Big Little ThingsActually, design hates a depression
Check out Murray Moss’s fantastic response to Micheal Cannell’s NY times article, Design Loves a Depression.
Here’s a little taste:
“Design tends to thrive in hard times,” says Mr. Cannell. No, it doesn’t. It tends to suffer, like any of the other humanistic disciplines. New ideas do not get championed or realized. Leadership turns to market-driven accommodation.
Or course, design will of necessity respond creatively to an economic downturn. It always has. And many talented, world-celebrated designers (including Hella Jongerius, Marcel Wanders, and Fernando and Humberto Campana, of whom Cannell is so disdainful) will no doubt articulate a myriad of rich, generous responses that are problem solving and practical, as well as responsive to monetary and material concerns. These and other great talents will also address through their work other areas of our lives, those human concerns we rely on the arts to embrace, including our emotional, intellectual, cultural, sociological, and political well being.
But apparently these humanistic concerns are of no interest to Mr. Cannell. Or at least I sense that he, along with Julie Lasky, anachronistically consider such topics irrelevant to design. He quotes Ms. Lasky: “If household furnishings are to avoid landfills…it will be about finding the sweet spot between affordability and durability.†That’s it? The only measure of good design is whether it’s cheap (by whose standards, by the way?) and sturdy? Ikea and Target are to be our official standard-bearers of good design?
Yes. Abso-friggin-lutely.
