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.

Tim Berners-Lee says the web is in its infancy. We have only just begun to see how the internet is being used to overcome distance, share information, and connect people together. The future web, Sir Tim says, will put “all the data in the world” at the fingertips of every user.

Whilst desktop and laptop computers have defined how we experience the web, I believe that the benefit of the web is best when you can use it anywhere. McGuire’s law is that the value of any product or service increases with its mobility.

So, the mobile web…

Mowser

In many ways, I think Mowser was a great idea. I also think that in many ways, Mowser missed the point. This is aknowledged by its creator, Russell Beattie, in his leaving letter, which was widely and wildly misinterpreted after it was published. Beattie’s leaving note, far from being doctor’s autopsy notes for the mobile web, is actually full of vision and hope for what the mobile web should be like.

In a way, it heralds the death of a certain kind of aenemic mobile web, and one we didn’t want in the first place. Mowser’s failure, although sad, should help to guide others working in the shaping the future of the mobile web:

It’s not the mobile web, it’s the web…?

The mobile web should exist as a term. But it should not refer to a different web. We can’t deny that how we access and use the “mobile” web is different from how we might use it at home. This does not refer just to the device that the web is viewed on; it refers also to what we use the web for.

We need to make mobile web experiences better. To do this, we need to try and identify how we use the web outside of our homes; and how this is different from how we use the web inside of our homes. E.g., we might not want to do intensive research whilst out shopping; but at home, we might meticulously research and compare reviews for a restaurant.

Despite this, we cannot, and definitely should not, separate the web we view on our laptop from the web we view on our mobile device. Tim Berners-Lee is vehemently opposed to .mobi domain names for this reason:

Twitter is the closest thing I’ve seen to the “crystal goblet” idea applied to social networking. ‘The Crystal Goblet’ was an essay on printing by Beatrice Warde which discusses the idea that printing should be invisible; that printed words should do their best to communicate the information instead of standing in the way of it, so that the “vintage of the human mind” isn’t spoiled by swirling ampersands and looping descenders.

Ideas printed in a book and means of networking with people online are entirely different things, but I really like the idea that some of the principles in Warde’s essay could be applied to social networking. Most basically, online services should be as transparent and camouflaged to human need as much as possible. Search is a good example: Google has become like the Helvetica of the internet.

Twitter’s character limitation has endowed each character you type into the box with extra value, as there are only 140 you could use. Twitter is naturally integrated into life, being very location-centric. In the past week I could have joined a friend in a cafe, an impromptu picnic, or a party, based on information shared on Twitter. Twitter is basically transparent to conversation, limited to 140 characters. 140 characters is the perfect length: long enough for a sentence or a question, and anything longer belongs somewhere else (which is why Twitter hasn’t completely replaced my need to blog).

The social dynamics are different from instant message, if you bring followers into consideration. It’s a hybrid forum-im-social network, which gives it a lot of power, and a lot of potential. The main problem for Twitter is that at the moment it seems to appeal mainly to geeks, while Facebook has wide appeal for everyone. Maybe it’ll take longer for its appeal to spread, and it’s still in an early adoption period…