Design and Democracy

Abstract

I shall present a few thoughts about the relationship between democracy and design, and about the relationship between critical humanism and operational humanism. This issue leads to the question of the role of technology and industrialization as a procedure for democratizing the consumption of goods and services, and finally to the ambivalent role of esthetics as the domain of freedom and manipulation. The main theme of my lecture is the relationship between design—in the sense of projecting—and autonomy. My reflections are open-ended, and do not pretend to give quick and immediate answers. The university still offers a place to pursue these questions that normally will not be addressed in professional practice, with its pressures and contingencies. Looking at the present design discourse, one notes a surprising—and I would say alarming—absence of questioning design activities. Concepts such as branding, competitiveness, globalization, comparative advantages, lifestyle design, differentiation, strategic design, fun design, emotion design, experience design, and smart design prevail in design magazines and the all too few books about design. Sometimes, one gets the impression that a designer aspiring to two minutes of fame feels obliged to invent a new label for setting herself or himself apart from the rest of what professional service offers. I leave aside “coffee table” books on design that abound in pictures and exempt the reader from intellectual efforts. The issue of design and democracy doesn’t enjoy popularity—apart from a few laudable exceptions. If we look at the social history of the meaning of the term “design,” we note on the one side a popularization that is a horizontal extension, and on the other side a contraction that is a vertical reduction. The architectural critic Witold Rybczynski recently commented on this phenomenon: “Not so long ago, the term ‘designer’ described someone such as Eliot Noyes, who was responsible for the IBM Selectric typewriter in the 1960s, or Henry Dreyfuss, whose clients included Lockheed Aircraft and the Bell Telephone Company ... or Dieter Rams, who created a range of austere-looking, but very practical, products for the German company Braun. Today, ‘designer’ is more likely to bring to mind Ralph Lauren or Giorgio Armani, that is, a fashion designer. While fashion designers usually start as couturiers, they—or at least their names—often are associated with a wide variety of consumer products including cosmetics, perfume, luggage, home furnishings, and even house