Picture this. A design journalist, perhaps someone like Marcus Fairs or Naomi Cleaver, is raking through the bargain bin at Habitat. Like an alien sociologist on a fact-finding mission from Mars, they come across a “Design Classic”. They pick it up, admire its lines and fondle its contours – then herald it in their newspaper column.
All sorts of things, from the Kalashnikov rifle to Adidas Samba trainers have been cited as Design Classics. To a certain kind of design journalist, the classicism of the classic aligns with a certain kind of Britishness. Since we can’t readily own a Supermarine Spitfire or an AEC Routemaster bus, we buy a Dualit toaster, Dyson vacuum and an Anglepoise lamp instead.
Do we value them for what they are they are – how beautifully made they are and how much utility they have – or for what they signify? As Grayson Perry said, this is the “emotional investment we make in the things we choose to live with, wear, eat, read or drive.” Design Classics are charged with social meaning as well as design values: we hunt them down to say something about who we are.
So we head for the Habitat and the flea market, the brocante and the interiors shop. If we’re lucky, we might score a Hille Supporto task chair, some of Knud Holscher’s D-Line handles, and a run of Vitsoe 606 shelving. At the end of the search, we collapse onto an Eames chair … and pour some real coffee from a cafetière: Richard Sapper’s “9090”, made by Alessi.
On one level the search for the Classic is the search for making an ideal environment in a world that is not ideal; on another it is about finding out who we are. Arguably we belong to a “Designer” age which grew up in the 1980’s and became jaded in the 1990’s. Soon, we found ourselves looking back over our shoulder to rediscover Mid-century design, with its clean lines and fitting use of materials.
That era also retained a residual pride in the Made in Britain tag. Time was when firms such as English Electric made everything from toasters to locomotives and Lightning jets. But now British-made white goods are what you see lined up along the kerb, ready to be uplifted by the scaffies – replaced by widgets made in Turkey or the Far East.
Half a century later, design journalism affects scorn at little bijoux and “home accents”, yet delights in things like the Alessi “Firebird”, Starck’s phallic-looking gas lighter. But Firebird isn’t a Design Classic, not if design means the integration of ergonomics, economics and aesthetics to make something which works well, meets a demand, and whose appearance acknowledges and reinforces its function.
Firebird is a little piece of ornamental sculpture, a bourgeois gew-gaw like china ducks flying up the wall, or a wild boar’s head mounted on a plaque. The unshaven clown prince of design had a big laugh at our expense with the Firebird, just as he did with the “Juicy Salif”, a lemon squeezer that wouldn’t. That’s the difference between applied design and decorative art.
It also represents key themes in the 21st century: disposability, wastefulness, and the overwhelming victory of marketing over everything else.
The American approach to product design is marketing-led. The marketeers define the brief for new products by emphasising consumer research, trend research and style forecasts. Then the designers and engineers would be asked to create products in response - therefore the emphasis became stylistic and short term. That’s what happened when Braun was taken over by Gilette.
Before that happened, Dieter Rams noted that his approach at Braun was collaborative, bringing marketeers, finance, design and engineers around one table. This has been likened to the Apple design process under Jonathan Ive, which is perhaps why there are parallels between Rams' Braun products and those from Apple.
I’ve just finished reading Leander Kahney’s excellent biography of Jonathan Ive, in which he makes the point that Apple’s fabulous profits are a direct result of design quality. "We are really pleased with our revenues but our goal isn't to make money. It sounds a little flippant, but it's the truth. Our goal and what makes us excited is to make great products. If we are successful people will like them and if we are operationally competent, we will make money," he said.
Quality also means sustainability – a tag which is casually applied to everything these days.
Dieter Rams drew attention to an “increasing and irreversible shortage of natural resources” in his Design by Vitsoe speech in 1976. “I imagine our current situation will cause future generations to shudder at the thoughtlessness in the way in which we today fill our homes, our cities and our landscape with a chaos of assorted junk,” he warned. Of course, mankind knows how to make stuff that lasts; so if stuff doesn't last, it's made that way by choice.
As another of the greats, Kenneth Grange, pointed out, “That’s the force of plain commerce as opposed to manufacturing commerce, which is what happens when money is the biggest single driving force in every damn thing. You can make more money making something cheaply and selling it expensively than by setting out to make something new. And to that extent the sort of accountancy temperament that the ingenious villains of the City thrive upon has come to dominate every other branch of commerce.”
In 1968, the Situationists came to the same conclusion with their famous non sequitur: In the décor of the spectacle, the eye meets only things and their prices.
Some think that Design Classics are things which people can aspire to, such as the Eames chair – but by definition, exclusive things work by excluding you from owning them unless you can surmount the high barriers to entry – in other words, their expense.
Others think Design Classics should be objects that everyone can own, like a pair of Converse All-Stars. Those shoes represent America and rock n’ roll, in the same way that the row of toiletries on the bathroom shelf is a city skyline reduced to a scale we can afford.
On reflection, I wonder whether Jasper Morrison’s Hannover trams aren’t a far more democratic piece of design, since no-one owns a piece of them. You can’t buy or sell them; they just are.
