Books: Hello World: Where Design Meets Life

The impact of design has been all around us ever since we started making things. As a verb and a noun, the word “design” has a double meaning. The writer Penny Sparke has said that it is not just a feature of our surroundings, it is also the creative process that makes them possible.

Do we need another book on design? There are many large, lavishly illustrated chronicles of the great white men who gave us iconic cars, gadgets, radios and an awful lot of chairs. As Alice Rawsthorn, the author of this book and former director of the Design Museum, says, design has long been a boy’s club.

There are also the more critical works of Stephen Bayley, Peter Dormer, Deyan Sudjic (the current director of the Design Museum) and many others. Rawsthorn is the design critic of the International Herald Tribune and the themes in her book have developed from articles on contemporary design.

Her starting position is that the design process continues to be trivialised and misunderstood and therefore misused. (Think of terms such as designer ice cream.) She is also concerned with how design with an ethical purpose can improve lives in the 21st century.

Rawsthorn has to do what all design polemicists do, which is grapple with defining design and what “good” design is. She looks at how “design thinking” has been used over the centuries, from the Chinese emperor Ying Zheng to English pottery manufacturer Josiah Wedgwood and Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple computers.

She emerges from this with a belief that it can meet the challenges of population growth, climate change and diminishing resources.

Broad spectrum

Rawsthorn cites examples that include the logo for the London 2012 Olympics, espresso pods and monobloc chairs as well as “super-normal” products such as Bic biros and Cricket lighters.

With regard to “bad” design, she considers the ethics of design, either by a product’s usage (the AK-47) or its afterlife (a plastic toothbrush floating in the Pacific). She feels that something designed to take human life cannot be seen as good. Does that mean that other great designs that helped defeat fascism, such the Spitfire fighter plane and the Soviet T-34 tank, are also bad?

In other chapters, Rawsthorn continues to draw examples from a broad spectrum. She is excellent on the concept of alpha brands built on design; Wedgwood Queensware, Thonet chairs, Braun, and Apple computers. Her comparison of the use of an apple as a logo by Apple and Ann Summers is witty and incisive, as are her forays into the imagery of computer design and typography.

Throughout the book, she has to return to the familiar canon of design history to contextualise her arguments for the general reader. At times, it becomes a bit standard but, then again, you do have to know about German industrial designer Dieter Rams to understand the aesthetic of Jobs and Jonathan Ive, the British designer who is part of Apple.

Ethical design

What stands out is Hello World’s panoramic range, which skilfully combines the historic and the contemporary. It argues that no matter how beautiful a thing may be, its value can, and should, be diminished if it arrives over-packaged, requires too much energy to produce and run it and is incapable of degrading in a landfill site.

Rawsthorn is at her best when discussing the contemporary challenges facing design and production; how to remain green, ethical and profitable. She picks up the baton laid down by Victor Papanek (author of Design for the Real World) and considers how new generations can apply design thinking to designing for “the other 90% of the world” who live outside the advanced economies and cites small-scale examples of how this can be done, such as community-owned printers.

She concludes by arguing for designers to be more open, more compassionate, bolder, humbler and more diplomatic. Rawsthorn argues forcefully for a world where design thinking and well-designed products do make life better, especially when form no longer follows function for so many of them.

It is a shame that the design of the book itself is so poor, with vertical page numbers and virtually no margins.

Although Hello World deliberately omits architecture and could have said more about the fashion industry, globalisation and product authenticity, it is a timely critique of design within our brand-obsessed world of cheaply and unethically produced disposable goods.

Mark Suggitt is the director of the Derwent Valley Mills World Heritage Site