Papers
The argument against design
Peter Hughes
June 2004
Over the last twenty years use of the term craft has been increasingly supplanted by the use of design to designate the heterogeneous cluster of activities that were once grouped under that broad rubric. While it may be argued that a rose would smell as sweet by any name, it is also true that names, as categories determining the inclusion and exclusion of the particular, structure the phenomena they describe. Changes in the names of things always reflect changes in material realities such as power structures and values. For this reason the shift toward the use of design is highly problematic and should be critically examined for what it reveals about these changes. Should we not be asking why designing, for example, a very attractive but scarcely functional citrus juicer for our bloated and uninhabited designer kitchens should be considered a more worthwhile human endeavour than designing and weaving a beautiful cloth or being able to imagine and throw a pot perfectly?
For the present purposes design can be defined in two main ways. The first is very broadly as 'any plan for action'. It follows from this that all people are engaged in design activity most of the time, when they plan their holidays, their gardens and arrange the furniture in their rooms.1 In this broad sense those activities designated as the crafts clearly involve design, but so too, do many others and the word cannot serve to distinguish any particular group of activities. A second sense of the word - which is the one that is most relevant here - is as it is used in the phrase industrial design. Industrial designers, and the design profession, did not exist before the industrial revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when the collapse of traditional craft and workshop based manufacturing and the rise of mechanised mass production necessitated the separation of making and designing activities. The word design is derived from the Latin word disegno, for drawing, and during the Italian Renaissance referred to the preliminary drawing or plan for a finished piece of work. 2 The distinguishing characteristic of design, then, is its separation from making, either as a preliminary or as an altogether separate activity with the making undertaken by others.
The use of design to replace craft is problematic in the first instance because it implies that crafts-persons did not previously engage in design activity, or that it was a minor part of their practice. To anybody familiar with the history of the crafts or the work of contemporary crafts-people this patently is not true. Even more problematic, however, is that it undermines one of the factors that set the crafts apart as unique and valuable practices. The crafts combine physical engagement with the material world, through the use of materials and the application of technologies old and new, with conceptual activity such as design and self-expression. For many crafts-persons an intimate dialogue between conception, design and physical crafting is central to their practice: the one feeding into and informing the others within and between projects. By so doing crafts practice undermines some of the most entrenched polarities in Western culture: the separation of intellectual and physical activity and of the spiritual and the material.
Design implies a disengagement from the material. It is true that designers are often very knowledgeable about materials and the processes used to manipulate them. It is equally true however, that while this knowledge may be useful it is not necessary, as the details of realising the design as a product are often the concern of other specialists, such as engineers and chemists. In recent years design has become very hip, some designers are now household names and designer products, from jeans to genes, are everywhere. Increasingly designers have become stylists and their role to develop products with distinctive appearances that will stand out in a market saturated with consumer goods. The work of industrial designers is determined by the meshing of manufacturing, advertising and media industries in an increasingly globalised world. Actual objects cease to be important as ubiquitous, niche marketed, sumptuously packaged and advertised products threaten to disappear altogether into their sophisticated packaging. The globalised capitalism of the early twenty-first century extends its hegemony by filling our world with its products: anticipating, stimulating and manipulating our desires. It leaves, as Hal Foster has observed, no space uncolonised, including human subjectivity itself.3
Like the design profession, the crafts emerged out of the industrial revolution in the nineteenth century. (The older craft traditions did not emphasise individual expression or experimentation with designs and materials.) Both are central to studio crafts practice. From their beginnings in the 19th century, the crafts did not necessarily entail a rejection of the social and technological changes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, or of technology per se. Rather, early crafts practitioners and theorists, such as William Morris, posited alternative possibilities to the industrialisation unfolding around them. This political dimension, even in its mildest form, is important to the heritage and identity of the crafts.
The practice of crafts-persons is very different from that of designers. The scale at which they work, usually in small workshops producing one-off or short-run production pieces, provides for that second distinguishing characteristic of crafts practice: a space for individual expression through the creation of unique objects. To be sure, many crafts practitioners run small businesses and are deeply concerned with making a living from their work. Yet many also subsidise their practice either by working in related fields such as education, or in entirely unrelated areas simply for the income. Implicit in the shift to design has been an emphasis on pragmatic business aspects of the crafts and a rejection of a supposedly unrealistic and nostalgic past.
To escape the tainted term craft many are now choosing to position themselves as either artists or designers, though neither of these terms truly accounts for what they do. The crafts are a unique set of practices, not a ghetto squeezed between art and design. Art practice has been successfully isolated from economic pressures by establishing itself as an autonomous sphere that is valued for and in itself, largely by emphasising the conceptual nature of the artist's practice. The crafts, with their profound integration of physical and mental activity, their emphasis on materials and skills and yes, their engagement with tradition, are not so amenable to such autonomy. Yet it can surely be argued that they, like art, have value independent of economic considerations; they cannot be entirely contained within and exhausted by them.
At best the change in nomenclature from craft to design is pragmatic, seeking the reflected glory of the design industry and its stars to support the case for continued funding of crafts practices, organisations and education. The change is, at worst, an attempt to absorb the crafts into the design industry in the name of economic pragmatism. The Practices Formerly Known as the Crafts have a unique value that cannot be subsumed into either art or design practice. While the word craft is not perfect - words cannot be expected to be - it does have a specialised sense in this context, a sense that it has gained through 150 years of history. And in this sense craft should be a rallying point in the defence of crafts practice. A change of name might buy some time but it will not, in the end, save The Practices Formerly Known as the Crafts.
Peter Hughes is Curator of Decorative Arts, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery
- Walker, John A, Design History and the History of Design, Pluto Press, London, 1990, pp31-32, Victor Papenak in Design for the Real World, 1972 has such an inclusive understanding of design and argues that design is simply problem solving.
- Greenhalgh, Paul, The History of Craft, in Peter Dormer The Culture of Craft, Manchester University Press, 1997, p.39
- Foster, Hal, Design and Crime, Verso Books, London, 2002, pp17-26
