Viewpoint
Thinking about design at the edge of the millennium
Victor Margolin
History of Architecture and Art Department,
University of Illinois at Chicago, Box 4348,
Chicago, IL 60680, U S A
lthough we speak broadly today of
A differences between 19th and 20th
century ways of thought, if pressed,
one is hard put to find a singular moment of
transformation on the cusp of the last millenium
when the paradigm of one century collapsed and
a new one was born. We do, however, see in the
latter decades of the 19th century, a steady
buildup of projects, both scientific and artistic,
that literally erupted in the early 20th century as
a radical challenge to what came before. Quan-
tum theory, the theory of relativity, the indeter-
minacy principle, Cubism, Futurism, Supremat-
ism, Dada, the stream-of-consciousness novel,
twelve-tone music, and totally new media such
as film, come to mind.
While our experience of this millenium does not
suggest that the year 2000 will itself be a singular
apocalyptic moment, it seems entirely possible
that in the early years of the next century we will
witness changes as momentous as those that
occurred in the first part of this one. It was
therefore appropriate and courageous for the
Cooper-Hewitt, America's designated National
Museum of Design, to have organized a confer-
0142-694X/92/040343-12 © 1992 Butterworth-Heinemann Ltd
ence on the theme of design at the edge of the
millenium. The conference was held in the
historic Great Hall of the Cooper Union in New
York on 15-18 January 1992.
Director Dianne Pilgrim told the audience in
her introductory remarks that the Cooper-
Hewitt is in transition as it prepares for its
centenary in 1997. Begun as a repository of
drawings, prints, books, and decorative arts, the
museum has now begun to think about design in
broader terms that include, but are not limited
to, traditional museum objects or any objects at
all. As part of this process, Susan Yelavich,
Director of Education, organized 'The edge of
the millenium' as a means of initiating a dia-
logue that would ultimately play back into the
museum's own reflection on its goals. The fact
that the conference was organized by the
National Museum of Design, placed it in rela-
tion to the museum's possibilities of action, thus
giving it a heightened significance as a rhetorical
occasion.
The conference brought together architects, de-
signers, critics, historians, and theorists over an
evening and three days to speculate on the
current state of design - here embracing
architecture, products, and graphics - in the late
20th century. The intellectual framework of the
conference and the core of its concerns stemmed
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primarily from the experience and discourse of
designers in the developed world. In her intro-
ductory remarks, Susan Yelavich made refer-
ence to postmodernism, poststructuralism, and
deconstruction as important modes of thought
that influenced her choice of conference
themes. Robert Campbell, architecture critic for
the Boston Globe who served as a key consul-
tant for the conference, echoed this postmodern
orientation with his references to a world of
simulations, a contingent future, and the loss of
a clear master narrative. As the conference
progressed, however, the sense of a postmodern
moment was not shared by all speakers and, was
countered particularly by the Italian designer
and theorist Andrea Branzi who made an im-
pressive argument for a 'second modernity'.
The lack of consensus as to how to characterize
the current cultural moment was indicative of a
number of competing visions and arguments
within the conference. And that was one of its
particular strengths. Susan Yelavich had assem-
bled a much greater range of speakers - disting-
uished here by differences in their social, cultu-
ral, philosophical, and technological views, as
well as their rhetorical strategies - than one
customarily finds at a design conference. In fact,
this conference was particularly differentiated
from the conferences organized by professional
design organizations by its emphasis on culture
as a significant framing device for the presenta-
tions and discussions. While this emphasis
occurs frequently in conferences on
architecture, it happens less often when product
and graphic design are discussed.
Following Robert Campbell on the first even-
ing, political scientist Michael Barkun gave an
overview of millenarian thought in the last
century and offered his own vision of the next
millenium. Barkun took particular note of
Francis Fukuyama's 'end of history' argument
344
which, he said, suggests a future devoid of
conflict but characterized by crashing boredom.
He also emphasized the expectations of disaster
that have characterized millenarian thinking
along with the past faith in the ability of science
to produce a rational order.
An important point of Barkun's was that many
people have become disillusioned with technol-
ogy as a redemptive force. One need only recall,
as he did, some of the disasters of recent years,
Three Mile Island, Bhopal, Chernobyl, the Ex-
xon Valdez oil spill, to realize that much can go
wrong with technological plans. At the end of
his talk he presented several likely develop-
ments for the future which included a loss of
faith in technology, a renewed attraction to life
in small communities, and revived attention to
artistic and spiritual values.
These statements recall specific social move-
ments of the 1960s and 1970s, notably the
American counterculture and the intermediate
technology movement inspired by the work of
Fritz Schumacher. One might have presented a
millenarian vision in other ways; in fact, a
number of presentations in the following days
evidenced a good deal of faith in cities, new
technologies, and global interrelations which
did not fit comfortably in Barkun's vision.
Fully embracing the notion of the millenium as
an apocalyptic ending, Tibor Kalman, whose
views have stirred heated debate in the Amer-
ican graphic design community, and Karrie
Jacobs, a critic for the design magazine Metro-
polis, called, in their multimedia slide and video
show, for an end to design. The rhetorical mode
of the conference had shifted from Barkun's
scholarly lecture to Kalman and Jacobs' media
blitz show and tell, a format that characterizes
many design conferences. They presented a
Black and Decker plastic device that separates
Design Studies Vol 13 No 4 October 1992
coffee machine filters as the embodiment of all
that is trivial and wasteful in product design.
This, they said, was the level of problems that
designers were capable of solving.
One could sense in their presentation a great
deal of frustration and dissatisfaction with the
social role of the designer. In other forums,
Kalman has been quite outspoken about what
he sees as the triviality of much design activity
and the designer's lack of initiative in shaping a
design agenda. He and Jacobs threw down a
gauntlet to the conference with their assertion
that design had become an inconsequential
practice. There were no direct responses to this
challenge from any of the other speakers in the
succeeding days although Andrea Branzi spoke
about the project of design, i! progetto, as the
Italians conceive it, as being something ex-
tremely significant embedded in the deepest
notions of who we are.
1 The state of architecture
The differences in modes of presentation during
the conference made it clear that there is no
single design culture in America or elsewhere
within which connections between views and
positions can be easily made. In the past fifteen
years or so, architecture, which was the topic of
the first day, has claimed the high ground
among design practices as the one with the
greatest intellectual discipline. It is to architec-
ture that literary theorists, psychoanalysts, and
philosophers have flocked and within
architecture that debates about practice and
meaning have taken on the cast of a Talmudic
discourse with all the complexities of interpreta-
tion and issues of morality such discourse en-
tails.
Historian Rosemarie Bletter gave a brief over-
view of utopian practice in the 20th century,
leading the audience through Frank Lloyd
Viewpoint
Wright's Broadacre City, the Town of Tomor-
row at the 1939 World's Fair, and the 1964
World's Fair in New York. Little research has
been done on the latter event and Professor
Bletter pointed out how few of the anticipated
projects of just over 25 years ago were fulfilled.
The technological optimism that characterized
that moment, notably the enthusiastic promp-
tion of atomic energy, has, as Professor Barkun
noted, been severely tempered. And projects
conceived in an era of eonomic optimism, such
as underwater hotels and automated farming,
no longer retain their lustre. Embedded in her
talk, though not explicitly developed, was the
thesis that visionary thought is very much of its
historical moment. The 'instant cities' of the
British architectural group Archigram, the arco-
Iogies of Paolo Soleri, and the cobbled together
jerry-rigged domes of Drop City in Colorado,
all prominent visions of the 1960s, have been
supplanted by other, less comprehensive views,
of how we might live. In fact, Peter Cook, one
of the central figures of Archigram, made a
presentation at the conference with his col-
league Christine Hawley, on London in which
they transmuted Archigram's visionary in-
terventions into more modest ways of working
in the interstices of urban life where only smal-
ler changes seem possible. In some sense,
Cook's continued belief in change, even on a
reduced scale, supports Rosemarie Bletter's re-
ference to German philosopher Ernest Bloch's
definition of utopia as a critique of the present
that marks what might be achieved.
In her introduction to the next group of speak-
ers, whose topic was the spiritual essence of
cities, Susan Yelavich humanized the city, refer-
ring to New York and Berlin as once authentic
cities that were pathologically damaged. Some
of her imagery and that of several other speak-
ers in this session, was drawn from the writing of
John Hejduk, Dean of the School of
345
Architecture at Cooper Union. Susan Yelavich
was the first of several speakers to cite Hejduk's
statement that 'In order to become well, the city
must breathe the thought of the feminine.'
The presentation of Alan Balfour, the new
director of the Architectural Association, made
reference to the city as the site of complex
negotiations between necessity and desire. On
the one hand, he argued, world industry must
put the most advanced construction technology
to use to satisfy the pressing demands for hous-
ing; on the other, evidence of what he called
'authentic desire' could be seen in more diminu-
tive manifestation such as neighbourhood
shrines and small gardens in Japan. Unlike
Barkun, who envisaged a future of decentral-
ized small communities, Balfour claimed that
the city would dominate our imagination in the
future.
Peg Birmingham, a philosopher from Pace Uni-
versity, who acknowledged her limited under-
standing of architecture, espoused Hejduk's
meditative w r i t i n g a s a way of shaping the
discourse about cities, particularly in gender-
related terms. Her talk was extremely difficult
to follow because she used a rhetorical strategy
that relied on an alternating sequence of asser-
tions and images which forced the audience to
listen in an unfamiliar way. At the same time,
she presented encapsulated accounts of ex-
tremely complicated feminist arguments that
have been developed and understood among a
particular conversation community but that can
be obscure when stated in an abbreviated form
to a general audience. Laced through her talk
was a series of poignant images that were meant
to take on rhetorical value but failed through
their intangible relation to her arguments. She
recounted quite vividly, for example, strong
scenes of street life in Harlem, including a
346
merchant's murder of a boy who stole some
jewelry from his store.
My difficulty in grasping Professor Birming-
ham's arguments began to clarify a much larger
issue of how contemporary social discourse is
conducted. Particularly in academia, but also in
the professions, issues and problems tend to be
framed in terms of isolated conversation com-
munities, groups who speak primarily to each
other, often evolving their own terms, frames of
reference, rhetorical strategies, and issues.
Clearly, Peg Birmingham was addressing a
general audience from within the discourse of a
particular conversation community, academic
feminism. She found a connection to the com-
munity of architects through the work of John
Hejduk, which similarly served as a bridge for
the next speaker, philosopher David Krell.
Professor Krell focused on a project of Hejduk's
called the 'room for thought', a square silo with
seats in the four corners. For Krell, the 'room
for thought' like Bloch's notion of utopia, is a
space of possibilities. At one point, he characte-
rized planning as a withdrawal of what wants to
be thought about, suggesting the diminution of
possibilities inherent in action but in some way
arguing more strongly for a sense of loss (since
he is a thinker rather than a planner) than a
practitioner might.
Krell's engagement with architecture as a think-
er rather than a maker and his positing of a
relation between thought and action within
which the latter might be viewed as a closing out
of possible thought, highlights some of the
difficulties that architectural theorists who draw
their ideas from literature, philosophy, or
psychoanalysis have with the act of building.
Such theorists are often extremely impatient
with the limitations of planning and strive to
posit architecture as something apart from
Design Studies Vol 13 No 4 October 1992
building as a way of keeping open a seemingly
wider and more profound mode of thought.
Hence, it is no surprise that Hejduk's writings
would have been of such interest to both Birm-
ingham and Krell since Hejduk posits
architecture in a space of possibilities that is
unfettered by the presence of the everyday.
Hejduk himself was the final speaker of the
morning. A large man, his presence too seemed
of a greater scale. He spoke, one might say, with
a rhetoric of prophecy, releasing his words
slowly with a calming rhythm. A prophet need
not anaslyse, justify, or rationalize. The prophet
makes assertions with a spiritual force that
places them beyond the conventions of critical
response.
Hejduk presented his equation of the spirit with
slow time through his portrayal of life in the
Bronx during the 1930s. This, for him, was a
moment filled with what he called 'spirit time'.
The trolley car was the seminal image. It moved
slowly through the cityscape, enabling its riders
to fully experience the journey. It stopped at
places which had a numinous presence. Hejduk
described the Bronx of his youth as a frugal
place. With its profusion of vacant lots, it had an
air of emptiness.
The quality of feeling that Hejduk introduced
into the discussion was more palpable than that
offered by the previous speakers. Here was an
example where the mixing of rhetorical
strategies served a productive end. It made clear
that this conference was not likely to generate a
set of conclusions on the basis of common
discursive conventions. Instead it would de-
mand more from the audience who would have
to both recognize and engage with the extremely
different rhetorical strategies of the speakers.
If the morning programme can be seen as a
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reflection on the philosophical and spiritual
sources of architectural practice, the four case
studies in the afternoon, London, Los Angeles,
Mexico City, and Tokyo, should be viewed as
the testing ground for the loftier premises of
architectural thought.
London, as described by the architects Peter
Cook and Christine Hawley, offers only modest
room for thought and little space to act. Cook
and Hawley placed great emphasis on informed
observation of small sections of the city as a way
of experiencing it, and, hence, devising
strategies of action. For them, London is not
characterized by a grand plan; in fact they
lamented the absence of such a plan in the city's
near future, but placed their optimism rather in
small interventions that responded to complex
layers of visual stimuli as well as traces of
activity.
As a method of observing the activity within a
physical space, Hawley suggested a representa-
tion of sites through layers of screened images
that created a context for action. She and Cook
characterized this as an architecture of overlay
rather than one of insertion. Their sense of
collage as a metaphor for urban life recalls the
'bricolage' described by Colin Rowe and Fred
Koetter in Collage City. There is a sense of
discovery in this method. The architect must
find all the subtle elements, including traces of
human activity, that comprise the site in order
to make use of them in a project.
By contrast, the architect Eduardo Terrazas,
who spoke on Mexico City, described the Mex-
ican capital as a place where large-scale plan-
ning was still possible, in fact necessary. Terra-
zas, the only speaker at the conference from a
developing country, never the less tried to
account for Mexico City in terms of the de-
veloped world's cultural discourse. He wanted
347
to characterize the city as postmodern by virtue
of its shift from the entry point for moderniza-
tion in Mexico, represented by a concentration
of commerce, education, and goods and ser-
vices, to something new, yet to be characte-
rized, that results from a reversal of the govern-
ment's centralizing policies.
Yet he also seemed ambivalent about decentra-
lization. He spoke about buildings and monu-
ments as educators of the public and urban
artifacts as testaments to a national past. As he
developed his argument, postmodernism for
him seemed to have more to do with elaborate
juxtapositions of modernity and tradition,
avant-garde culture and native arts, and multi-
ple ethnicities than with a sense of the inauthen-
tic that many postmodern theorists claim.
Rather than postmodern, however, the situation
Terrazas was describing could also be characte-
rized as late modern or, in Branzi's terms, a
second modernity, particularly the co-existence
of colossal engineering feats, such as the city's
gigantic pumping system that brings water into
the city from outlying areas, and the low-cost
indigenous building schemes conducted by the
populace without architects or engineers.
An interesting discussion might have been
generated by closely comparing Mexico City
with Los Angeles, which was described by John
Kaliski, principal architect for the city's Com-
munity Redevelopment Agency. Whereas for
Mexico City, self-representation, as Terrazas
described it, is still seen in terms of national
identity and city projects are supported in large
part by state funds, Los Angeles is a city that has
been developed with sizeable infusions of
private capital and multiple independent visions
of urban life. To balance the concerns for
stable residential neighbourhoods with a push
for expansion, Kaliski described a network of
348
public boulevards with residential areas behind
them.
Even this degree of planning, however, cannot
be found in Tokyo as architect and critic Marc
Treib depicted it. Perhaps Tokyo comes closer
to Jean Baudrillard's vision of a simulacra-
driven world than any of the other cities discus-
sed on the program. Treib characterized Tokyo
as an urban process, rather than a product,
noting how chaotic its development has been.
Originally a group of villages, it still does not
have many trappings of a metropolis such as a
system of street names.
Japan is a nation with a significant cash surplus
to support an idiosyncratic building program.
Treib noted that few architects address the city
in their buildings, preferring to create extrava-
gant structures that stand out from their sur-
roundings. For many Japanese architects it
seems, Tokyo is a resource, a place to make new
statements rather than discover existing patterns
of activity and relate to them. Treib's emphasis
on the way many Japanese architects transform
building types into icons of other objects strong-
ly invites a different reading of Tokyo than any
orthodox modernist could provide.
The descriptions of the four cities were so rich in
data that no cursory discussion could have easily
fathomed the connections between them, either
in terms of commonalities or differences. In the
subsequent panel discussion, moderated by
Alan Platus, Associate Dean of the Yale School
of Architecture, an attempt was made but little
was concluded. The cities had been well chosen
for their differing social, economic, and cultural
identities and a more intense unravelling of
these might have helped us to achieve a better
grasp of the larger concerns about the millenium
that framed the conference.
Design Studies Vol 13 No 4 October 1992
2 The semantics and pragmatics of
product design
In keeping with the cultural theme of the confer-
ence, the lead speaker on the second day was
British design journalist and consultant John
Thackera, who espoused a concept of 'cultural
engineering' which he is helping a number of
corporations and public institutions to develop.
As Thackera uses this concept, it is a way for
corporations to become involved with cultural
programmes and education. Pragmatically it
means linking up with institutions that, in an
optimistic sense, may help to convey to the
public the cultural significance of design; in a
pessimistic one, it may simply be another way to
promote products.
Unfortunately, Thackera did not address the
issues of semantic and pragmatic values in pro-
duct design that would be raised in the following
talks. His talk also suffered from a promotional
rhetoric that undercut its argument. The use of
public lectures to promote one's professional
activity is endemic to design conferences and a
practice that needs to be overcome if such
events are to have any intellectual credence.
Although the rest of the day's speakers differed
considerably in their concerns, all had in com-
mon some relation of industrial products to the
human user. Michael McCoy, Co-chair of the
Design Department at the Cranbrook Academy
of Art, spoke about product form. Under
McCoy's leadership, the product design prog-
ramme at Cranbrook emphasizes the semantic
value of products as evidenced in poetic objects
which McCoy believes signify cultural myths.
Such objects designed by Cranbrook students
have become the most visible demonstrations of
how product semantics, a current theory that
explores product meaning, can effect the de-
velopment of forms.
Viewpoint
Located in an art school, McCoy places more
emphasis on the formal aspects of design than
on engineering or manufacture. While the work
done at Cranbrook is clearly demarcated as a
particular strategy for design education, one
that emphasizes the cultural meaning of pro-
ducts, Cranbrook design is unfortunately some-
times misunderstood in a larger sense as a
comprehensive design method, which it is not.
As sources of product forms, McCoy draws
heavily on popular culture, notably films such as
2001, Blade Runner and Road Warrior, but also
on vernacular objects. He claims that a product
becomes mythic by serving as a kind of theatric-
al prop for living, hence the emphasis at Cran-
brook on the visual. Several concepts serve as
strategies: prosthesis (the product as an exten-
sion of the body), anthropomorphism (the pro-
duct form anthropomorphized to make it friend-
lier), and vernacular form (the product form as
a reference to earlier products; i.e. an answering
machine with an iconic relation to a rural mail-
box). At bottom, intuition is a stronger basis for
form generation at Cranbrook than theory. As
McCoy discusses theory, it is not a set of
principles but a series of hypotheses about myth
and technology that guide the discovery of
forms.
If Hejduk had spoken the previous day with the
prophet's voice, Branzi, who followed McCoy,
delivered a statesman's address. He presented
three theorems for an ecology of the artificial
world which he framed within the cultural con-
text of a second modernity. While Hejduk
shared his personal experience of a particular
historic moment, the Bronx in the 1930s, pre-
senting it as verification of 'slow time's' value,
Branzi gave us an embracing vision of contem-
porary culture that was made credible by his
own immense stature in the field of design. He
was initially part of the 'radical design' move-
349
ment in Italy in the late 1960s, then became
a formulator of Italian 'new design', a par-
ticipant in the Memphis group, and an educator
at the Domus Academy in Milan. His writ-
ings and projects have had great influence
among designers world wide for a number of
years.
Branzi, who has shifted the locus of his thought
from postmodernity to an extended and re-
newed modernity, is representative of a more
philosophical position within Italian design cul-
ture. He spoke, as a number of Italian designers
do, of the 'project of design', an embracing
concept that locates design centrally in the
process of cultural transformation. I have al-
ways found this concept to be an inspiring one
that forces the need for continuing cultural
analysis. If the design project is as culturally
significant as Branzi and other Italian design
theorists argue that it is, then one needs to be
deeply engaged with large issues of social trans-
formation since these will affect the nature of
the project.
Branzi's presentation was a demonstration of
the value of well-informed and sophisticted de-
signers who are capable of stating their own will
to design in culturally powerful terms. He ack-
nowledged the complexity of the contemporary
condition and stated that the new design must
take full account of this. There are limits to the
capitalist industrial system, he declared, but the
collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe makes it
difficult to posit an alternative at present. Never
the less, he kept the possibility open.
The focus of design, stated Branzi, is not the
single object but an ecology of the entire world.
He then outlined a series of theorems that had
to do with balancing opposing logics of produc-
tion, advanced technology and crafts, standar-
dization and diversity, humans and machines.
350
Branzi ended with a statesman-like summation
of where the first modernity has fallen short and
what design can contribute to a renewed mod-
ernity.
He noted what he called the 'violent complexity
of the metropolis', and saw this countered in
part by virtual space, which he described as a
'world of fiction and simulacra'. Branzi did not
end his talk with a prescription but with a
presentation of choices. Design, he said, has to
decide whether to work in the real world or the
virtual one. This was not a talk to be dissected as
one would a scholarly paper but rather a states-
man's vision of the contemporary world and the
possibilities it holds for designers.
Unfortunately, Branzi's rhetoric of states-
manship was not perceived by his respondent
Michael McDonough, a young New York
architect who countered Branzi's overarching
vision with a rejection of authorities and experts
that smacked rhetorically of the 1960s counter-
culture. He characterized Americans as popul-
ists, mistrustful of experts, cynical about
reform-oriented design cultures, and believers
in change from the bottom up. In McDonough's
jingoistic reading, Branzi represented a Euro-
pean high culture that he felt was irrelevant to
the American experience.
This was a regrettable interpretation of Branzi's
talk, particularly for an audience generally un-
familiar with Italian design discourse, since
McDonough attempted to undercut the import-
ance of Branzi's vision as an instrument to
empower designers. He called for a resistance to
the project of design as Branzi proposed it,
preferring instead to espouse the untidy micro-
cosms of American multiculturalism. Needless
to say, Branzi had acknowledged and even
argued for the very diversity that McDonough
celebrated in his response.
Design Studies Vol 13 No 4 October 1992
The difference between the two, however, is
that Branzi, the product of a European cultural
tradition, formulates issues of practice within a
long wave of historic time and relates current
practice to eminent achievements of the past.
McDonough, on the other hand, in a way that is
American but not typically so, considers prac-
tice to be an immediate and existential response
to a situation. Whereas Branzi prefers to think
in broader terms, McDonough is content to act
microcosmically without relating his action to a
larger vision of contemporary culture or to the
precedents of the past.
3 Virtual worlds and expansive
problems for designers
The virtual world to which Branzi alluded was
brought front and centre by the afternoon's first
speaker, Bruce Sterling, a best-selling science
fiction author and a founder of cyberpunk, a
sci-fi genre grounded in an engagement with
pop culture and high technology. Sterling pre-
sented his thoughts in the form of a conversation
with product designer Tucker Viemeister. Their
exchange, enveloped in a fluid backdrop of
slides, video clips, and music, was intentionally
provocative, even to the point of being struc-
tured indeterminately as six narrative sections.
Their order was determined by members of the
audience who randomly picked the overhead
transparencies that identified each section.
Sterling spoke as a visionary, offering the audi-
ence a scenario of future technological possibili-
ties. Central to these is cyberspace, a term
introduced by William Gibson in his cyberpunk
novel Neuromancer to denote the virtual space
made possible by communication through com-
puters. In its early protoform it was characte-
rized by computer bulletin boards but now
Sterling and others conceive of it as an alterna-
tive simulated milieu made ever more tangible
by VR (virtual reality) technology.
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The subtext for Sterling's optimistic portrayal of
cyberspace is a libertarian philosophy that
chafes at social restraints and is coupled with a
cynical view of government officials and techno-
managers who have badly bungled their ste-
wardship of our future. 'Escapist' would be too
simple a term for Sterling's position. He be-
lieves the future can be reinvented in cyberspace
and that the mistakes of the corporeal world c~n
be corrected in the virtual one.
The attraction of cyberspace for Sterling is its
lawlessness. In true libertarian fashion, he refer-
red to it as the 'ultimate designable medium'
where possibilities can be realized without unde-
sirable restraints. He called it a frontier, just as
Americans in the 19th century referred to the
Western landscape and John Kennedy in the
late 1960s characterized outer space as the 'new
frontier'.
Sterling's characterization of cyberspace stems
from a complex mix of anarchy, cynicism, liber-
tarianism, alienation, self-reliance, hedonism,
and high-tech fascination. Although cyberspace
may become the ultimate fantasy medium in the
hands of the Nintendo and Disney corporations,
Sterling regards it as a serious political location
that strongly critiques the limitations of contem-
porary life.
He raised an immense number of issues but
there was, unfortuntately, no format for un-
packing them or for bringing his acount of an
alternative reality into play with what had pre-
ceded it in the conference thus far. His vision of
the future could not be further from Barkun's
narrative of small decentralized communities
nor could it differ more from Hejduk's slow
time or Branzi's ecology of the artificial. How
would Birmingham characterize cyberspace in
feminist terms or Krell as a place to think what
calls to be thought? On what basis might desig-
351
ners generate the forms of virtual objects?
Would they be considered any less trivial than
those decried by Kalman and Jacobs? And do
the poetic projects of McCoy's Cranbrook stu-
dents represent in any way the myths that
underlie cyberspace consciousness?
With the next group of speakers, all of whom
emphasized issues related to product users, we
returned from virtual to corporeal reality.
Donald Norman, a cognitive scientist known in
the design community for his book, The
Psychology of Everyday Things, led off. Nor-
man has earned a considerable reputation in the
past couple of years for his widely publicized
assertion that many, if not most, products are
badly designed. He is a pragmatist who believes
that a product's functional relation to the user is
the only question worth addressing. For him,
McCoy's concern with myth embodied in form
was irrelevant as is all the 'literary deep thought'
that confuses the issue of how to design.
Norman could not have been more blatant in his
denunciation of inconsequential discourse and
in doing so he, unfortunately, revealed a con-
siderable ignorance of design culture. Accord-
ing to him, most designers don't know how to
make a product that works well. Such a state-
ment could only come from someone unfamiliar
with the history and current practice of design.
Norman's thesis that many products are badly
designed is beyond dispute but his narrow focus
on this issue as the core of design thought was
misplaced. It was much more satisfying to hear
Branzi's generalized reflection on design in cul-
ture than Norman's singular point, repeated
more than was necessary by holding up exam-
ples of badly designed products to the audience.
As a participant in the discourse about products,
Norman is an intriguing figure by virtue of
identifying a central problem of design while
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acknowledging little of the larger culture of
which design is a part. This paradox is inherent
in current design thinking, which is grappling
with ways to integrate pragmatic or operative
concerns with semantic or symbolic ones. Nor-
man, however, does not want to recognize this
complexity. Instead he prefers to privilege prob-
lems of product function and reject all other
concerns. Consequently, his presentation was
one of the least successful of the conference by
virtue of his unwillingness to come to terms with
the ideas of most of the other speakers.
The talks by the two speakers who followed
Norman, John Seely Brown, director of the
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, and John
Rheinfrank, a designer with Fitch Richardson
Smith, while fuller and more reasoned than
Norman's jeremiad, also concentrated on
pragmatic rather than cultural issues. This
separation of pragmatic and cultural problems
in product design is in sharp contrast to
architecture where a centuries long tradition of
high cultural status and technological advance,
along with a well developed historical conscious-
ness, have embeddded architectural discourse in
cultural issues.
The paradox, however, is that immensely in-
teresting work is being done by product desig-
ners in spite of the split between pragmatics,
cultural theory, and historical consciousness.
The work described by Brown at the Xerox Palo
Alto Research Center is a good example. Brown
focused on the subject of ubiquitous computing
which he defined as "taking computing out of the
box' or the development of networks to estab-
lish multiple access to a single program. After
an enticing introductory statement that he and
his colleagues in Palo Alto were 'rethinking the
border in product design', Brown proceeded to
recount the particularities of the work underway
at his research centre as if he were speaking to a
Design Studies Vol 13 No 4 October 1992
meeting of professional colleagues• While of
interest, this descriptive rhetoric did not further
develop the deeper meaning inherent in rethink-
ing the borders of design, which, if articulated,
might have helped to make connections be-
tween the presentations of other speakers.
Rheinfrank illustrated a set of general principles
about designing with case studies of his own
firm's work. These included the redesign of a
Xerox copying machine that exemplifies the
cognitive ergonomics Norman espouses• The
presentations by Brown and Rheinfrank were
intended as demonstrations of cutting edge de-
sign but their narrative strategies were embed-
ded in the discourse of professional meetings of
colleagues and clients. The aims of such meet-
ings are usually to solicit client or management
support for further activity or to demonstrate
possibilities of practice to other practitioners• It
is no surprise, therefore, that a number of the
questions which followed their presentations
related to professional concerns about how to
design products rather than to larger cultural
issues of which the work discussed might have
been indicative.
4 Graphic design between modernist
practice and global diversity
The final day's talks on graphic design were
somewhat diverse but had in common the con-
cern for a new gounding for practice. The
opening speaker, journalist Michael Thomas,
was supposed to challenge the myth of the
'information age' but his talk was simply a
curmudgeon's opinionated complaint about the
evils of the modern age. He offered little new
information and even his opinions fell easily
within well-recognized conventions.
Lorraine Wild, who teaches in the graphic de-
sign programme at the California Institute of the
Arts, returned the colloquy to problems of
design. Whereas Brown and Rheinfrank, as
Viewpoint
working designers and design managers, exuded
a confidence about the problems and projects
they were engaged in, Wild noted a loss of
consensus as to what graphic design is.
This loss, she said, results from a belief that
modernist design philosophy and formal innova-
tion have run their course. She had studied with
Paul Rand and Bradbury Thompson at Yale and
then worked in Massimo Vignelli's office in New
York. She was particularly disappointed in the
way Vignelli defended his version of modernism
by attacking younger designers such as the
publishers of Emigrd as well as designers who
depend heavily on the computer which she
quoted Vignelli as describing as 'a tool that gives
them licence to kill'.
Beyond her vision of a moribund modernism,
Wild saw a confused design scene where many
designers have lost the modernists' sense of
social purpose. Instead, they occupy themselves
with self-centred aesthetic and technological
exercises. Similar to many artists, architects,
and designers who decry a version of modernism
that appears to espouse universal solutions,
Wild called for a pluralism of ideas, which, she
said, a study of language theories, particularly
semiotics and rhetoric, could help to bring ab-
out. She also stated that the development of a
personal voice should be high on the agenda of
graphic design education.
Speaking out so strongly against a modernism
that seemed to her moribund was clearly an
emotional experience for Lorraine Wild. As a
leading graphic design educator in midcareer,
she was also voicing the feelings of numerous
younger designers and students, many of whom
are women. Within graphic design, there is a
search for a new direction that will enable
designers to combine a sense of honest purpose
with new types of formal solutions that are both
more personal and appropriate than the limited
353
visual vocabulary they associate with modern-
ism.
The call for a new sensibility was also central to
Ellen Lupton and Abbott Miller's stimulating
slide lecture on information signs. They con-
tinued Wild's critique of universal graphic solu-
tions by arguing that the presentation of in-
formation, particularly in the form of visual
icons, was not value free. Their presentation
combined criticism of existing signs, such as
their exposure of the sexist bias in the US
Department of Transportation sign system, with
an advocacy that information icons be used
more sensitively to denote differences of gender
and culture.
Cultural distinctions were exemplified in the
two afternoon presentations whose subject mat-
ter was graphic design in the now defunct coun-
tries of East Germany and the Soviet Union.
These talks focused on how the socialist experi-
ence shaped design thought. As Eric Spieker-
mann, a graphic designer from former West
Berlin, pointed out, the striving for a socialist
style of public graphics in East Germany was
eventually eroded by increasing knowledge of
Western practice, while Constantin Boym, a
Russian furniture designer who now works in
New York, told the poignant story of Vladimir
Cheka, a graphic designer in Moscow who went
to New York to work. Disillusioned with the
heavy emphasis on the pragmatics of meeting
client needs, he returned to Moscow and now
tries to make a living as an artist. Was Boym's
narrative tale meant to signify a more wide-
spread Russian sensibility caught between the
frustration of underdevelopment and the de-
mands of overdevelopment? There was certain-
ly more to explore on this theme of cultural fit.
5 Conclusions
With one exception, the members of the closing
panel, which was supposed to sum up the con-
354
ference, evaded their task and gave their own
presentations ranging from the moderator
Michael Sorkin's use of a cash machine transac-
tion as a metaphor for the decline of public
space to critic Hugh Aldersey-Williams' argu-
ment for recognizing national characteristics in
design. Only Kathy McCoy of Cranbrook
attempted to draw any conclusions from the
proceedings. Her strongest statement for me
was the perception that architecture had spent
itself.
It was evident from the conference that those of
us who participate in the discourse about design
and the built environment do not share a com-
mon vision of what our contemporary condition
is and have achieved no agreement on what
design might become in the next millennium.
Nor do we share a language with which to
develop this vision. Although the conference
offered a rich experience of many voices speak-
ing out about architecture and design, conversa-
tions among the speakers did not develop. Con-
sequently the deeper issues embedded in their
presentations were not teased out and discus-
sed.
This difficulty in discovering and conversing
about shared themes was not unique to the
Cooper-Hewitt conference. It is indicative of
our cultural moment. What is lacking among
intellectuals is the will to cut through these
differences and forge wider conversations
around topics that matter. But, more than any
other design conference I have been to, 'The
edge of the millennium' brought together a
great many speakers with differing concerns.
The opportunity to hear them as part of a single
narrative made it possible to better compare
their themes and rhetorical strategies. I now
understand better ho.w diverse contemporary
design thought is and recognize the challenge of
creating productive conversation communities.
That alone made the conference worthwhile.
Design Studies Vol 13 No 4 October 1992