Design and Culture

This week the Design Museum in London hosted a Design School Summit, “Design School and the Cultural Turn”, reflecting on the relationship between design schools and the cultural sector, and in particular, design museums. The event comprised a series of speakers from Europe and the USA questioning how curatorial practice should be affected and influenced by the needs of design schools and positing the notion of the museum as a potential hub for design communities that enables new forms of debate and exchanges.

The event kicked off with a presentation by Justin McGuirk, Chief Curator of the Design Museum who reflected on the journey of the museum from 1989 as a place concerned, at its inception with commerce and the instantiation of cultural values in everyday objects, to one which is concerned about the relationship of design to the urgent issues of the day. He presented a vision of the current museum as a ‘palace of projects’, where the process and thinking of designers might be exposed rather than objects displayed without context.

This talk was followed by Maya Dvash from the Israeli Design Museum in Holon. Maya presented a view of the design museum as a place in which students of all ages come, some to work in the Design Lab, others to view the exhibits. The vision presented here was of a museum that reaches out to the community that it serves to build skills, working with academics and teachers to achieve this.

Jan Boelen, artistic director of Z33 in Belgium and Atelier Luma as well as curator of the 4th Istanbul Design Biennial talked of design as a form of enquiry, power and agency, all pervasive but unable to offer solutions to all of the challenges now facing humankind. His view of design education is that it now has to navigate new constraints and challenges about relevance, adaptability, accessibility and finances. The theme of the biennial, “School of schools” seeks to question and reframe education models, looking at the potential role of museums as laboratories, studios or academies by working alongside learners and educators.

Marco Petroni, Professor from Abadir in Italy, then put forward the provocation that the school is a form of protest against the overwhelming global culture. His discussion was around possibilities and choices and the search for new modes of possibility that put designers on the edge of a field. Marco argued the continuing relevance of the 1970’s experiment by designers and architects, “Global Tools”, an anti-urban, radical movement that set out to develop individual creativity in an anti-school which included such acts as Riccardo Dalisi conducting spontaneous education experiments with poor children and students in Naples. His vision is radical, the school as a co-creational space in which knowledge is exchanged among teachers, students, lecturers, craftspeople, visitors, exhibitors and researchers from near and far creating a multi-layered learning space. There is a need to rethink the design profession in the age of the Anthropocene, and changing economic and social contexts.

Alexandra Midal, from HEAD in Geneva, questioned why images are so prevalent and designers so silent about the theory that underpins their practice, expecting objects to speak for themselves. She put forward a model of design school where culture and design and not separated by silence, but reconciled in daily practice where culture, theory and practice are treated non-hierarchically. Using the example of the films and images of Ray and Charles Eames, Alexandra discussed design by accident and the power of editing and translating designed content to imbue it with meaning, proposing that as Charles Eames said “most scholars, scientists, curators aren’t trained to want to face the process of re-understanding a subject that they know in any terms except the written word”.

The penultimate speaker was Constantin Boym, Head of Industrial Design at the Pratt Institute New York and founder of the design company Boym Partners. Constantin put forward the view of the museum as classroom, contextualising the museums of NY as places that attract millions of visitors each year in a city where industry has declined massively. He talked about a collaboration between the Brooklyn Museum and the Pratt Institute in which the aim was to bring students into the museum to design for public use. The outcome was a set of benches, each responding to the exhibits in different rooms, though ultimately sited in the lobby area. Similar collaborations between students and the Cooper Hewitt museum have resulted into the design of an exhibition and a series of designs for people with Alzheimer’s disease. Each project drawing in curatorial staff as well as teaching staff.

The day ended with Clive Dilnot, Professor of Design Studies at Parsons School of Design in New York. Clive began by discussing the relationship between design and culture, putting forward the view that understanding the complexity of these terms can, potentially open up possibilities for new practice and pedagogy. Culture he said, quoting Zygmunt Bauman is “a knife pressed against the future”…”about making things different from what they are; the future different from the present”. Culture is seen as active and questioning. For design he turns to J.C. Jones who put forward, in the 1980s, the view that designing as an activity which needs to be continuously redefined and which will survive only if it is used to “transform our lives, on earth, and beyond”. Using examples of the power of good and bad exhibitions to influence the understanding and practice of designers he questions whether the future of design education lies naturally in relation to cultural institutions. His conclusion is that design must be viewed as culture, and culture as design. Culture offers design a way to understand the world and design offers culture, materialisation, reconfiguration, positing or propositioning, mediation and negotiation, sensibility and ethics.