the death of the designer

The Death of the DesignerAuthor(s): Adam RichardsonSource: Design Issues, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Autumn, 1993), pp. 34-43Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1511672 .

Accessed: 21/10/2013 15:36

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The MIT Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Design Issues.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 129.82.28.124 on Mon, 21 Oct 2013 15:36:35 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mitpress

http://www.jstor.org/stable/1511672?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Adam Richardson

The Death of the Designer

Introduction Industrial design is in crisis. Whether it recognizes it or not, it is in a crisis of identity, purpose, responsibility, and meaning that has largely gone uncommented upon by the practicing community, a fact that is, or should be, disturbing in itself. The viability of the profession as it is currently practiced needs to be seriously questioned, its boundaries examined, and its values reconsidered. After the fall of classical modernism and the supposed flounder- ing of our current paradigm post-modernism, what follows? Where does design end and engineering and invention begin? Or are they a single continuum with artificially imposed categories? What are the impacts of design's products in societal and cultural contexts, and are these impacts important? These are not new issues, but emphatically these questions, and more, need to be answered before the industrial design profession becomes a ghostly parody of what it claims to be.

The death of the designer is upon us and has been for some time. Papanek, and the Italian Counter-Design movement of the 1960s were all early warnings which have since been muted. In fact, there are two deaths: one promising reincarnation, the other damnation

a seemingly paradoxical combination, but one that is inevitable in today's climate. Both deaths must be faced if we are to avert the crisis.

This crisis of identity is simply that industrial designers do not do what they generally say they do. That is, they have much less control over the process of product development than one might be led to believe by the common rhetoric. In addition, how users and cultures respond to the products which designers help create is not well understood. Most conventional theories tend to exag- gerate the designer's influence over these interactions, and exactly what the designer's responsibilities are toward the culture as a whole must be given closer attention.

To begin, two fundamental roots of design - form and function - must be dug up and examined before being replanted in translated form. These roots are ancient and perhaps a bit worse for wear, having endured many inspections. Certainly much has been

_ _ _ _ _ _ 34



recorded about the relationship of these two basic concepts. They have been treated as either distinct-or inseparable, one at the expense of the other, or treated with absolute parity. There exists a neces- sity for a new examination, a new equation, to rethink their relative balance in light of the crisis now with us (a crisis they helped to insti- gate) and to trace the consequences of this new interpretation to the boundaries of industrial design.

Of all the manifestos concerning the relationship of form and function, the Bauhaus maxim "form follows function" is surely the most famous, as well as being the most sweetly succinct. It is also one of the most misinterpreted. It is not a statement of importance, granting function a greater stature than form, but one of process: function must be discerned before form can be fashioned and, implicitly, to do otherwise would be nonsensical.' However, in the effort to repudiate the erroneous myth of the subservience of form, form has been made more important than function, almost to the exclusion of the latter. The myth of the maxim has replaced its reality, and thus brought appearances firmly to the fore in the collective consciousness of the industrial design community. For evidence one need only observe, with few exceptions, when designers discuss a product, the function and the reasons and consequences for it are barely mentioned; its form is almost solely reviewed. This seems ironic when considering the lengths to which designers will go to separate what they do from "styling," that dirty word that belittles the profession. Just how function has come to be so exiled within industrial design will be examined later.

The semantics argument First, let us consider what is perceived to be the more consequen- tial of the two factors: form. Surprisingly little has been written about the interpretation of form in the field of industrial design, least of all from the perspective of designers, who are notoriously reticent to critique the profession or themselves as a group. The fact that this particular aspect of design has received so little attention is even more surprising when it is recognized as one of the most dom- inant factors within the field.

Product semantics is one of the most developed and well-known recent conceptions of form, and several different versions of the precise meaning of the phrase have come to prominence. The modern semantics movement exists in two general schools: "process" and "function." The process school uses semantics to guide the user as to the proper use of a product, an approach that has been labeled "scientific" by its proponents (which accordingly is supposed to give industrial design more credibility within the business community).2 The function school, on the other hand, uses the semantics of form to express the functions of the different elements of the product. To my mind, this school is journeying down a dead-end street for reasons that will become clear later. Much of the work func-

Design Issues: Vol. IX, Number 2 Springl993 35

1) Ralph Caplan, By Design: Why there are no locks on the bathroom doors in the Hotel Louis XIVand other object lessons (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1982), 32-33.

2) Reinhart Butter in an unpublished lecture as part of the Progress Lecture Series in San Francisco delivered on May 30, 1991.



tion semantics has produced has been frivolous. For example, Stewart Brand, in his book on MIT's Media Lab, states that while judging a national contest of student design work: "One contes- tant waxed eloquent about the 'product semantics' of his submission. He meant the handles were cleverly designed to look like handles."3 It was from one school that a number of products appeared with wavy surfaces signifying water. Or was it sound? Or heat? Ultimately, shallow "one-liner" metaphors such as these quickly become wearing. Likewise, the early experimental work of this type done at Cranbrook had more complex goals in mind but, as so often happens, the popularization of the approach caused much to be lost. Specifically, it was stripped of its engagement with culture and, with this, much of its vitality. Product semantics is thought by many design theorists to be passe, out-of-fashion, and perhaps even obsolete. Indeed, ideas similar to these were investigated in the 1950s and 1960s (without the "validation" of communication theory), and ideally should have become givens or foundations on which to build.4 There is far more to a product than these schools allow. They confine themselves to communicating function and method of use, both of which are undoubtedly important, but only constitute part of the meaning and impact of products.

The semantic approach of both the process and function schools has held to the modernist model of closure, of a singular, logical meaning that is discerned upon apprehension of the product by the user. This is a comfortable model, since it belies certainty and locks the designer and user into a controlled, predictable dialog. To critique this belief, let me refer to the literary and social critic Roland Barthes, whose essay Death of the Author inspired the title of this one. Barthes contends that in literature each reader of a text will interpret it in subtly different ways, imbuing it with meanings not considered by the author. In fact, he goes so far as to say, that the concept of the author is a fallacy: the reader is the real author who "writes" the text as he/she reads it. For the reader to be accorded his/her true stature, states Barthes, it must be at the expense of the death of the author.5

Since the two "traditional" semantic approaches are grounded in communication theory, it is appropriate to use Barthes's literary theory in order to counter them and observe its effect.6 Instead of the constricting model described earlier, we have one that is open- ended, unpredictable, and outside the designer's influence. The newly invigorated user "reads" the form and function of a product using an interpretation that is independent of the one that the designer intended. As with text, there is obviously considerable congruence, but the interpretation remains individual nonetheless. In other words, the "birth" of the user must result in the "death" of the designer.

The first death In order to make this process clearer, let us take a product and examine it in light of these concepts. The common U.S mailbox is

3) Stewart Brand, The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT (New York: Penguin Books, 1988), 80.

4) Donald Norman, in his book The Psychology of Everyday Things (New York: Basic Books, 1988), gives a lucid description of this fundamental foun- dation. The fact that the book was deemed so innovative is worrying.

5) Roland Barthes, "Death of the Author," in Image, Music, Text, trans. and ed. Stephen Heath (New York: Noonday Press, 1988),142-48.

6) Henrietta Moore, in Reading Material Culture, ed. Christopher Tilley (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, Inc., 1990), 112, argues, a. . . material culture can be considered as a text because it is the product of the inscription of meaning and meaningful action on the world." Here, "product semantics" is meant quite literally, treating products as texts and interpreting them similarly.

36



an object with which most people are familiar. It sits unassuming on many street corners. Like a parking-meter, it has an animal- like presence. Its "paws" press on the concrete, its mouth gets pulled open, and the mail tossed down its belly, later to be "pumped" by the mail carrier. It is a familiar, whimsical image. It is interesting to compare the U.S. mailbox with the English mailbox with which I grew up. The latter stands shoulder-high or taller, massively cast of iron. Painted bright red, it is embossed with Queen Elizabeth's sign: ER II.

Why the differences? Each nation has its own distinctive mailbox, shaped by cultural forces. Americans have a distaste for big government, so the U.S. mailbox, a potential symbol for over- bearing governmental omnipresence, is comforting, cute, disarmingly innocent. It has none of the stature or solidity archi- tecturally speaking of, say, city hall. In contrast, the English mailbox is dominating, unmovable, and now "classic." The English encour- age (or tolerate) more government control and like to pretend that the monarchy still plays a part in running the country. Their mailboxes reflect these inclinations. The evident age of the design harkens back to an era of British prosperity and dominance and serves as a nostalgic reminder of past glory.

These, of course, are just my responses; a result of my experi- ences and biases as a designer layered on top of my English upbringing with its class consciousness. Theoretically there are an infinite number of interpretations possible, although, in reality, a poll of mailbox users would probably find interpretations that had some congruence with mine while still exhibiting individuality. All interpretations are equally valid. Whether and how many of them were intended by the designer(s) of the mailbox is unknown, but the degree to which they could control the multiple meanings that have since come to be associated with mailboxes is only partial.7

It is also interesting to note how the mailbox fares on conventional semantic levels. Its simple process of use is successfully communicated by the pull-handle, but on a function-semantic level it is a total failure: where is the "mailness" of its form? The only indi- cation of its function is given by the text pasted to its flank. Otherwise, convention and common knowledge are the only means of recog- nizing the object as a mailbox, over time it has become an icon.

Here then, is the first of the two deaths of the designer; this one in the metaphorical sense that Barthes meant it for the author. The commutability of meaning that an abstract form permits means that the designer has no way of conveying a singular meaning and that precise meaning only. Products can only communicate mes- sages within boundaries of probability; there always remains a degree of uncertainty as to how the symbolisms will be decoded by their users. The designer's self-made pedagogic role is therefore denied, not only its hegemonic nature, but its entire existence. Upon release into the use-place, it is impossible to know what will

7) Paul Ricoeur, in Reading Material Culture, 94, calls this distanciation, a process that he recognizes in reading both texts and material culture. He states: "the text's career escapes the finite horizon lived by its author. What the text says now matters more than what the author meant to say, and every exegesis unfolds its procedures within the circumference of a meaning that has broken its moorings to the psychology of its author." (emphasis mine) Here we may substitute "products" for "text," and "designer" for "author."




become of the project, although it has ostensibly been the designer's task to control and limit the impending interaction between culture and project, a task that cannot be performed well at a draft- ing machine. In this, the designer is granted reincarnation - instead of paralysis, there is liberation. Once it is acknowledged that the play of interpretation on the object is unceasing and unstoppable, a great burden is lifted. We shall see later what this might imply for the practice of industrial design.

Looking beyond conventional semantics So far, our analysis has been at the individual user-product level, with the concentration being on the "form" half of the "form follows function" equation. Before describing the second death of the designer, it is necessary to widen our scope to the level of culture as a whole. Here, function becomes more prominent when all the individual responses combine to form a number of cultural ones, and create a complex symbiosis between the individual and the mass levels. With this expansion of scale comes a shift in emphasis. Culture deals with categories of objects rather than individual products, so the specific form of a product becomes essentially insignificant; its function becoming the major factor and cause for attention. Here, there is already a clue as to the second diminution of the designer's role. Designers deal with individual products, not the category (for example, "Sony Trinitron" rather than "televi- sions"), and consequently appear less important on the greater cultural scale.

The cultural response to a particular function takes place broad- ly in three ways. The first and most immediate response is that meanings come to be associated with the function of the object. For example, the telephone has numerous "mythical," in the Barthian sense, attachments that range from over-extended teenage gossip- ing to telemarketing, from information transmission (human and electronic communication) to ordinary calls of friendship, as well as strong associations of power, control, and subservience. Since the telephone has been with us for a period of time, some of these myths are derived from the second type of response: the socio- cultural impact of the product over time. When the phone was first introduced, it was not considered useful in the domestic sphere (who would you want to call?). Now, it is one of the most ubiq- uitous products, and to live without a telephone is almost unimaginable. Its assimilation into society is complete, and we are absolutely dependent on it. Our lives, our world is structured around knowing that it is available. Surely it is not possible that Alexander Graham Bell foresaw what would be made of his invention or how it would evolve to create and fill niches as though it were a living organism. This brings us to the third response, which is a technological one: functions are not static. Rather, they change and mutate, crossing over into other areas of technology and, in turn,

_ _ _ _ _ _ 38



are impacted by other applications. Telephones have not remained simple voice-to-voice communication devices, but have spawned other uses and products, such as Gallup polls, modems, answer- ing machines, and so forth.

In summary, function generates responses that vary perhaps even more than responses to form, although they are of a different nature. For the telephone and other domestic technologies (TV, radio, remote control, microwave ovens, vacuum cleaners, etc.) function, not form, is the primary reason for their importance. Our lives are affected and organized in certain ways because of what they do, not what they look like. For better or for worse, mass-produced objects have ramifications within society that are as concrete as they are far-reaching. Just as the brain constantly restructures itself to accommodate new memories, society and culture constantly shift as they absorb the impacts of products.

It is clear that at the culture-product level there is an unpredictability to the response, just as there is at the user-product level. It appears to be an unavoidable pattern. The conventional process semantic and function semantic approaches are inapplicable here for this reason alone, even if they don't address the culture-product relationship. This is a significant lack, for it is at this level, where function is the primary force, that the designer's second death becomes evident. Whereas the first death is a direct response to form, the second is tied to function.

The second death The culture-product interaction is a postpartum activity, so to speak, one that takes place after actual production. However, it is necessary, also to examine the development phase of the product, as well as the prevalent model for the practice of industrial design. Here, the designer is hired to create a form for a mechanism and/or structure conceived of by an engineer, the function of which has been determined by another. The end goal is mass production of the item.8 Clearly, the industrial designer has no say in the base function of the product, only in how its function is to be execut- ed by the user. This is the outer limit, the prescribed perimeter of the designer's influence within the functional realm; his/her task is to mold the function into a useful and useable form that is attrac- tive to the purchaser. For a large number of products, including the domestic items mentioned earlier, the extent of the designer's input is to annually create a new shell for innards that remain essentially unchanged from the previous year's exterior iteration (aside, perhaps, from an increase in dubious "features"). It is here that the capitalist ideology reaches its apotheosis, or perhaps nadir.

In this light, the word designer seems empty. The myth of the individual, heroic creator (which designers themselves have done little to dispute), is simply barren of truth. Designers have far less impact on the final product than they like to think, instead they are

8) This definition excludes the feminist critique that the history of industrial design has ignored crafts as a valid part of design, a realm that women have occupied to a large degree. This is con- sciously done since it is just this "classic" definition which I am cri- tiquing, in part, advocating a return to a pseudocraft process, i.e., involvement of the designer at the initial stages.




part of a team involving others that have done much of the work before the designer begins.9

This exclusion of the designer from the initial decision on function is a partial cause of the second death, which comes about because the function of the product is out of the designer's hands, both dur- ing development and afterwards when it is introduced into the culture. The designer has little opportunity to define the function while working on the product, as it is a priori, a given. Once the product has been manufactured, the forces of culture take over and the function becomes redefined, once again, outside the designer's control.

The issues surrounding this second death are more problematic than the first. By being excluded from deciding function, designers are prevented from having any influence on the ideological issues concerning products and can only respond to them in a cursory, detached fashion while remaining, nevertheless, implicated in them in a very direct way. While the ways in which a culture will react to a particular function are unpredictable, it is important for designers to be aware of the ideological context within which they operate if they wish to influence it. For it is only at the initial stages that the designer has any chance of affecting the ideologies that are to be propagated by the production line.

What are the ideologies involved here? Products and their attendant functions are not accidents; they exist for specific reasons. The issue of existence, of why a product is created at all, is not one that has been carefully examined, despite its undeniable importance in the product design process.10 Jean Baudrillard states that function is the "degree-zero" or non-ideological elemental con- stituent of a product in a capitalistic society where products cannot present themselves as simply purveyors of functions." No mass-produced items are neutral - all are ideological containers. Function contains the deeper, even more sinister, ideologies and social ramifications. It is decided by those who make such decisions that a particular function or technological innovation is worthy and/or marketable, and so a product is conceived to perform it. An invest- ment of time, money, and effort is made. These are all ideological concerns. In a capitalist, bourgeois-dominated society, much of the ideology will involve itself with the continuing entrenchment of these values"2 and of wealth (itself an ideology that often takes precedence over all others). A form is consequently given to the product, continuing the ideologies that were initiated with the function, although almost invariably it will mask them. But form is inevitably implicated in the myth and, along with it, so is the designer. By creating the form for the function, the designer vali- dates in the eyes of the public not only the product, but also the process and ideologies behind it. (This act of confirmation is evident in the earlier example of the mailboxes.) Whether, and however, the form is decoded by the user, it contributes to the implementa- tion and absorption of the ideologies by presenting them in such

9) Adrian Forty, Objects of Design (New York: Pantheon Publications, 1986), 241-42. Forty gives a harsh critique of the myth of the designer's omnipo- tence and also touches on the ideology question. He states, "To put the para- dox in the most extreme terms, how can designers be said to be in com- mand of what they do, but at the same time merely be the agents of ideology, with no more power to determine the outcome of their work than the ant or worker bee?"

10) Since this essay was written, Tony Fry's "Against an Essential Theory of Need: Some Considerations for Design Theory" appeared in Design Issues, VIII, no. 2 (Spring 1992), 41-43, and is an insightful investigation of the fabrication of needs by "the system" that leads to products that fulfill these "artificial" needs. Of course, the boundary separating an artificial need from a genuine one is, at this point, extremely blurred.

1 1) Jean Baudrillard, Design After Modernism, ed. John Thackara (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1988), 173. "Degree-zero" is a reference to Barthes's Writing Degree Zero, although a similar argument about the ideology of myth can also be found in Barthes's Mythologies.

12) Roland Barthes, "Myth Today," in Mythologies (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1992), 37. Here, Barthes investigates the favoring of myth toward the bourgeoisie.

40



a way as to make them appear unquestionably natural or, con- versely, by distancing, obscuring, or distracting them.'3 But these ideologies and their cultural environments are inevitably present- ed in one form or another (perhaps even becoming realized by their conspicuous absence). The product is a convex ideological mirror. It shows the user contiguous with his/her culture (since the object, and its designers, are within a culture), and this image is altered and/or created by the reflective ideological curvature of the object itself.

The issue here is that of control, or rather the illusion of having it when in fact it is in the hands, of others. In the case of the first death, designers work as though they have control over the product once it enters the use-place. Although, as we have seen, this is not so. With the second death, designers are primarily passive spec- tators when it comes to initially deciding the function of products, and conveniently submerge this fact by stating, "I designed that." The sweeping scope of meanings indicated by the word design is at times confusing. Here, it is obscuring and preventing the profession of design from grasping the crisis at hand.

Living with the deaths How is the crisis -of industrial design to be averted? As I have defined it, the crisis arises from the current profession not recog- nizing the two deaths I have described. If we are to quell the crisis, the deaths must somehow be acknowledged and lived with. Below are some preliminary suggestions as to how to tackle the ramifications of the two deaths.

In terms of the first death, where form is the issue, it is evident that we need to find a new theory of form to describe the user-product nexus. It should be one that embraces the unpredictability of interpretations to be found in the use-place, one that takes a pos- itive rather than negative attitude toward the flexibility of meaning in design's formal manifestations. Certainly, guidelines on how to instruct a user as to the function and process of operation are valu- able tools for designers, and the development of such tools is one of the central goals of product semantics. However, as with any tool, the end goal is not the tool itself, but the use of the tool to create something beyond it, achieved through skill and individual expression. In other words, product semantics should provide the framework for the expression of other issues and ideas, the semantics themselves becoming "transparent." To use the linguistic analogy that assigns the title "product semantics" to its extreme, semantics are like words and consequently a collection of semantic tools, like a dictionary. Dictionaries are useful references but, in Heidegger's words, they have little to report about what words spoken thoughtfully say. However, once the basic need of clearly communicating use has been taken care of, designers may also elu- cidate through form their emotional and intellectual stands on the


13) Barthes, "Myth Today," 127-31. Here, Barthes describes the naturalizing effect of myths in more detail and in a broad- er context than I am using it here.



products at hand with the full recognition that their feelings will not necessarily be interpreted as they mean them. As with art, the emotional excitement comes not from the dull predictability of each viewer seeing exactly what the artist intended, but from find- ing themselves and their own readings within the work. This is not to say necessarily that design is art, since the issues and working processes of each discipline are usually quite different, but design would do well to place greater emphasis on the emotive, even poet- ic, roles that products can have in expressing the meanings that mass-manufactured objects have in technocratic cultures.

The designer does not have a free hand in this activity, however. The meanings are limited in scope by the manufacturers of the products. For instance, a manufacturer of TVs producing a new model would not look kindly upon a designer expressing his/her negative critique of the social effects of television upon this country's political discourse. Nevertheless, the designer might feel this way and thus is morally bound to question rigorously whether he/she is willing to participate in a process that will bring, in their mind, a damaging product into being.

This point brings us to function and to the second death. As discussed earlier, designers essentially have no role in deciding whether a product should be distributed on a wide scale. Television is, of course, an easy target, but given the deteriorating state of our environment, escalating poverty and social division, over-popula- tion, and enormous medical costs (caused partly by expensive technology that is a mainstay of high-profile design), it is more important for designers to place themselves in a position of social consciousness and responsibility. The unpredictable behavior of technology within culture makes soothsaying a difficult activity, but it is one that nevertheless must be undertaken, for it is only at the earliest stage, before production begins, that the designer has an opportunity to prompt the attendant ideologies in a direction that will likely benefit both the individual user and the culture at large. Allthough the play of culture on a function is a vital activity, it would be irresponsible to let it occur without any checks, monitoring, or criticism. As those who, in principle, have each user's and the culture's interests at heart, it is only natural that designers should be included in performing such analyses.

Unfortunately, this is not the case, probably for the simple reason that designers have, almost universally, little or no training or experience in performing such research. As Clive Dilnot has noted, designers have historically not felt compelled to read phi- losophy, ethics, economics, the social sciences, or even design history.'4 Despite the fact that these disciplines all comment on the very social relations that designers deal with on a day-today basis, few designers are aware that these fields have any bearing on the profession, or if they are, they take little action to implement their knowledge. An ethics of industrial design

14) Clive Dilnot, ID Magazine Jan/Feb 1992), 32-34.

42



sorely needs to be defined and developed, and not left in its current nebulous state.

The correction of this deficiency will take time. Likewise, so will the recognition that designers should be present at the very con- ception of the product and the reevaluation by designers of their roles in the process of "form follows function." While the imple- mentation of these solutions to the current crisis of industrial design will be experimental, even problematic, such reassessment is imper- ative, for the path that industrial design is currently following leads only to its bastardization.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Mark Bartles and Dave Orgish for their help- ful comments on an earlier draft of this essay. Both the essay and I have benefited greatly from them.

Design Issues: Vol. IX, Number 2 Springl993 43 _____



the death of the designer

Documents