Last week I attended a talk by Stephen Bayley at the London College of Communication, titled The State of Design Criticism Today. To put it bluntly – and mildly – the talk was dull. The promise in the title was not fulfilled. The question remained frustratingly unanswered. Just what is the state of design criticism today?

What exactly are the ways we can write about design? and why should we? and how should we?

What is design criticism supposed to provoke?

‘Critical writing about design’ is suddenly quite a hot topic, at least for universities. The London College of Communication is convening a new course in MA Design Writing Criticism for October 2008, and so is the School of Visual Arts in New York. I very much liked Joe Clark’s thoughts on the latter. It’s generally thought that the cream of (the current definition of) ‘design writing criticism’ is published in Eye (I also like Joe’s thoughts on this topic, as it’s extremely rare to hear Eye criticized).

The trouble is the very idea of “criticism”. It implies personal taste, which is fine for art criticism and literary criticism. The “arts” are full of ambiguity and subjectivity.

Design has something more objective about it: something well-designed is something that works. Unfortunately, writing critically about design is more complicated than this. It’s somewhere between something that works (science) and something that appeals to taste (art). Much of the “criticism” I’ve read about design seems to be more along the lines of historical documentation.

The talk at LCC confirmed my suspicion that, along with all of its other troubles, perhaps the main trouble with “design criticism” is that many of the writers are art historians, not technologists and designers.

And another interesting question is: how closely should design follow technology? Since graphic design – which deals with the organization of information – was born out of the industrial revolution, perhaps it’s quite important that it does follow technology. It is tied to information proliferation, and in 2008, it’s tied to the Web.

This leads me to feel that the history of the Graphic User Interface in software, pioneered in Xerox PARC in 1981, should have been included in my graphic design education along with the history of the printing press and metal type.

In conclusion: the trouble with design criticism is that it’s really confused about what it is. And I still don’t know.

I recently lost my mobile phone. It’s the first time I’ve ever lost my phone. I haven’t replaced it yet, because I’m intending to get an iPhone when it comes out next month. Losing my phone made me realise how accustomed I am to having it with me. Payphone boxes are useless to me: I don’t know most useful numbers. My mobile phone memorized phone numbers for me, so I never had to.

I feel vulnerable without my mobile phone. If I planned to meet a friend, and something came up, I could re-plan the meeting using my phone. Organizing, re-organizing meetings on the move is really useful. Without a phone on me, I’ve had to fall back on careful planning before I leave the house.

My dependence on my phone reminds me of Samuel Beckett’s fictional creation, Molloy, who is so dilapidated that he can’t move without the aid of a bicycle. Physical dilapidation the least of his problems. He can’t remember his name, if his mother is really his mother, or if his bicycle is really his bicycle. His dependence on technology to move around led the critic Hugh Kenner to describe Molloy as a Cartesian centaur: half man, half bicycle.

(When Molloy loses his bicycle later in the novel, he uses his crutch as a grapnel to crawl through a forest on his belly: again, he is reliant on tools.)

We have grown so dependent on our phones that we notice how helpless and incapacitated we feel when, say, the battery runs out, or we lose them. The mobile phone is an extension of our bodies. Like Molloy, we are Cartesian centaurs: the technological component makes up half of ourselves.

The mobile phone is different from most media because it is so personal. They are digital approximations of identity. The address book is a digital approximation of the people we know. It is highly personal: the handset we choose conveys personality, status, wealth, and taste; we can customise theme, wallpaper, fonts. Most important to us is that it helps us connect with the world.

Like Molloy who depends on his bicycle in order to move around, we depend on our phones to help us feel connected to the world.

Most compelling to me in Paul Graham’s essay on Cities and Ambition is the idea that “most people who did great things were clumped together in a few places where that sort of thing was done at the time”. Cities are made up of several voices, but one voice speak louder than the others. According to Graham, New York calls for you to make more money; Silicon Valley calls for you to be more powerful; and London calls for you to be more aristocratic. (But as Nancy Mitford put it: “An aristocracy in a republic is like a chicken whose head has been cut off; it may run about in a lively way, but in fact it is dead.”) Since we’re living in a world with penetrable social walls, we are able to move towards a city’s centre of gravity, if we want to go that way.

Brighton’s voice is: Decadence. There is a culture for enjoying oneself. Brighton is like a really thrilling romance that has the benefit of being wholesome. It reminds me of California – somewhere in-between Santa Cruz and San Francisco, with a touch of London cool.

It’s not just a party town – it is serious and ambitious as well. A prerequisite for my presence here is the fact that it’s full of people passionate about, and ambitious for, what they do. It’s hard not to be infected by the positivity and interest in life and work, and there is a community here. Paul Graham isn’t personifying architecture and geography; he is talking about people.

In the last few decades, thousands of products have entered our lives with the intention to make them simpler. So, why does so much modern technology confuse and trap us?

“Technology changes rapidly; people change slowly”, writes Donald Norman, in ‘The Design of Everyday Things’. Interaction with things is governed by our biology, psychology, society, and culture. Human biology and psychology do not change much with time, and society and culture change slowly. The rate of new product creation is so high that some features aren’t tested thoroughly, or aren’t tested at all.

Bad design affects the super-complex to the dead simple: for instance, bad design is a door with a raised bar across it. The door only opens if you apply pressure on the right side of the bar, but there is no visual indication of this.

And what about a phone interface with a mysterious button ‘R’? Nobody knows what the button does, but the button remains for as long as a designer can provide a reason for its existence. Likewise, bad design is a door that has a handle which suggests twisting and pulling, but slides open.

I have been toying with the idea of modern (in)conveniences for a while before I read Norman’s book. The supermarket and the washing machine were subjects of a brief post.

Bad design, I’ve since learned, is used to confuse users intentionally. Why would a designer want to do this?

The Supermarket Maze

Supermarkets are complex, distracting, confusing. They are also exotic, amorphous and evolving ecosystems of products. The products displayed in the supermarket largely sell themselves with their packaging. Graphic design is key here – how can one peanut butter stand out from another peanut butter?

To do our shopping in the twenty-first century, we no longer need to visit individual shops. Products are gathered together within a single building. We enter a shop, pick up a basket of pre-determined size, and working from a mental or physical list, walk around the shop selecting items to put in a basket, before taking the basket to the check-out. The products are checked out by a human or a machine, or perhaps both. We exit the shop.

How can we design a supermarket to make it easy to find a desired item? Thinking in terms of pure design, I would use a clear supermarket layout, with low shelves so you can see over them, and make use of clear signposting. A shopper could, with clear layout and signposting, be sent from A to B.

A businessperson, however, would think in terms of both design and profit. It’s good business to send your shopper on a longer route from A before they reach B, so they pick up more things to take to check-out. Most shoppers are sent into a maze of distraction and advertising. In other words, supermarkets are deliberately confusing.

The Space-age Washing Machine

It shouldn’t be more complicated than putting your dirty clothes in the machine, putting in the washing powder, and pressing a button. But washing machines have become needlessly complicated, with some interfaces looking like spaceship dashboards. Norman suggests this is because ‘complicated’ looking products actually hold consumer appeal. Apparent complexity, at least in Korea, suggests status. More features, Norman argues, defies simplicity. More features sell products. A more complex washing machine is more attractive than one that appears simple. How many people try to understand how products work before they buy them?

A wonderful experience should be able to overrule these poor business tactics. Driving sales via confusion and advertising exposure is far from ideal, but it seems to work – at least in some places. Apparent complexity may always sell. The iPhone and iPod Touch, though, are examples of wonderful apparent simplicity when the device itself is complex: the good design masks the complexity of the functions.

Supermarkets rely on products selling themselves off the shelf. That’s interesting, if you combine this with the fact that product packaging is on its way out. Sainsbury’s in the UK is trying out the milk bag, which may eventually replace the plastic bottle. The milk bag is already popular in Canada (according to the article, 60% of fresh milk in Canada is sold in bags). Supermarkets are bending to the pressure of environmental awareness, but as the Times article points out, it’s down to whether consumers will want it.

It’s worth bearing in mind a scenario where packaging is severely limited, or where we simply no longer can afford to spend our resources on disposable packaging. Without products selling themselves with their packaging, will the current supermarket model work? If products can no longer sell themselves individually with their packaging, the model for advertising products in stock will have to change.

What makes design so compelling is how it emerges from seemingly conflicting motives: in these cases, the aims of the designer are at odds with the aims of business. Business itself is at odds with environmental pressure, availability of resources, the ideal of how they would advertise their product, and ultimately, what consumers want.