|
In her opening remarks at the 2006 Art Center Design
Conference "Radical Craft," Chee Pearlman dissed my job.
The esteemed former editor of I.D. magazine (and the conference's
Guest Program Director) compared "junk mail" -- form letters
that try to look like personal correspondence -- to a hand-written
thank you note from her niece, disparaging the former as "fake
craft." While it's hardly a fair comparison -- pitting a corporation
against a relative -- the distinction immediately disappointed me.
I make my living designing "junk mail" and "spam."
The conference was only minutes old, and already I had learned that
my craft was "fake."
Of course, Pearlman's comment was not the only indication
that perhaps I didn't belong there. The Art Center Design Conference
was a very expensive (standard conference fee: $1,250), corporate-sponsored
event that lured an audience with luminaries such as fashion designer
Isaac Mizrahi, Apple product designer Johnny Ive, Pulitzer-nominated
author Dave Eggers, and graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister. The
venue was accordingly showy, even a little Las Vegas. Walking into
the main session hall, you passed through a rainbow-colored curtain
of mist glowing with the GE logo. Steelcase supplied all of the
conference seating -- rows and rows of brand-new, high-tech task
chairs and stylish leather armchairs -- and the souvenir conference
tote was a full-size messenger bag from Timbuk2.
It was odd then, in a venue so pumped up on high-tech
and corporate endorphins, that the conference theme was a re-valuing
of "craft," a word usually reserved for basket weaving
and needlepoint. Keynote speaker and The New Yorker writer
Adam Gopnik described craft as an almost Zen-like, spiritual undertaking:
something learned by doing, intelligent without being intellectual.
Jane Olson of Human Rights Watch related how knitting enabled her
to find common ground with traumatized Bosnian refugees while providing
them with a means of income long after her visit was over. Martin
Fisher of non-profit KickStart discussed how the company's portable,
human-powered irrigation pump is helping sub-Saharan African farmers
out of poverty. Radical craft indeed, these practices are actually
changing people's lives in substantive ways.
As much as I was in awe of the parade of spacecraft
designers, oceanographers, inventors, and Academy-award-winning
filmmakers who rounded out the first day, I couldn't help but wonder
how any of this marvelous stuff applied to my own design practice.
With the possible exception of advertising (which is much sexier),
direct marketing is the most bald-faced and disposable form of marketing.
A direct communication from the corporation to the consumer, it's
one step up from telemarketing, and low on the totem pole of design
disciplines. If "radical craft" is, as it was defined
throughout the conference, the act of creating something that solves
a problem for someone else, then direct marketing is its ultimate
perversion. Not only does it substitute a corporation for a person,
but it inverts the relationship so that the only problem it solves
is the company's need to make a buck. By the end of the first day,
I felt like a shallow poser, a huckster, a hack. Yes, design could
change the world, but by that standard, I could hardly call myself
a designer.
Thankfully, the second day of the conference included
some less weighty presentations: Claudy Jongstra's incredible felt
creations, made from the wool of her flock of 200 rare sheep; advertising
guru Jeff Goodby's impressive reel of hilarious television spots;
Isaac Mizrahi working the room like a manic talk show host, and
the achingly lovely everyday poetry of former United States Poet
Laureate Billy Collins. At times, the conference's reach was so
broad, that it risked turning into an overly grandiose survey of
all of human creation, without respect for important differences.
For example, it seemed disrespectful to frame both the subsistence
needs of poor farmers and the haute couture demands of rich socialites
as "design problems." Some projects are clearly more vital
and necessary than others; but some hierarchies, such as those between
the disciplines, could use debunking. Is there necessarily more
craft in a poem than in a piece of felt?
It was this idea -- that every kind of design has
its own “craft," that there is artistry in even the lowliest
of tasks -- that redeemed my conference experience. I was even inspired
to stop joking that I design "spam." Direct marketing
is actually the most customizable, one-on-one form of mass communication.
It only seems "fake" when it hasn't been delivered to
the right person. And it doesn't have to be ugly or cheap-looking.
Like anything else, it can be "crafted" to show care and
consideration. The best design advice came from Jonathan Ive talking
about his own practice, "We focus on a small amount of stuff
and care about the few things that we do." It's easy to lose
that focus in the daily flurry of deadlines, difficult clients and
office politics. The conference helped me see that underneath all
of the details, my obligation as a designer is to get down to the
root of the problem, in order to see it anew. Now that's radical.
This article originally appeared
in the Summer-Fall, 2006 issue of CMYK.
Reprinted with permission.
< back to art
|
