Opinion: there’s no excuse for excluding women from the design conversation in Milan, says Kieran Long who offers a ready-made Rolodex for a fairer male/female split.
This column is intended as a service to design, and to address a practical problem that is in acute focus during Milan furniture fair week. The problem is the shocking lack of women designers who are allowed to participate in product and furniture design, either as designers or voices in the discussion about the field.
I know how it goes. You’re organising an event or a commission, you go to your contacts book, you phone up the next in line and they happen to be male. I think there is without doubt institutional prejudice in parts of the furniture industry, especially in Italy, but mostly it’s just carelessness and laziness. It must also be because brands, PR people, agents, curators and media outlets can not think of any women to invite. Hence this column.
This idea first came up when my wife (Sofia Lagerkvist from Front) was invited to be on the jury of the new Young Talent Award, funded by the Be Open Think Tank. She was the only woman on the jury (out of five) and there was only one woman on the shortlist for the prize (Katharina Mischer of male/female duo Mischer Traxler, who also won the prize) out of ten. This simply doesn’t make sense: easily half of the interesting designers I can think of practicing today are women and many of them are in an emerging generation.
I then got into some Google research and recommend you do the same: look on the website of any of the big brands in furniture design and count the number of women they employ as designers. The results are shocking and wildly unbalanced.
I’m not going to get into all the reasons behind the systematic exclusion of women from the top table of design: there are people far more qualified than me to make that critique. I just want to make a list of great women designers on one of the world’s most important design websites, so that when anyone out there is trying to make a 50/50 gender split on juries, panels, rosters whatever (as all should), there is no excuse.
So, here’s your ready made Rolodex of important women in furniture design.
The most important and productive women in this field of design must be Patricia Urquiola and Hella Jongerius. If you need legends try them, or Reny Ramakers, Li Edelkoort or Ilse Crawford. To that you would add Front (read my above disclosure) as the highest profile all-woman design studio.
The above list is partial, focused exclusively on those who would identify themselves as part of the world of furniture and product design (so excludes architects, graphic designers, fashion designers, digital and interaction designers, etc). It’s western euro-centric and biased and I offer it without critical interpretation. But it’s a start. Perhaps in the comments people could leave more names, and this page can function as a starting point for anyone organising a talk or a biennale, making a commission or exhibition, or employing a designer for their product range.
We are of course all guilty, including national museums. The post-1945 gallery of design at the V&A has a grand total of four pieces of furniture designed by women (Sayaka Yamamoto, Ineke Hans, Alison Wales and Mary Little), two of which were are credited in partnership with men. There are other objects (ceramics and glass mainly) designed by women in that gallery, and many more pieces by women in the furniture gallery, but there is certainly a gender gap. We are working actively to address and correct that.
I’m not trying to make a big point here, just trying to provide a useful bunch of links. I’d like to thank my colleagues here at the V&A, as well as Amy Silver and Sofia Lagerkvist for their help and suggestions. Please add to this list in the comments, and let’s do a compare and contrast at next year’s Milan to see if panels, juries and design rosters have equalised.
Kieran Long is senior curator of contemporary architecture, design and digital at the Victoria & Albert Museum. He presents Restoration Home and the series The £100,000 House for the BBC, and is currently the architecture critic for the Evening Standard newspaper.
“Did I ever tell you about the time I met Walter Gropius?” Joseph Rykwert is leaning across a table in Daquise, the Polish restaurant in South Kensington he has been frequenting for nearly 50 years, a sparkle in his eye. “I was at the Royal Academy, and on the landing halfway up the stairs I saw Jane Drew, who I knew quite well, and Gropius, who I knew from photographs,” he says. “I walked up to them, and Jane Drew said: ‘Professor Gropius, this is Joseph Rykwert. Joseph, go and find Professor Gropius a taxi.'”
Rykwert gave me this finely turned anecdote on Saturday, at dinner after a symposium about his work at the Victoria & Albert Museum. This week in London has been a festival dedicated to the venerable architectural historian, focussed around the Mardi Gras of Tuesday’s award of the Royal Gold Medal by the RIBA.
Rykwert for me, although I have met him many times and was his editor at the Architects’ Journal, is a legend, a different order of individual to most other writers and certainly to myself. The Gropius story shows how he links us with the first generation of modernist masters, but he is also someone whose work (and that of his prominent students like David Leatherbarrow, Mohsen Mostafavi and Alberto Perez-Gomez, not to mention legion younger protégés) has tangible and I think growing influence in contemporary architecture. He is one of the few historians whose works are routinely assigned by teachers in architecture schools and all of us, surely, aspire to his literate, balanced prose.
The Gropius story also shows Rykwert’s appetite for gossip, and for the almost implausibly perfect story. Despite some claims to the contrary that I’ve heard in the last few days, I think Rykwert would like Dezeen and the writing found around the web, and I’m positive he’d be writing in these forums if he were beginning his career today.
The thing about giving the gold Medal to any critic, and especially one as widely read and respected as Rykwert, is that his opinions are unmistakably available to the rest of the world. It’s not really a question of convenient interpretations allowing generic and polite appreciation. You either agree with Rykwert’s words, or you don’t. You either believe, for instance, the idea that the plan of a Roman city had mythic origins giving each citizen a sense of their place in the cosmos, or you think he’s wrong and it was all about troop movements. And you can either deal with the implications of that insight, or ignore them.
Norman Foster could plausibly say of an architect and fellow Gold Medal winner like Alvaro Siza that he has the deepest respect for his work etc, without really having to face the question of their diametrically opposed views of what architecture is and how human beings find a place in the world. Perhaps all buildings are themselves ambiguous enough that we can elide even fundamental differences (with the possible exception of work by the progeny of the Prince of Wales school of architecture, or narcissistic and vocal numbskulls like Wolf Prix). Flattening difference in architecture probably results from a profession keen to avoid conflict within: the idea that one shouldn’t criticise a fellow professional.
In the big, if-not-exactly-happy-then-mutually-uncritical family of the profession that the Royal Institute of British Architects tries to bring together, it would have been interesting to know, for instance, what Dominique Perrault might have thought of Rykwert winning the prize (Rykwert says of the Bibliotheque Nationale de France in The Seduction of Place: “Demoralised by disaffection and labour problems, by inept book stack towers and disgraced by sterile, unhappy public spaces – both within and without – it seems a perfect candidate for a revised edition of Peter Hall’s Great Planning Disasters.”), or, say, any developer or architect involved in London’s Docklands (which Rykwert calls “socially confused” amongst other things in the book already cited).
A true critic is the unwelcome guest at a party of architects. Rykwert himself found that out the hard way when he began teaching architectural history at the University of Essex in 1967. What Eric Parry in the Gold Medal citation called the “architectural authorities” (in fact the RIBA itself) tried to close down this course because it stood outside their approved version of how architectural history should be taught and who might be permitted to learn it.
This is why Rykwert’s Gold Medal lecture on Monday night, which some found tortuous, was so important. He began by describing his work as a designer, and followed that with accounts of the three architects who turned down the RIBA Royal Gold Medal (Richard Norman Shaw, John Ruskin, who turned it down twice, and William Richard Lethaby) embroidering it with anecdotes so detailed that at one point I thought Rykwert was about to say no to it himself. His theme was the age-old problem of whether architecture was an art or a profession.
For Rykwert, this is a non problem – a false dichotomy. Some audience members at Monday’s lecture tried to ask him about where politics stands in relation to architecture, but Rykwert’s work stands for the idea that every act of design, or writing, is political. Design is a set of ethical commitments or reticences. We cannot absolve ourselves of responsibility for the full range of implications of a project – as Zaha Hadid tried to week – any more than we can choose just to breathe the oxygen in the atmosphere, but not the nitrogen and carbon dioxide. Rykwert has earned a place alongside Ruskin and others because of the clarity of his commitment to an adulterated but rich and meaningful view of architecture.
Kieran Long is senior curator of contemporary architecture, design and digital at the Victoria & Albert Museum. He presents Restoration Home and the series The £100,000 House for the BBC, and is currently the architecture critic for the Evening Standard newspaper.
Opinion:Kieran Long responds to the recent closure of ten London fire stations, arguing that architecture built for a specific purpose and location is far more valuable to a city’s sense of place than generic, pragmatic solutions.
Last week in London, ten fire stations serving the city closed for good. The buildings will be sold to the highest bidder and most likely turned into apartments. It felt like a tragedy. These civic places that housed some of the bravest of our citizens were suddenly surplus to requirements and, at a stroke, the men and women who served there had no representation on these high streets.
One striking consequence was the sight of beefcake guys openly weeping on the streets of London. It was as moving as it was unsettling. What kind of a society reduces its strongest and bravest to crying on each others’ mountainous shoulders? As the last watch ended at Clerkenwell, Westminster and Belsize stations, emotions ran high. Some anger, yes, which the trade unions stoked as best they could, but mainly resignation and powerlessness: a sense of the inevitable carelessness of contemporary cities.
Architecturally, many of these stations provided a curious setting for this human drama. Take Belsize station in north London, designed by an architect with the unlikely name of Charles Canning Windmill. With its pitched roof and tall dormer windows it has the villagey idiom of the suburban Arts and Crafts. It must have been terribly retro even in 1915 when it was opened, with the gleaming, noisy engines it accommodated seeming jarringly modern against this romantic cottage of a building.
At Clerkenwell station, the built fabric was more urban and assured. Clerkenwell fire station is the oldest in the country (it opened in 1872) and was part of a dense urban fabric even then. Piled on top of and behind the functional, fire engine-related accommodation are flats intended for firefighters and their families. On the roof of this six-storey building is a platform that was used during the war to spot fires as they broke out. There’s even a small football pitch for exercise.
To what degree does the architectural character of these fire stations contribute to the guileless sadness expressed by the people who used to work there? Profoundly, I would say. Good architecture marks out our territory; it gives us a place in the world in both literal and metaphorical senses. When that building is built specifically to a purpose that benefits all of us, the sense of loss at its demise is all the greater.
Can we say that the firemen of Clerkenwell felt more sad than those at Kingsland Road, whose building is a fairly banal Modernist box of beige brick and red concertina doors? I’m not sure what kind of quantitative research would be possible on this question, but it’s an intriguing problem. When a building articulates its location and purpose so clearly it can be a powerful thing, one that has its own momentum, and some are more powerful than others. Battersea Power Station feels like the most strident example of a building so perfectly suited to its time, place and function, that many have failed to transform it into anything useful since it closed down.
Something happens to the city when you replace the specific with the generic. I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the last couple of weeks, especially in view of MoMA New York’s decision to demolish the Folk Art Museum by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, which is an egregious example of the sacrifice of the precisely tuned, specific environment with a purposefully generic one.
It is here where the vandalism of that proposal really becomes clear. The Folk Art Museum was intended for a collection of folk art: small, unheroic things that needed low light levels. The galleries helped you concentrate on these objects, but the building also provided a sense of relief through its vertical connections.
MoMA‘s architect Diller & Scofidio proposes to use the same site for what they call the Art Bay, a large, abstract glass box. In its banal simplicity, it’s supposed to enable access for the public and give freedom to artists. In fact, it’s a classic misunderstanding of what a public place really is. Taking our place in society is not about being free from constraints, it’s about being free enough to commit ourselves to something: understanding our place in relation to others. It’s not about flattening or denying our differences by pretending they don’t exist, but instead about expressing ourselves clearly and tolerating and enjoying wildly differing approaches to life, culture, art and work.
In her Opinion piece about the MoMA plan on Dezeen, Mimi Zeiger argued that it is somehow sentimental of us to wish for architecture to endure, that it has a sell by date and we should all just accept obsolescence as a fact of contemporary life. In this regard, I think she’s wrong. Perhaps bad architecture or arcane, outmoded institutions become obsolete. But good ones adapt, become influenced by their surroundings and renew their commitment to their place in the world. The fire fighters of Clerkenwell were torn away from their place in violent, pragmatic fashion, and it caused pain.
MoMA and institutions like it should be the last to cause such a sense of loss because of pragmatic considerations. Without a sense of institutional and architectural character, our cities would not give us a place in the world. We would all be fire fighters, exiled to a modern, strategically located facility, out of the sight of our fellow citizens: mere service providers.
Kieran Long is senior curator of contemporary architecture, design and digital at the Victoria & Albert Museum. He presents Restoration Home and the series The £100,000 House for the BBC, and is currently the architecture critic for the Evening Standard newspaper.
News: the architecture and design department at the V&A museum in London has acquired Katy Perry Lashes (pictured) and Primark jeans as part of a new “rapid response” strategy for collecting objects as soon as they become newsworthy, to reflect the changing way fast-moving global events influence society (+ interview).
The V&A is thought to be the first major museum in the world to adopt such a strategy, which is radically different from traditional methods for curating design and manufactured objects.
“The rapid response collecting strategy is a new strand to the V&A museum’s collections policy, which can respond very quickly to events relevant to design and technology,” senior curator of contemporary architecture, design and digital Kieran Long told Dezeen.
Whereas the museum has traditionally collected objects that have already earned their place in design history over time through their inclusion in books and exhibitions, this new strategy allows the curators to respond immediately to contemporary issues.
“We felt that the world works a little bit differently these days,” Long explained. “There are global events that take place and have a bearing on the world of design and manufacturing, which give certain objects a certain relevance at that moment.”
Long and colleague Corinna Gardner invited Shenzhen citizens to choose an everyday object that could tell a visitor something important about present-day Shenzhen. “These objects together tell a story about that city in this moment and offer a broader, more wide-ranging portrait of one of the most interesting, fast-changing cities in the world today,” said Gardner.
One of the objects on show is a bra without underwire. “Shenzhen is the electronic manufacturing hub of the world and many of the factory workers are female,” Gardner said. She explained that security checks on the way in and out of the factory usually involve a metal detector so workers choose to wear non-underwired bras in order to avoid beeping on the way through and having to undergo a physical search, where there is a a high rate of abuse.
“For me, the idea that a non-underwired bra is a valued currency in Shenzhen is a design narrative that tells you about the sexual politics of manufacturing in that city,” added Gardner.
One of the benefits of this new approach is that the museum preserves objects that have little value and would therefore otherwise disappear.
“Sometimes it can be these very banal objects that can go away and are impossible to retrieve, because lots of valuable things are kept by people,” said Long. “The kinds of things that Corinna [Gardner] was collecting in Shenzhen, if you tried to do that in two years time, you wouldn’t find those things. They would have gone because the city changes so fast.”
The exhibition continues in Shenzhen as part of the Biennale until February. From April the V&A will dedicate a new space in its twentieth-century galleries at the museum in London to displaying objects they’ve collected with the Rapid Response approach.
Here’s an edited transcript of the interview with Kieran Long:
Rose Etherington: What is rapid response curating?
Kieran Long: The rapid response collecting strategy is a new strand to the V&A museum’s collections policy, which can respond very quickly to events relevant to design and technology. The traditional way that the V&A collects objects is based on the idea that an object would prove its value over time by becoming a part of design history, being frequently cited in books and so on. These ways of proving an item’s value obviously take time.
We felt that the world works a little bit differently these days. There are global events that take place and have a bearing on the world of design and manufacturing, which give certain objects a certain relevance at that moment.
Primark jeans
Rose Etherington: Can you give me an example?
Kieran Long: One example I have here in my office is a pair of Primark jeans. These jeans were made around the Plaza factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh, which collapsed in April this year, killing a thousand people. Those Primark jeans wouldn’t usually enter our fashion collections. Knowing that they were made in that factory, however, gives them a particular relevance and tells us something about contemporary manufacturing and about building codes in Bangladesh, about western consumerism, about lots of issues.
We thought that if we had those jeans in the museum, the day after that event, there’s something very visceral about that and the object’s ability to tell that story.
Rose Etherington: Was acquiring the 3D-printed gun an early application of this strategy?
Kieran Long: When Cody Wilson released the plans of the gun online, that was the moment that design changed. If we had had the rapid response strategy then, we would have printed one the next day probably and just got it on display immediately.
Rose Etherington: What else would you file under rapid response?
Kieran Long: This year The Telegraph newspaper ran some stories about working conditions in Tesco distribution warehouses. One of the things that they were talking about were the WT4000 wearable devices manufactured by Motorola that people in their distribution warehouses would wear. Basically they measure how many times you put something in a box on a production line.
Whenever I show this product, people are shocked that we think of wearable technology as the lovely things that you publish on Dezeen like Nike Fuel bands. Actually wearable technology is a reality for thousands of working people in this country. It’s a kind of neo-Fordist, time and motion study-type device that means people can get fired if they don’t put enough things in a box. A brilliant piece of industrial design but also a very frightening one.
The world’s first 3D-printed gun
Rose Etherington: What does this mean for the role of the curator?
Kieran Long: I don’t think it’s really any different to any traditional role of the expert curator in some ways. We are not stopping anybody from collecting in any way that the V&A has always collected. It’s just about moving more quickly and responding to events in the world. We have the tremendous luxury of being paid to develop rigorous world-class expertise about the objects that we collect.
I think that time and that investment we put into the expertise should also be focused not just on beautiful objects by famous designers and by leading artists, but also we should be looking at views of social and cultural change about manufacturing, about global supply chains, about things that really are a part of design and manufacturing that affect the lives of many people all over the world.
Rose Etherington: Does it also mean looking in other places for objects to collect than a curator traditionally would?
Kieran Long: Yes. It’s quite interesting, every time I talk about rapid response collecting internally, you find that some people in the history of the V&A museum have always done it this way. In 1989 when the Iron Curtain came down there was a big moment when the prints collection here collected a whole range of propaganda posters for the ex-USSR and the GDR and so on because they had the understanding that these things would disappear.
With the removal of that barrier, this Russian propaganda stuff became very important, so we now have one of the few complete collections in the world of propaganda posters and this kind of material. That was brilliant thinking, very reactive and very timely.
Rose Etherington: How will the objects collected with the rapid response method be displayed within the V&A museum?
Kieran Long: From April 2014 we’ll have a modest space by the twentieth-century galleries. We’ll have six cases that we will be able to use for these objects. People will come in and see things that have been in the news, things that have just rolled off the production line and been made into prototypes.
Rose Etherington: Do you think that the V&A’s future visitors will want to see Primark jeans?
Kieran Long: One of the things you realise when you work in an institution like the V&A, with 160 years of history, is you do think about the long term and I really believe people will look back and want to find a pair of Primark jeans in our collection. I really believe that. They will look back in the archives and newspapers and they will know the size of that business and the dominant position they have on the high street. Sometimes it can be these very banal objects that can go away and are impossible to retrieve, because lots of valuable things are kept by people.
The kinds of things that Corinna [Gardner] was collecting in Shenzhen, if you tried to do that in two years time, you wouldn’t find those things. They would have gone because the city changes so fast. Things are very fragile and not given value by people. What a great role for a museum to keep safe the things that might not otherwise be safe.
Rose Etherington: How does this fit into the V&A museum’s history?
Kieran Long: The museum itself is very self-consciousness about the way it does collect and document it’s own history. Hopefully people will look back and say there was this moment when the V&A got this new team with Kieran Long, Corinna Gardner, Louise Shannon and Rory Hyde and they all sat around and they had this new idea. They all stuck around for five or ten years and here is the group of things that they collected.
There are examples of that throughout the museum’s history. The famous circulation department of the 1950s and 1960s were collecting contemporary things in a really innovative way and that department was closed and integrated into other departments, but people are now doing PhDs about their work. They hold them up as an innovative, leading-edge group of thinkers at that time. Of course we aspire to that and we’re ambitious, and we want to be a part of this great museum’s history.
Rose Etherington: What about picking things which seem a good idea at the time but history processes otherwise?
Kieran Long: We may be wrong on some decisions but as long as we’re rigorous and careful and we follow our own parameters, it will have interest.
Opinion:Kieran Long argues that while it’s fun to be cynical about pop cultural artefacts like Katy Perry Lashes, a recent expose on the conditions in which they’re made proves that it’s vital for design criticism to move beyond semiotics.
I’ve always felt, in that completely unfair way we tend to judge big stars, that Katy Perry was the most cynical and dead inside of all the questionable female role models in the pop cultural landscape. The Popchips poster campaign she fronted earlier this year is burned into my retina. I saw her every morning at South Kensington Tube station, looking over the top of her sunglasses in a sarcastic gesture of astonishment at just how extraordinary a bag of crisps can be. Her fingernails were like talons and her steel grey eyes were framed in false eyelashes.
“All Katy Perry lashes by Eylure are handmade, 100% natural and each style is reusable,” reads the description on the box of fake eyelashes that sits on my desk as I write. This comes just before “Katy’s top tips”, the instructions, in the voice of the gazillion-selling pop star, about how to wear the lashes to their best effect.
There may be no more emblematic product of contemporary capitalism than Katy Perry Lashes, the false eyelashes endorsed by the megastar singer. They are made of real hair and the Cool Kitty style (one of three different designs available) of lash has an undulating profile, with longer and shorter hairs alternating and creating an effect that Katy Perry herself models in a photo on the front of the box.
Perry has a self-consciously plasticky, robot-from-the-1950s aesthetic that is always accessorised with false lashes, nail varnish and a comicbook hairdo. With this Stepford/Bladerunner thing, she seems to invite identification. Something about her plain, cybergirl-next-door look makes young women feel that they somehow should be her, or be like her. It’s no coincidence that most of her merchandise is products for the body: perfumes (a whole range of them), body lotion, makeup. By buying these objects, you are somehow transforming your physical substance into Perry’s. The lashes allow young people to get inside Perry’s body, to look out at the world through her eyes. This out-of-body experience is available for the reasonable price of £5.95 in high street pharmacies.
When her partnership with Covergirl cosmetics was announced, Perry was quoted as saying: “In addition to music, I’ve always considered makeup to be a powerful creative avenue of self-expression.” In Perry’s world, you have to design yourself, to draw a new you on your own skin: she’s the perfect articulation of how contemporary pop culture raises narcissism to an art form.
In the end, this is the psychological game for which the fake eyelashes are designed as a prop. In themselves they may not seem like interesting design objects: they derive their fascination for many of us from this pop cultural framing. The material things are simply two rows of hairs, each hair tied by hand and one-by-one onto a tiny piece of string. These are then trimmed and affixed to a small strip that can hold a latex-based glue. The glue fixes the row of hairs to the Perry wannabe’s own eyelid.
I probably wouldn’t have noticed these ephemeral bits of sub fashion design at all before I met Gethin Chamberlain, the journalist responsible for the remarkable expose of the manufacturing story behind the false lash industry, published in UK tabloid newspaper The Sun on Sunday 20 October. Chamberlain participated in a debate at the V&A museum about ethical manufacturing in the fashion industry, but just a few days before the event he published the story of the false eyelash industry. In it, Chamberlain traces Eylure’s production to small villages in Indonesia, where women weave the tiny lashes and earn as little as 20p per day for doing so. He describes how many workers in the lash industry (which is worth £110 million in Britain alone) do earn the legal minimum wage for that region (£50 per month) but that some factories outsource the work to homeworkers in more remote locations: many of these earn less than half that paltry wage.
As designers and critics, we can always enjoy being cynical about pop cultural artefacts like these lashes and idly patronise the industry around figures like Perry. I guess there’s a whole office devoted to selling Perry’s name, plastering it over merchandise from body lotion to perfume to iPhone covers to T-shirts. There’s even something reassuring for prospective businesspeople that it’s still possible to make money in this day and age selling fridge magnets with pictures of Katy Perry in the buff on them. If capitalism is that easy, I wonder why we aren’t all making more money.
But the story of these objects and their making is a sleight of hand, a trick that consumerism plays on us. So remote are we from manufacturing today that a company can celebrate the making of these objects as a positive marketing story (“handmade, 100% natural”), while indirectly employing workers in exploitative conditions. Thanks to journalists like Chamberlain we are all aware of this. If we are serious about design in the expanded field, we have to inquire after not just the semiotic resonances of these objects, but the human costs too.
Kieran Long is Senior Curator of Contemporary Architecture, Design and Digital at the Victoria & Albert Museum. He presents Restoration Home and the series The £100,000 House for the BBC, and is currently the architecture critic for the Evening Standard newspaper.
Opinion: in his latest column, Kieran Long argues that product designers should learn from architects and tackle civic issues like surveillance and security rather than “hide in their studios making something lovely.”
When was the last time you met a designer whose work is about justice or love, or truth? Universal values, ones that bear on the meaning of our lives, seem to be beyond the creative register of most designers of objects and things. In product design, I’m struck by how small the concerns of its practitioners tend to be.
I began thinking about this while teaching at the Royal College of Art in the Design Products department in 2011/12 with the designer Sofia Lagerkvist from Front Design. Our students were great and we loved working there, but when we set a brief that asked our students to work in north-east London libraries after the riots, there was noticeable resistance. There was a sense of some (not all) students imagining that this was not what they came to the RCA to do, and that it was not what they wanted their careers to be.
The conflict was certainly my fault. I found it difficult to have this conversation with them, because I’d never encountered this line of thinking in many years of teaching in architecture schools. It seemed self evident to me that such a brief was valuable. Architects do actually spend time thinking about a higher meaning for their work beyond the commercial and outside the simple “I like/I don’t” like paradigm of individual taste.
For architects, their education (ideally) gives students a sense of certain (yet often very vague) responsibility to the city itself and therefore that the citizen is important.
Architects will almost always speak about their higher role if given the chance: about their responsibility to provide a setting for civic life, to make a place meaningful for people and so on. Our cities might not be better because of it, but the conversation is there.
I’m not saying architects are uniquely civic minded in their work, either. We can think of plenty of works of digital design (games, websites, even interfaces) that take as their themes issues of access, citizenship, or even life or death. Graphic design does, too, through political posters and publications and many practitioners’ interest in the graphic culture of the streets.
In product design, however, sometimes it feels that its most important practitioners just want to be left alone to whittle away in their studios making something lovely, periodically being wheeled out to tell the story of their whittling.
The obvious retort to this is probably that product design is indeed the field most in bed with fast-moving consumer capitalism. The Ron Arads and so on of this world give salesmen new, beautiful and desirable things to sell, and that machine is necessary. Also, the media around design – with its systems of awards and juries and the institutions (like mine) that honour the good and great – are not all that interested in the world of design beyond the decorative. Honourable exceptions include the work of people like Justin McGuirk in the Domus of recent years. In the main, the role models we promote are those engaged with consumer products.
I know many designers whose work articulates our everyday experience in ways that are meaningful, that help us to understand and enjoy our daily lives. It is enough for good design to be things we cherish because they are beautiful, well made, or a pleasure to use, but it seems to me that our daily lives are dominated by barely competent and sometimes downright sinister works of industrial design, and I do not understand why designers don’t spend more time chasing down these opportunities. I mean, I hate the yellow plastic pad that I have to slide my Oyster Card up against when I get on the tube in the morning, and the ugly yellow system of handles and railings on London buses. I hate the incompetent way that cathedrals integrate gift shops into their lobbies and the excessive bulk of the common-or-garden wheelie bin.
More important, though, is whether there are any Dezeen readers whose work involves designing bits of the Ring of Steel terrorist defences around the City of London, or truckproof bollards, crowd-management barriers, riot-police shields, the casings for CCTV cameras, or the plastic spikes that they stick on top of the CCTV cameras to stop birds shitting on them.
The whole infrastructure of security and surveillance that dominates our experience of the city today (to take just one example) has gone untouched by the field of product design in any meaningful way. These are works of design that take justice and trust as their topic, and they make it pretty clear how those in power think of us as citizens.
Architects are often thought of as terrible snobs, but loads of them spend their days thanklessly trying to redesign low-cost housing for grasping, couldn’t-care-less developers or vainly trying to improve the standard of big-shed retail. Perhaps product designers dislike getting their hands dirty.
If the best we can say of a designed object is that they people can either buy it or not buy it, then the piece is nothing. It is worse than nothing, it just exists to make the wheels of a corporation turn, to encourage consumption and so on. Let’s be honest about that. I know that we all depend on this system working, it pays most of our wages etc etc, but let’s not pretend it’s why we get out of bed in the morning. Design could be so much more important than that. I just wonder if designers have the passion and desire to go out and design the things that define our lives as citizens and human beings.
Kieran Long is Senior Curator of Contemporary Architecture, Design and Digital at the Victoria & Albert Museum. He presents Restoration Home and the series The £100,000 House for the BBC, and is currently the architecture critic for the Evening Standard newspaper.
News: leading figures from London’s design institutions have warned that new immigration rules which make it harder for international students to stay in the UK after graduation could be a “disaster” for the city.
Kieran Long, senior curator at the V&A museum, described London as “a crossroads for great creative people to come and learn from their peers,” but warned: “Anything that stops that would be a disaster.”
Design Museum director Deyan Sudjic said: “London has really based its success on having 150 years of great art schools. They have been somewhat industrialised, got too big, and the government has also got quite curious about allowing students to stay once they’ve graduated. We need to be an open city, that’s what London always been.”
Last month the UK government announced changes to immigration rules that add “genuineness” interviews to the existing points-based hurdles students must clear if they wish to extend their leave to remain in the country once their course ends.
The new rules also introduce the power to refuse an application for a student visa extension where the applicant cannot speak English.
“It would be a disaster for London,” agreed Nigel Coates, professor emeritus at the Royal College of Art. “For creative people, London is the most attractive city in the world, partly because of its schools. But the government, confused as always, seems to be shooting itself – and us – in the foot.”
“It’s making it very, very difficult for AA students,” said Sadie Morgan, president of the Architectural Association school. “They give huge amounts to the UK economy. It’s a really big issue. It’s damaging and short-sighted of the UK government. They’re looking to be doing something aggressive about immigration but it is hugely damaging for schools like ours.”
Architectural firms can apply for visas on behalf of overseas graduates they want to employ, but Morgan said it was a “convoluted and expensive” process.
Sudjic added: “London is a remarkably successful place at attracting really smart, gifted young designers. They come to study here and lots of them build a practice here, not necessarily based on clients here, but on clients all around the world. London is a great place to be but it can’t be complacent and one of the things it has to do is go on attracting smart and new people and get them to stay.”
“London is welcoming, enterprising and full of opportunities”, said Max Fraser, deputy director of the London Design Festival. “It’s multiculturalism is one of its great selling points. We want to retain the best talent and the new visa restrictions are not conducive to that.”
London mayor Boris Johnson is understood to share the institutions’ concerns and convened a meeting with leading London arts schools this summer to discuss the issue. However, the mayor has no influence over national immigration policy. The UK’s Conservative government introduced the rules to appease backbench MPs, who demanded a tougher stance on immigration.
Dezeen spoke to leading figures in the design world during the London Design Festival last month to get their views on London’s position as a centre for design and the reasons for its current strength as a creative hub. The pre-eminence of London’s arts schools and its openness to immigration were the most-cited reason for the city’s standing as one of the world’s leading international centres for design.
“I think London has always been a place thats incredibly tolerant of new things, of people arriving in the city,” said Kieran Long. “We know that the city is based on immigration, and the people that are already here tolerating them and we’re really comfortable with that. In terms of design and architecture, we have some of the greatest schools in the world, a lot of people come to study here.”
He added: “I think there are threats to that, certainly we should keep London as open as it possibly can be and any political agenda that’s about closing that down somehow, to me, is anathema to what London really is.”
Sudjic said: “London is a great place to be but it can’t be complacent and one of the things it has to do is go on attracting smart and new people and get them to stay.”
Alex de Rijke, dean of the School of Architecture at the Royal College of Art, added that funding cuts and the rising reputation of schools abroad presented new threats to London. “Inevitably you produce a lot of architects that stay for a while then go and forge a career, whereas perhaps in the future that will not be the case as emerging economies all over the world will inevitably take over cultural production. So I see, not necessarily a lessening in the influence of education here, but certainly more of a diaspora of talent.”
“As other universities around the world offer amazing opportunities for the global student population, it’s increasingly difficult to be able to offer added value,” agreed Morgan. “The added value is being able to stay and work in the UK because of the huge kudos you get from working for UK practices.”
In an interview with Dezeen during the festival Patrizia Moroso, creative director of leading Italian furniture brand Moroso, praised London’s openness to students from overseas and contrasted it with the situation in Italy, where she says underinvestment in schools is leading to the collapse of its creative industries.
“The schools [in Italy] are collapsing,” she said. “When I see our universities and design schools, they are not the best in the world, they are not so important unfortunately. If you don’t give importance to learning, not immediately but in ten years you lose a generation of material culture.”
Last month the mayor of London proposed a new “London visa” to allow exceptional creative talents to bypass the lengthy new visa application system to set up businesses in London. He told the Financial Times (£): “It is a clear message to the elite of Silicon Valley or the fashionistas of Beijing that London is the place they should come to develop ideas, build new businesses and be part of an epicentre for global talent.”
“I’m really passionate about this acquisition,” says Long, who is senior curator of contemporary architecture, design and digital at the V&A and was heavily involved in acquiring the gun.
“It has caused a lot of fuss in the press, that the V&A would acquire something like this. But what I’ve been pleased about is that most people have seen it not as something deliberately shocking but as a really good signpost to where manufacturing might be going and the implications of new technology.”
The original prototypes did not arrive at the museum in time for London Design Festival, so the museum printed out a copy in London based on Wilson’s blueprints.
“We have guns in the collection; we have all the relevant licences to import firearms,” Long explains. “The only problem we have is getting an export licence. We’ve had the Department for Culture and Media here involved, we’ve had all of our technical services people involved. It’s been an immense bureaucratic effort.”
Wilson, a self-proclaimed anarchist, made the blueprints for the weapon available online through his Defence Distributed website, before the US government ordered them to be taken down. Long says that the politics of Wilson’s gun is what gets him excited.
“Something that I’m really passionate about at the V&A is to show the political backgrounds of things, even when they might not be palatable,” he says.
“I don’t believe everyone should be carrying guns and that’s not what we’re advocating here. What we are saying is this is possible and we might have to do something about it if we don’t want these things to happen.”
He continues: “The design of the gun and its distribution online is an act of politics as much as an act of design and that’s when I get really excited because I think design is something that can tell us about the world.”
Long believes the weapon has also turned the conversation about the future implications of 3D printing on its head.
“There’s been a lot of technocratic optimism around 3D printing, particularly in the design world,” he says.
“But when Cody Wilson released [the digital files for his 3D-printed gun online] it really transformed that conversation. It changed it into ethical issues around how we want to live together, how new technologies affect our relationships with one another. This gun, just sitting there, is pregnant with all of those questions.”
He continues: “Design for me is the thing that really focusses those questions. And when you see this thing for real you think: ‘All these things, can they go together and kill someone?’ The answer, simply, is yes.”
Kieran Long
We drove to the V&A in our MINI Cooper S Paceman. The music featured in the movie is a track called Temple by London band Dead Red Sun.
Opinion: in the first of his monthly columns for Dezeen, V&A senior curator Kieran Long argues that today’s obsession with authorship and celebrity “leads to serious imbalances in the way we see design in the world” and calls for an overhaul of the way design is curated in the twenty-first century.
Long, who was an architecture journalist before being appointed to curate design, architecture and digital at the V&A last year, points out that museums like the V&A focus on handmade, one-off objects at the expense of the mass-produced, anonymous objects that predominate in the real world. “The museum is more or less silent on the era of extraordinary Chinese manufacturing we are living through,” he says.
Below he sets out “95 Theses” for contemporary curation, including provocative statements such as “Ugly and sinister objects demand the museum’s attention just as much as beautiful and beneficial ones do” and “Museum curators have as much in common with investigative journalists as they do with university academics”.
Every morning, on the way to my office, I pass a sign that reads: “Whatever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.” At the Victoria & Albert Museum, the building is always telling you to do something. The didactic, Victorian and Edwardian decoration asks you to pay attention to nature, to design and manufacture, to the provenance of objects, even where your food comes from. But this particular sign is deeply serious in its upper-case, gilded typeface. It can be seen only by V&A staff, and most often by the people who empty the bins in the service road at the back of the museum.
As a motivational slogan, it’s espresso-strength, but it also betrays an emphasis at the V&A on the handmade, the artisanal and the one-off that design institutions, the media and designers themselves share. An object that an artist’s or craftsperson’s hand has touched has far more chance of making it into the V&A’s collection than something mass-produced or anonymous.
In our China gallery, for very good institutional reasons, there are no contemporary, mass-produced objects. The twenty-first century is represented by artisanal glass and works of conceptual furniture design: the museum is more or less silent on the era of extraordinary Chinese manufacturing we are living through. Dezeen has a similar emphasis: while the site is catholic in its tastes, the anonymous, the mass-produced and the semi-designed are suppressed in favour of the work of a fairly coherent group of designers.
There are all sorts of pretty reasonable explanations for this. The most banal is, of course, that star designers are click bait: celebrity matters, especially in the media. On the other hand, some might argue that designers’ work is simply better than the anonymous manufactured stuff that surrounds us. It’s easier to love the milled aluminium monocoque of Jonathan Ive’s Macbook than the awkward black plastic housing of a traffic light.
The emphasis on the authored leads to serious imbalances in the way we see design in the world. In future months, I will use this column to try to broaden the conversation about what design is, to try to move beyond a myopic interest in what designers and architects do, toward understanding what their work tells us about the world we live in. The others writing here (Sam, Alexandra, Justin and Dan) are all much better at this than me: I’m looking forward to reading their work.
But to begin, I want to share with you some thinking I’ve been doing about what a museum is for in the twenty-first century. Below are “95 Theses” about how museums might think about contemporary practice, offered in a spirit of generosity and for debate.
I have written these in collaboration with colleagues at the museum: Glenn Adamson, the head of research (who leaves the V&A soon to join MAD in New York as director) was instrumental, but Martin Roth, the director of the V&A, Christopher Wilk, head of Furniture, Textiles and Fashion and Corinna Gardner, curator of product design have all collaborated. The statements below do not represent the view of the museum, perhaps they even question the idea that the museum can have a singular, coherent viewpoint. We disagree among ourselves about many of them: all the more reason to put them out in the world.
The format of the 95 Theses is a gentle joke: the V&A’s relatively new, German director does not foresee a Lutheran Reformation at the V&A. But we felt that just as Martin Luther’s Theses were addressed at indulgences within an institution at a crisis point in its public role, so it was time for some clear statements that question our own received wisdom.
I hope the Dezeen audience will forgive this rather lofty start. In future columns, I want to write about what design tells us about how we live together in the world. I will type each column with all my might: about 70 words per minute.
Curating for the Contemporary: 95 Theses
The Public Realm
» A museum is a privileged part of the public realm.
» Among the museum’s most important roles is that of an agora – a space for the public to encounter itself.Museums should strive to maintain openness.
» Museums should accommodate difference.
» Museums should provide a setting for democratic encounter.
» Museums should constantly monitor the behaviours they allow and disallow.
» The museum must engage with the popular and the mass-produced: the material culture of every social class and situation.
» The public should be able to find objects from their own lives in the museum, and learn about how these things came to be.
» Museum viewership at its best is an active process, in which notions of truth are consciously tested and remade.
» Museums should encourage critical response and involvement by their visitors.
Historic Collections
» Our historic collections are only as important as we choose to make them.
» Interpretation flows around and through a museum’s collection, but the objects will outlast our interpretation.
» Every gallery in every museum necessarily reflects the contemporary world, through selection, interpretation, and display.
» It is difficult to judge which things the future will value, so our choices must be based on an object’s compelling relevance to today.
» This conception of relevance includes both the past’s value within the present, and present views of what was valued in the past.
» Geographically-orientated displays should reflect the current reality of the regions they represent.
Expertise
» A museum’s staff is a topography of different views and opinions.
» Our public voice should reflect this multifarious nature.
» The museum should develop institutional modesty.
» We should strive to be aware of what we don’t know, and constantly invite experts in to help us.
» Often those experts will be drawn from the general public.
» When visitors have more knowledge than curators, this should be welcomed.
» Nevertheless, the expertise of curators is real. Museums should not yield our traditional role as repositories of knowledge and judgment.
» Museums must make a special space for the public’s authority.
» A museum object is an incontrovertible fact in the world. It is interpretation that is necessarily unstable.
» We should actively mount challenges to our own curatorial expertise.
Democracy
» A museum is a civic institution.
» Museums should be instruments of social justice.
» This means behaving democratically.
» We are a long way from achieving democracy in museums.
» Museum collections are extensive archives of unstated prejudice – beset with sexist, racist, and class-based distortions.
» Museums must work to redress this legacy, employing techniques proposed within feminism and post colonialism.
» Staff should advocate for democracy within their institutions.
» The museum can have meaningful contributions to political processes, and should seek out these opportunities.
» Twenty-first century practice is increasingly ‘flat’ in character.
» We take seriously the postmodern critique that sought to dismantle hierarchies of fine art over craft, high culture over low.
» This means that no domain of creativity is inherently superior to any other.
» Painting and sculpture have no more cultural value than knitting, cooking, and bicycle repair.
» The vernacular and the academic are equally valuable.
» Museums will need to reshape themselves if they are to reflect this reality.
The Global Museum
» Given the opportunities provided by technology, more museums than ever are in a position to reach a global audience.
» There is a danger that this wide-ranging influence will reproduce existing power asymmetries.
» Museums with a global reach must consider deeply the terms on which this universality was established – such as colonialism and imperialism.
» If they can be truthful about these historical realities, museums can be invaluable tools of cultural diplomacy.
» Every instance of cultural diplomacy should be mutual.
» Museums should not be in the business of unilaterally exporting anything (treasures from the collection, local cultural assumptions, models of expertise, etc.).
» In matters of repatriation and other controversial issues of patrimony, are museums sufficiently objective to be the final arbiters?
Kieran Long is Senior Curator of Contemporary Architecture, Design and Digital at the Victoria & Albert Museum. He presents Restoration Home and the forthcoming series The £100,000 House for the BBC, and is currently the architecture critic for the Evening Standard newspaper.
Following the huge success of Sam Jacob’s regular opinion column, we’re proud to announce that four more world-class writers are joining us as columnists: Dan Hill, Alexandra Lange, Kieran Long and Justin McGuirk.
They’ll each be contributing a monthly column starting this month (apart from Alexandra, who will be joining us in January due to her commitments at Harvard).
Sam Jacob’s next column will appear tomorrow and after that we’ll publish an Opinion piece by one of our writers every week.
Here are some biographical details of our new writing team:
Dan Hill
Designer and urbanist Dan Hill is CEO of Fabrica, a research centre and design studio based in Treviso, Italy. Hill has previously worked for Arup, Monocle, and the BBC and has written for Domus magazine. His blog cityofsound.com covers the intersection between architecture, design, culture and technology.
Alexandra Lange
New York-based architecture and design critic Alexandra Lange has contributed essays, reviews, and features to publications including Domus, Metropolis, New York Magazine, the New Yorker blog, and the New York Times. Lange is a featured writer at Design Observer and has taught architecture criticism in the Design Criticism Program at the School of Visual Arts and the Urban Design & Architecture Studies Program at New York University. She is a Loeb Fellow at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design for academic year 2013-2014.
Kieran Long is Senior Curator of Contemporary Architecture, Design and Digital at the Victoria & Albert Museum. Most of his career has been spent as a critic, writer and editor for a wide variety of publications about architecture. He was deputy editor Icon magazine, editor in chief of the Architects’ Journal and the Architectural Review, and is currently the architecture critic for the Evening Standard newspaper.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
