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.