians and businesses. Where Benjamin focused on fascist and Stalinist dictatorships, Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s cultural analysis examined the organised deception of the masses by agents of capitalism – design included [3]. Despite the unholy alliance between design and totalitarian regimes, Benjamin also saw an opportunity here for the arts to be reinvigorated. Adorno and Horkheimer, on the other hand, offered a distinctly more pessimistic prognosis, criticising the so-called cultural industries, of which design is one, for being fundamentally lacking in negativity [4]. Instead, they being erased in pursuit of an upbeat mood. Moreover, the ubiquity of many plied a close relationship between aesthetics and life, a relationship that seemed to neutralise social conflict via aestheticisation. Over the following decades, this was echoed in discourses in which both design and those art forms increasingly influenced by it – pop art, for instance – were regarded with suspicion [5]. These theoretical discussions of aesthetics, however, became increasingly detached from the real-world phenomena they purported to describe. After all, any representation in which art is seen as the last bastion of truth and design restricted to the mere creation of practical utility [6] bears little relation to postmodern reality. In fact, both art and design in the postmodern world placed more emphasis than ever on the aesthetic appearance of objects, surfaces, and surroundings.
This however, by no means led to simply harmonising effects and thus to the superficial resolution or complex contradictions or differences. Instead, designs such as Ettore Sottsass’s sculptural shapes for living spaces, barely recognisable as objects of utility, were particularly notable for the negativity of their aesthetic presence. Both in their shapes and their surface renderings, these Superboxes, as the series later became known, are devoid of any obvious functional purpose [7]. In fact, as the critic Tommaso Trini observes, it is doubtful whether they can even be classed as furniture [8]. The strikingly patterned surfaces, too, are remarkable more for their aesthetic indefinability than for any evident symbolism. When design, as here, raises questions as to its own symbolic and functional categorisation while also embracing cricitism of its superficiality, it opens the door for a redefinition of the practice. Wolfgang Welsch, for instance, argues that, rather than simply having the licence to be ironic, design should “venture into areas that are beyond our conception” and could, like art, produce works that, to adopt Adorno’s phrase, “leave us guessing as to what they are” [9]. Unlike most other German-speaking contributors to the aestheticisation debate, Welsch does not regard such crossing of boundaries as a danger, instead seeing this aesthetic movement towards the contradictory and the paradoxical as extensions of design’s purpose. Where Adorno saw negativity as a point of difference between the cultural industries and art, for Welsch, writing in early 1990s, it was a constitutive aspect of a forward-looking metamorphose definition of design.
The concern that design would thereby metamorphose into art was not only raised in debates around postmodernism, it has also been heard time and again since the turn of the century – with regard to critical design for instance. Having arisen out of experimental design teaching by the likes of William Gaver or Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby at London’s Royal College of Art, this much-discussed approach comes down firmly against a positivist understanding of the discipline. Instead, it seeks to also visualise the negative aspects of design – offering as it were, a “pathology of material culture that includes aberrations, transgressions and obsessions” [10]. With this call to incorporate negativity, practitioners are urged to consider aesthetic experiences with design in all their complexity and ambiguity, experiences that can neither be reduced to functional transparency nor to the creation of deceptive illusions [11]. Dunne and Raby’s Huggable Atomic Mushrooms (2004–2005), thus express our fear about destructive technology while also offering comforting softness. Taking its cue from radical design and conceptual art, critical design is a belated response to the aestheticisation debate’s comdemnation of design for merely superficially neutralising social difference [12]. At the same time, proponents of critical design draw a clear line between it and art: for all its ambivalence, critical design is under-pinned by an aesthetic of use [13] and draws on the logic of industrial production [14].
On the other hand, it would appear that the idea of integrating negativity into our understanding of design seems to have been abandoned amidst the talk around social design over the past decade. Instead, a definition of the discipline has come to the fore that extends design to include social institutions and actors, enabling all stakeholders – be they design experts or otherwise – to develop productive activity that enables positive actions [15] and thus, as far as possible, eliminate dysfunctionalities and design obstacles that pre- vent “meaningful change” from taking place [16]. Negatives are disregarded in order to articulate the social benefit as clearly as possible, with design expected to position itself exclusively as a positive force counter-acting the negative effect of the capitalist profit motive. There has, however, also been criticism of the normative side this moralistic approach (see form 278, p. 94). Even within the field of social design, some have spoken out against this deliberate disregard of negativity in the design process. Jesko Fezer, for instance, calls for a design that actually intensifies conflicts in order to contribute to social processes that shape political opinion [17]. Unlike Victor Margolin, Fezer’s (see form 272, S. 100) objective is not the facilitation of positive and potentially useful solutions to social conflicts, in fact, he eschews this approach entirely. With a few exceptions, focusing exclusively on the social impact of design not only ignores potentially negative effects, it also fails to consider the ambivalence of aesthetic experiences. True, it can at times seem as though the aesthetic is automatically equated with aestheticisation in such discourses [18]. There are doubtless good reasons for this, as the above review of the previous century’s polemic debates illustrates. Any in-depth discussion of the aesthetics of design can scarcely avoid mentioning aestheticisation – not least because design is still seen as the key symptom of much-criticised aestheticisation processes [19]. It is, however, possible to frame negativity as a constitutive aspect of design – as we have seen with both radical and critical design. While intermittent attempts were made in postmodern aesthetics, similar contemporary efferts have – despite various practice-led ideas – been notable by their absence. It is, then, surely time for a theory of design that treats ambivalent aesthetic experiences not as unwanted obstacles in the path of absolute positivity, but as dialectic preconditions of their own discipline [20].
[1] Andreas Dorschel, Gestaltung – Zur Ästhetik des Brauchbaren, Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2003, p. 30.
[2] Tido von Oppeln, Waren zeigen. Zu einer zweifachen Produktion von Design, in Kathrin Busch, Burkhard Meltzer (eds.), Ausstellen. Zur Kritik der Wirksamkeit in den Künsten, Zurich, Berlin: Diaphanes, 2016, p. 225–242.
[3] Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Kulturindustrie, Aufklärung als Massenbetrug, in Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (ed.), Gesammelte Schriften, Band 5: “Dialektik der Aufklärung” und Schriften 1940-1950, Frankfurt/Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 2003, p. 144–196, p. 148.
[4] Ibid., p. 156.
[5] Wolfgang Fritz Haug, Kritik der Warenästhetik. Gefolgt von Warenästhetik im High-Tech-Kapitalismus, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2009, p. 40, p. 135.
[6] Rüdiger Bubner, Ästhetische Erfahrung, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1989, p. 15.
[7] The objects in question were designed for Poltronova in 1966.
[8] Tommaso Trini, Ettore Sottsass Jr: Katalogo Mobili 1966, in Domus, Issue 449, 1967.
[9] Wolfgang Welsch, Perspektiven für das Design der Zukunft, in Wolfgang Welsch, Ästhetisches Denken, Stuttgart: Reclam, 2003, p. 201–218, p. 217.
[10] Anthony Dunne, Fiona Raby, Design Noir, Basel, London: Birkhäuser, 2001, p. 6.
[11] Anthony Dunne, Hertzian Tales. Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and Critical Design, Cambridge, London: MIT Press, 2006, p. 3, p. 23.
[12] Ibid., p. 83.
[13] Ibid., p. 43–68.
[14] Anthony Dunne, Fiona Raby, Design Noir, Basle, London: Birkhäuser, 2001, p. 58.
[15] Victor Margolin, Social Design: From Utopia to the Good Society, in Max Bruinsma, Design for the Good Society. Utrecht Manifest 2005–2015, Rotterdam: Nai010, 2015, p. 27–42, p. 29.
[16] Ibid., p. 29.
[17] Institut für angewandte Urbanistik, Jesko Fezer, Twelve Working Theses for Space Design, in Axel Wieder, Binna Choi (eds.), Generous Structures. Casco Issues XII, Utrecht, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2011, p. 82–85.
[18] Annette Geiger, Social Design – Ein Paradox?, in Claudia Banz (ed.), Social Design. Gestalten für die Transformation der Gesellschaft, Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2016, p. 61–70, p. 68.
[19] Andreas Reckwitz, Die Erfindung der Kreativität, Zum Prozess gesellschaftlicher Ästhetisierung, Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2012, p. 181.
[20] Daniel Martin Feige’s recently published philosophical treatise on the contemporary understanding of design did examine both the discipline’s dialectic underpinnings and the meaning of aesthetics (see form 277, p. 102), but the former was explored chiefly in the context of the discipline’s historical establishment while, regarding the latter, negativity was omitted entirely. Instead, the aesthetics of design were portrayed as primarily positive, namely as a “form of practical world-building”. See Daniel Martin Feige, Design. Eine philosophische Analyse, Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2018, p. 9, p. 55.