Steve and Alice on Design Criticism MFA, part 1

This past spring, School of Visual Arts announced the birth of a new Masters study in Design Criticism, to begin fall of 2008. Steven Heller, co-chair of our own program, is helping to develop the curriculum with Alice Twemlow, who will also be the chair of the department. Focusing on such a specific topic in criticism might seem risky, but as CRIT sat down to speak with Steve and Alice earlier this summer (over a heaping plate of bagels), there was a sense of energy and overwhelming enthusiasm from the design community at large (even the proposed Faculty list reads like an AIGA town-hall meeting), and suggestions of new formats and discussions for the way we act and react to design.

CRIT Interview by Tamara Gildengers Connolly and Len Small

CRIT: Why is this program necessary?

Steve: We needed something else to do. (laughs) But aside from that, there has never really been a program that focuses on design writing in general and design criticism specifically. The question then is why is design criticism necessary? That’s because it’s so much part of our everyday life that both journalistically and academically there needs to be a common language, or at least a language that gets out to a variety of different people, that addresses how to look at design, how to read design, how to experience design. This program is a way of doing that.

The fact of the matter is, over the last twenty years, there has been more people that have not really studied design criticism, but they have picked it up as an ad-hoc practice. More and more people are engaged in that, coming from different perspectives– from [journalism] school, from design academies, from scholarship, from practice.

Alice: Design criticism exists out there in a kind of nebulous form; you have to find it. You sort of have to look for it in all different arenas and far out-away places in the media landscape. What we’ve noticed is that some of it is brilliant, and some of it is absolutely dreadful. The reason for doing an academic course is to try and help codify the discipline. People might rebel against that, but that’s fine; we wanted to give it a form and shape, some intellectual tools, to help people understand its history and its potential. That’s a reason for doing an actual academic program, rather than it carrying on in this ad-hoc way.

Steve: Indeed, art history and art criticism have their vocabularies, and they are sometimes jargonistic… that rebellion is all part of it. You’ve gotta have something to rebel against.

CRIT: Reading the description, the one thing we saw separate from an an art history degree is that you talk about how things look and also they’re made, and increasingly how they decay. You mention in here that the program is also about ethics, economics, and ecology, very different from the usual art history background.

Alice: That’s possibly because design touches so many more things that art does, so we actually have to engage with all of those aspects of life. What I’m really intrigued about is whether students coming on to this course will want to use design as a lens for using at a social critique, In that sense, to use an object to be able to read or critique an entire aspect of society. They are going to have to bump up against all of these kind of phenomenon.

Steve: You can’t decontextualize design because it’s all… it’s this table, this bottle, it’s the bagel (laughs)… so you have to deal with those three “e’s”. Ultimately, there are outcomes. I went this past weekend to see the Summer of Love Show; what they try to do is put art together with the ‘popular culture’. In doing so, they create this interesting tension, because they all came from the same place, but you can’t address it all in the same way because we don’t have a language to address it. They did it in terms of the exhibition; it’s all sitting there waiting for you to interpret it yourself. I think what we might be doing is allowing the student a tool to look at it together, separate it out, bring it together…

When I was there, I was thinking it’s too bad this show isn’t up now when we have students because it would be a great thing for them to go in and disassemble. You get that from art criticism in New York Times, Michael Kimmelman could go in and really address all these issues, but he’s a rare one.

CRIT: Would there be any overlap or direct study with the field of ethnography? Some of these things that you’re talking about seem to relate to this new intersection of ethnography, design and marketing. Do you see that playing a part in the program, or is that something different?

Alice: We wouldn’t be able to ignore some of the recent theory in ethnography, I think it’s really interesting, and some of the students would enjoy figuring out ways to work with ethnography, and some of design’s closer relatives like art history.

Steve: It’s more of a phenomenon for us to study as Designer-Entrepreneurs. It has to be there; a design critic has to understand these things, they can’t come with a blank-slate. But how it fits in we have no idea. The thing is, because there’s no model for it, there’s no paradigm for it, and if we do what they did in the 80s in Cranbrook—they went in and took literary theory and grafted it on to design—you get a lot of deconstruction and post-structuralism and stuff like that. Whether we do that or not is another story. Some teachers may want to do that, but you can’t graft things on, you have to develop almost organically, and some students will bring their own perspective into it, and that’s when teachers becomes a moderator.

Alice: That’s a really good point; I think much like your class, the MFA Design class, we hope that people are going to be coming from as many different backgrounds as possible. There will be some practicing designers in the mix, there will be people coming from a heavily theorized literature background, or maybe from history or philosophy programs. I can’t wait for these seminar situations that will ensue, because as long as the teacher will act as a moderator certainly among, We will also be giving them some theoretical frameworks, some of which they haven’t heard in their education today, and as you suggest, maybe what’s coming out of ethnography might be one of those topics, but maybe others too.

Steve: Right now Alice is meeting with our perspective faculty, and sometimes we do it together. From those perspective faculty members, we’re getting ideas we never would have thought of. The whole thing is organic, it’s not built on a firm structure. Ultimately there will be a structure, but even that will be permeable.

Alice: We’re only two months into the real crafting of the program, so far. It’s the best part, really.

Steve: No responsibility! (laughs)