2 What is a designer?

All men are designers. All that we do, almost all the time, is design, for design is basic to all human activity.

— Victor Papanek¹

Every aspect of Edward Teach’s appearance was calculated to make him look as fearsome as possible. Heavy coats, sturdy boots and imposing hats accentuated his height. His face was obscured by the straggling beard that inspired the nickname by which he was renowned as one of the most brutal and successful pirates of the early eighteenth century, ‘Blackbeard’. Whenever his ship raided another vessel, Teach struck dastardly poses with several braces of pistols slung on his shoulders and lighted matches sizzling under the brim of his hat.² In his 1724 book A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, Charles Johnson described him as ‘such a figure that imagination cannot form an idea of a fury from hell to look more frightful’.³ The finishing touch was the macabre symbol of a human skull above a pair of diagonally crossed bones on his ship’s flag.

Other pirates were adding those motifs to their flags at the time, for the same reason: to frighten their victims into surrendering. Pirates had deployed flags as part of their terror tactics for centuries, but had done so individually. When the Scottish buccaneer William ‘Captain’ Kidd was wreaking havoc on the high seas in the late 1600s, he often befuddled his prey by flying a French flag, hoping to lull them into a false sense of security until his ship was ready to attack. Henry Avery, an English pirate of the same era, preferred to dazzle his victims with a faux aristocratic flag bearing four gold chevrons. But by the turn of the eighteenth century, after years of war, Europe began a peaceful era, colonial trade flourished and New York emerged as a lucrative black market for contraband. Piracy became so profitable that the cannier practitioners, like Blackbeard and his Welsh counterpart, Bartholomew ‘Black Bart’ Roberts, were eager to operate as efficiently as possible. They treated their trade as a serious business and ran their ships accordingly, striving to complete raids swiftly, preferably without wasting valuable ammunition or incurring casualties. Terrifying the crews of the ships they attacked into speedy surrender was a prudent strategy, and flying a flag that declared how brutal and remorseless they could be was an inspired way of doing so.⁴

Maritime historians do not know exactly when the skull and crossbones was chosen as the collective symbol of piracy, or why the flag was called the ‘Jolly Roger’, but its imagery is self-explanatory. Having signified death in many cultures for centuries, that motif would have been instantly recognizable to sailors on either side of the law, regardless of where they came from. The first recorded sighting was by John Cranby, captain of the British Navy ship HMS Poole, in July 1700 when he spotted a skull and crossbones on the flag of a French pirate vessel captured off the Cape Verde islands in the Atlantic Ocean.⁵ News of the bloodcurdlingly effective new flag would have spread swiftly in a cosmopolitan trade like piracy, and more sightings were soon made.

As well as communicating its intended message clearly, the Jolly Roger was flexible enough to be customized. The flag of the French ship pursued by HMS Poole sported an hourglass as well as a skull and crossbones to suggest that time was running out for its victims. Other pirates added daggers, skeletons or spears. One of Black Bart’s flags bore two human skulls, each representing an enemy against whom he had sworn vengeance.⁶

Centuries later, the story of the Jolly Roger’s origins reads like a textbook example of modern communication design, and the symbol of terror adopted by those lawless, mostly illiterate pirates seems like a precursor of today’s corporate logos. It tells us exactly what its owners want us to think of them – in the pirates’ case, that they were very scary – just as BP’s sunflower symbol tries to convince us that it is a sensitive, environmentally aware company, despite the calamitous Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and the ‘aristocratic’ shield with a crown and cross printed on Prada’s bags and boxes is a reminder that it has been making luxury goods for over a century.⁷ However much more money, research, time and resources were invested in the development of those contemporary corporate motifs, they fulfil the same function as the skull and crossbones did in the early 1700s.

When most people think of ‘a designer’, they do not picture Blackbeard or Black Bart, but one of the larger-than-life design-heroes (rarely heroines) flashing carefully cultivated scowls on magazine covers. They might imagine someone like the redoubtable German graphic designer Jan Tschichold, who, as head of design at Penguin Books in London during the late 1940s, drafted the ‘Penguin Composition Rules’ and insisted that everyone in the company adhere to them. Suspecting Penguin’s printers of prioritizing quantity over quality (they were paid by the keystroke), Tschichold prowled around the presses to check that they were observing his edicts. If any of them dared to challenge him, he would exaggerate his German accent and pretend not to understand what they were saying. When the novelist Dorothy L. Sayers objected to the decorative asterisks he had added (in contravention of his own rules) to her translation of Dante’s Inferno, Tschichold retorted: ‘The master is permitted to break the rules, even his own.’⁸

Equally draconian was the Danish furniture designer Verner Panton. When the Swiss industrialist Rolf Fehlbaum asked him to design the interior of his home in the late 1960s, Panton saw the project as a chance to put his colour theories into practice. ‘Verner said: “We’ll do a black room, a red room, a golden room and an orange room,”’ recalled Fehlbaum, who soon discovered that the designer did not simply envisage the walls and floors being in those hues, but everything else too: every stick of furniture and whichever objects were likely to be used there. When Fehlbaum asked jokingly whether it would be permissible to move, say, a cup from one room to another, Panton was stupefied. Why would he want to ruin the colour scheme?⁹

Then there was the imposing personality of Finland’s most famous twentieth-century architect and furniture designer, Alvar Aalto. Passengers on Finnair flights taking off from Helsinki in the 1950s and 1960s grew accustomed to leaving later than expected thanks to his tardy arrival. Reputedly the only person for whom Finnair routinely delayed its flights other than the country’s president, Aalto invariably mounted the aircraft steps several minutes after the plane was due to depart. At first, the cabin crews assumed that he was not particularly punctual, but soon realized there was another explanation. Before a couple of his ‘late’ embarkations, Finnair employees spotted his car being driven around the airport before he boarded the aircraft. Having come to the airport in plenty of time, Aalto had instructed his driver to delay their arrival, so he could make a grand entrance.

Entertaining though such stories are (unless you were one of Penguin’s harassed printers, Panton’s clients or Finnair’s stewardesses), the image of the omnipotent design-hero has always been illusory.¹⁰ Not only do designers, even the most famous ones, generally work as part of teams, which have to co-exist with other teams, their power to determine the outcome of their work is subject to numerous constraints. Any number of factors can impede the progress of a design project: the unwelcome intervention of colleagues, clients or suppliers; budgetary restrictions; human error; and sudden changes that the designer could not have anticipated, and cannot control. The completeness with which any individual designer’s vision will eventually be realized is usually determined by a combination of their strength of character, persuasive powers and luck. All in all, their role is more ambiguous than is generally supposed, and is not restricted to professionals, as Qin Shihuangdi, Black Bart and countless other anonymous designers have proved. Anyone who conceives or implements the process of change we call ‘design’ is entitled to describe themselves as a designer, not just those who have been trained, or are paid for doing so.

Yet the myth of the dictatorial ‘design-hero’ has proved surprisingly enduring. It dates back to ancient Greece, when potters identified their urns by inscribing them with their own maker’s marks. Typically, they sought credit for work that they considered to be aesthetically pleasing, not because it displayed the intellectual ingenuity or aptitude for change that is now expected of design. Most other design exercises were unrecognized at the time, went unrecorded and are now long forgotten. The few we are aware of are generally remembered for different reasons: as Blackbeard and Black Bart are for being notorious thieves who were lucky enough to be romanticized as plucky buccaneers by authors like Daniel Defoe, and a succession of movie stars from Douglas Fairbanks and Errol Flynn to Johnny Depp.¹¹

The same applies to Nicholas Owen, a sixteenth-century carpenter in Elizabethan England, known as ‘Little John’, who was one of the first craftsmen to be noted for the conceptual strength of his work rather than for its beauty or finesse. As a devout Catholic in a Protestant regime, Owen lived in fear of religious persecution, and put his carpentry skills to good use by constructing ‘priests’ holes’ inside the walls of houses to conceal fellow Catholics. Sometimes they had to stay there for days at a time, and Owen, who only ever worked at night and in deepest secrecy, added trapdoors, known as ‘feeding traps’, through which food could be delivered. In extreme circumstances, he would make a tiny hole in a wooden panel so that a hollow quill could be inserted and soup dripped into the fugitive’s mouth. He was equally skilful at disguising the entrances behind pivoting floorboards or wall panels. Owen built dozens of ‘holes’ from the 1580s onwards, and may well have made more, but concealed them so cleverly that they have yet to be discovered. Eventually, he himself had to go into hiding and was arrested after being starved out of one of his lairs at Hindlip Hall in Worcestershire.¹² Believed to have given himself up to distract attention from an elderly priest who was concealed nearby, Owen died under torture in the Tower of London, having refused to betray his fellow Catholics.¹³

 

A working model of the Manchester University Mark I computer in 1948

 

IBM 701 mainframe computer in the 1950s

 

Production of the IBM 701 mainframe computer in the 1950s

 

IBM System 360 mainframe computer in the 1960s

 

Apple iPad mini in 2013

Other early ‘designers’ were accomplished tinkerers, whose design coups have, like Owen’s, only been acknowledged because their principal achievements prompted historians to explore other aspects of their lives. Typical was Benjamin Franklin, the eighteenth-century US politician, political theorist and keen amateur inventor who devised the Franklin Stove to heat the air in a room to an even temperature. He also designed what are thought to have been the first bifocal lenses to help him to read in poor light, and a scissor-like contraption for retrieving books from high shelves.¹⁴

Similarly, Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, added a revolving arm to the chair on which he wrote the 1776 Declaration of Independence. Jefferson was intensely involved with the design of his house, Monticello, near Charlottesville, Virginia, and installed several of his innovations there, including a dumb waiter hidden inside a fireplace. Full bottles of wine were hoisted up from the cellar on one side, and empty bottles sent down on the other. He also devised a clock to record the days of the week as well as hours and minutes.¹⁵ Another supporting role in design history goes to the nineteenth-century British naturalist Charles Darwin, who built an early example of a chair mounted on wheels for the study of his home, Down House, in Kent.¹⁶ Having replaced the legs of a wooden William IV-style armchair with a set of cast-iron bed legs mounted on castors, Darwin would roll around the room to inspect the rows of specimens laid out on the desks by his research assistants on a forerunner of the wheeled office chairs that are now used by millions of people every day.¹⁷

While these ‘celebrity’ tinkerers were finessing their inventions, the role of the designer was being formalized by industrialization. Once it became possible to make an object in huge quantities, it was necessary to ensure that each example was manufactured to identical specifications. The industrial design process was developed to fulfil that function, and the design profession invented to execute it. Charles Le Brun was one of the first designers in this sense, through his work at Gobelins,¹⁸ followed by the sculptors who created delicate porcelain figurines for Meissen in early eighteenth-century Germany.¹⁹ But the role was crystallized by Josiah Wedgwood in his Staffordshire potteries during the late 1700s.

Born into a local family of potters, Wedgwood had learnt his trade as a teenage apprentice before working with Thomas Whieldon, an older, more experienced ceramicist who had experimented with innovative ways of organizing the production process by allotting particular tasks to groups of workers.²⁰ Throughout his apprenticeship, Wedgwood proved to be unusually skilful at modelling, which involved shaping the pots, and he later supervised the training of the apprentice modellers in his own potteries, mostly local boys, such as William Wood, whose father had worked for Whieldon, and William Hackwood, who became his own most talented modeller.²¹ Given that Wedgwood also chose the artists who decorated his ceramics, his personal taste was critical in determining the type of products made by his factories.

Fascinated by science, Wedgwood constantly experimented with new materials, glazes and production techniques, and discussed the results with fellow members of the Lunar Society of Birmingham, a group of intellectually vigorous local scientists and industrialists, including the chemist Joseph Priestley and the engineer James Watt.²² He also took a lively interest in art and architecture, not least as possible sources of ideas to be applied to his products. When Wedgwood began in business, the most popular decorative style was ornate rococo, but he realized that it would soon be supplanted by the restrained neoclassical aesthetic of the fashionable Scottish architect Robert Adam. In 1763, Wedgwood introduced a richly glazed, cream-coloured dinner service made from unusually fine earthenware in simple, elegant shapes inspired by Adam’s architecture. When Queen Charlotte, the wife of King George III, placed an order, he christened it ‘Queen’s Ware’ in her honour.²³

Five years later, Wedgwood accepted the most ambitious commission of his career: to make the Green Frog Service for Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia, as a fifty-person dinner service destined to be used in a summer palace built on a frog marsh near St Petersburg. Catherine stipulated that each of the pieces, all Queen’s Ware, should depict a green frog and a scene from British life. Wedgwood dispatched artists and illustrators all over the country to sketch and paint over a thousand traditional vistas of forests, rivers, lakes, hills and castles, as well as glimpses of industrial Britain, such as canals and ironworks. Most of them worked on paper, but one artist was equipped with a camera obscura, a forerunner of the camera.²⁴

As Wedgwood’s reputation rose, he was able to persuade famous artists such as George Stubbs, Joseph Wright and John Flaxman to work for him.²⁵ They were described as ‘designers’, but their role was mostly limited to decoration, by drawing picturesque scenes or figures to be reproduced by the modellers. Together with Wedgwood, the modellers were responsible for critical design decisions such as the choice of shapes, materials, finishes and how the products were to be made.²⁶

The vitality of enterprises like Josiah Wedgwood’s seemed so thrilling to fashionable Londoners that they took tours of the bustling factories in northern England and the Midlands. By the early 1780s, painting his plain ceramics was regarded as an elegant accomplishment for society ladies alongside singing, playing the piano and needlepoint. Some ‘artistic’ socialites pleaded to be allowed to design pieces that would be manufactured by his factories. Wedgwood permitted a few of them to do so, including Diana Beauclerk, daughter of the Duke of Marlborough, and Emma Crewe, whose wealthy mother was among his best customers. Ever the astute marketeer, he may have been swayed by their publicity value as much as their talent, but the work of one socialite, Lady Elizabeth Templetown, a stylish amateur painter married to a royal courtier, Baron Templetown, proved to be surprisingly successful. She specialized in depicting sentimental, domestic scenes, inspired by ancient Greek mythology and Goethe’s poetry, mostly of mothers nursing their children or contentedly engaged in domestic tasks. Her pieces for Wedgwood sold so well that rival manufacturers raced to copy them, giving the vivacious Lady Templetown a strong claim to be the first female industrial designer.²⁷

The fashion for industrialization soon ebbed. By the early 1800s, millions of workers and their families had exchanged rural poverty for urban squalor by abandoning the countryside for better-paid, but often dangerous jobs in filthy, noisy factories. The socialites and intellectuals who had once signed up for factory tours regarded manufacturing as dirty, soulless and destructive, rather than exhilarating. On the rare occasions that industrialization appeared in nineteenth-century art and literature, it was generally demonized. The story of Victor Frankenstein, the idealistic scientist who is terrorized by his own invention, the ‘Creature’, in Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, is a morality tale warning against unfettered faith in science and technology.²⁸ When the novel was adapted for the London stage in the 1820s, Shelley’s sensitive text was rehashed as an anti-industrial Gothic melodrama, and her ‘Creature’ reinvented as the ‘Monster’.²⁹ A rumour that a railway was to be built near their sedate country town provoked a similar response from Dorothea Brooke and her neighbours in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, set in the early 1830s.³⁰ Similarly, the heroine of Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel North and South, Margaret Hale, was horrified when her family moved from a pretty village in southern England to the remorseless bustle of Milton, a brash industrial city in the tellingly named northern county of Darkshire.³¹ Artists lost their early enthusiasm for industrial commissions, leaving manufacturers to employ draughtsmen to draw the specifications of their products, and engineers or modellers to interpret them for production. But the new designer-draughtsmen tended to be poorly paid, sparsely trained and exerted little influence over their employers. Mostly, they copied historic shapes and motifs from books, and the quality of their work was often questionable. The title page of the British architect A. W. N. Pugin’s 1836 book Contrasts sported a spoof advertisement for ‘Designing taught in six lessons: Gothic, Severe Greek and mixed styles’ plus one for ‘An Errand Boy for an Office who can design occasionally’.³²

Politicians including Benjamin Franklin in the United States, Robert Peel in Britain and the French social reformer François Alexandre Frédéric, Duke de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, lobbied their governments to improve the training of designers and to promote their wares. France led the way by founding a national network of Écoles des Arts et Métiers to educate designers and engineers, and by showing off its manufacturers’ output in a series of trade fairs, the Expositions Nationales des Produits de l’Industrie Agricole et Manufacturière, or ‘Expos’ for short.³³ Other countries followed suit by opening their own design schools and trying to outdo one another by staging ever bigger, more ambitious Expos, culminating in the first of the World’s Fairs, the 1851 Great Exhibition in London.³⁴ Some six million people flocked to the Crystal Palace, a specially built glass structure so immense that it enclosed several fully grown trees, to marvel at more than a hundred thousand objects, including the world’s largest diamond, a prototype of Samuel Colt’s Navy revolver, a ‘sportsman’s knife’ with eighty blades, a robotic ‘Man of Steel’ and the first public toilet.³⁵ The profits from ticket sales were used to buy land in nearby South Kensington to construct schools and museums, including the National Art Training School, later renamed the Royal College of Art, and the Victoria & Albert Museum, which opened in 1857 with many of the Crystal Palace’s exhibits in its collection.³⁶

The tide turned again when the artist William Morris, art critic John Ruskin and fellow members of the Arts and Crafts Movement dismissed industrialization as crassly commercial and championed a return to traditional craftsmanship. Such criticism stemmed partly from snobbery. The chief consumers of factory goods were the newly affluent middle classes, who were eager to acquire cast-iron and papier mâché replicas of the intricately crafted wares they associated with the aristocracy.³⁷ By then, the handcrafted work beloved of Morris and Ruskin tended to be either an indulgence of the rich or the last resort of the destitute, who had no choice but to make things themselves because they could not afford to buy them ready-made.

Morris practised what he preached at his decorating firm, originally named Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co and later Morris & Co, by collaborating with artist friends such as Edward Burne-Jones and Ford Madox Brown on the design of furniture and furnishings to be made by carefully selected artisans and workshops. ‘The Firm’, as they called it, then sold their wares.³⁸ Other designers chose to work within industry in the hope of raising standards there, including Christopher Dresser, who abandoned his original career as a botanist to do so. Rather than being employed by a particular company, like most of his peers, or setting up in business, as Morris had done, Dresser produced designs for furniture, wallpaper, ceramics, textiles and other products for different manufacturers from his studio. He also wrote extensively on design, and published an influential study of Japanese aesthetics. His knowledge and passion were reflected in his work, the metalware in particular.³⁹ Simply styled and aesthetically pleasing, his products reflected a thorough understanding of the economics of mass production and the skills of the workers who had made them.

As industrialization expanded, more designers were hired, the demands on them became more onerous and their roles more rigid. Design teams grew larger and more hierarchical. The historic division of responsibility between design and other disciplines, such as engineering, was formalized, and the friction between them escalated as the competing camps jostled for power. The quality of design education improved, and the influence of progressive schools, like the Bauhaus in Germany, infused designers with Constructivist fervour, encouraging them to be more intellectually ambitious about their work, and to think beyond the commercial demands of design, by treating it as a tool for effecting social and political change and a means of self-expression.

Some designers sought to achieve these goals within a commercial context, as Dresser had done. The design team headed by Peter Behrens during the early 1900s at AEG, the German domestic appliance maker, established a template for thoughtful, enlightened corporate design, which was subsequently applied by Jan Tschichold at Penguin, Eliot Noyes at IBM, Dieter Rams at Braun and more recently by Jonathan Ive at Apple.

Other designers cast themselves as iconoclasts, including László Moholy-Nagy, a charismatic Hungarian artist who was a committed Constructivist before serving in the army during the First World War. After the war, he fled Hungary to join Dadaist groups in Vienna and Berlin, where he produced a series of Telephone Paintings made by phoning instructions to a sign factory, which executed them. During the mid 1920s, Moholy became an influential teacher at the Bauhaus, where he sported red factory overalls to symbolize his faith in industry and the students nicknamed him ‘Holy Mahogany’. He then returned to Berlin, to experiment with photography and film with his compatriot György Kepes. In the mid 1930s, he and Kepes left Nazi Germany to seek refuge in the Netherlands, Britain and eventually the United States.⁴⁰ Wherever they went, Moholy insisted on taking the Light Space Modulator, an electrical contraption he had assembled to create pools of light and shadow for him to study. It looked so strange that he described it variously as a ‘robot’, a ‘fountain’ and ‘hairdressing equipment’ to get it through customs.⁴¹ To Moholy, the practice of design was ‘not a profession but an attitude’ and design itself was a holistic medium infusing every area of society. ‘Ultimately all problems of design merge into one great problem: “design for life”,’ he wrote. ‘In a healthy society this design for life will encourage every profession and vocation to play its part since the degree of relatedness in all their work gives to any civilization its quality.’⁴²

After Moholy’s death in 1946, Kepes continued their research and disseminated their ideas in his books on visual theory.⁴³ He also propagated them as a teacher: first at Brooklyn College, where his students included Saul Bass, who would introduce their avant-garde theories to a mass audience in the title sequences he devised for the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese; and later at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where his colleagues included Muriel Cooper. There, Kepes founded the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, which became a role model for art and technology programmes all over the world. The experiments begun by him and Moholy in Berlin during the 1920s have a lasting legacy in the torrent of digital imagery that fills our lives today.⁴⁴

Yet despite their best efforts, and those of other visionary designers like Cooper and Bucky Fuller, public perceptions of design were dominated by the flamboyant personas of the two most visible designers in both halves of the twentieth century: both freelance guns-for-hire like Christopher Dresser, both French and both delighted to play the part of traditional design-heroes.

First came Raymond Loewy, who left France on a ship bound for the United States in 1919 with $50 in savings and a Croix de Guerre medal for his military service during the First World War. After starting out as a window designer for Macy’s and Saks and as a fashion illustrator for Vogue, he reinvented himself as an industrial designer. Loewy was responsible (or he and his team were) for the design of the Greyhound bus, the Lucky Strike cigarette packet, a Coldspot refrigerator, the Coca-Cola bottle and logos for Shell and Exxon, among other things. In 1949, he became the first industrial designer to appear on the cover of Time magazine. A line drawing of Loewy’s face was encircled by some of the hundreds of products he had designed.⁴⁵

An imposing figure, dapperly suited and deeply tanned with a neatly trimmed moustache, Loewy was a relentless self-publicist who conducted countless interviews and published several books on his life and work, bragging about his achievements and shamelessly dropping the names of famous friends and clients. Typical was an anecdote about President John F. Kennedy telling his secretary that he and Loewy ‘were not to be disturbed’ in the Oval Office after inviting him to the White House to discuss the redesign of Air Force One.⁴⁶ Loewy also relished the tale of his housewarming party at the spectacular modernist home in Palm Springs he had commissioned from the Swiss-born architect Albert Frey. No sooner had his neighbour, the movie star William Holden, fallen into the pool fully clothed, than the singer Tony Martin followed suit, and then their host.⁴⁷ ‘Asides from wanting to make a living, we were all nice fellows,’ he said of himself and his fellow industrial designers. ‘Outré at heart and simple enough to believe that by improving a product functionally, safely, qualitatively and visually, we were contributing something valuable to the consumer, his sense of aesthetics and to the country.’⁴⁸

If Loewy created the role of the super-prolific, mediagenic designer-for-hire, Philippe Starck perfected it. He made his name in the 1980s as a postmodernist prankster, designing a chair for Café Costes in Paris as a playful pastiche of an early 1900s Viennese coffee-house chair with three legs rather than the usual four.⁴⁹ At the time, Starck said that the waiters would trip up half as often on a chair with one back leg, not two.⁵⁰ Subsequently, he made three legs a signature of his chairs, despite the complaints of the luckless souls who tumbled off them on to the floor. Starck continued in a similar vein by producing plastic versions of Louis XV-style chairs, stools shaped like garden gnomes and lamps mounted on spookily realistic replicas of Beretta pistols and AK-47 assault rifles. A burly, mal barbu figure who bore a distinct resemblance to Desperate Dan, the pie-scoffing hero of a cartoon strip in the British children’s comic the Dandy, he courted the media by speaking in franglais soundbites. Once, Starck boasted of having designed a chair in the few minutes between an aircraft seat-belt sign going on and off. He also claimed to have a Harley Davidson waiting for him in most of the cities where he worked. For years, Starck claimed to be bored by design, and at times he designed as if he was, which was a shame, as his best work was spirited and witty. He then attempted to reinvent himself as a champion of sustainable design, despite also accepting the role of creative director of a space tourism venture and producing yet more variations of his best-selling (but, sadly, non-biodegradable) plastic Louis Ghost chair.⁵¹

He and Loewy were more design-showmen than design-heroes, but they were cast in the indomitable mould of Panton and Tschichold, and did little to disrupt conventional expectations of designers, especially in their relish for the commercial aspects of their work.⁵² ‘I once said that industrial design keeps the customer happy, his client in the black and the designer busy,’ Loewy noted in his monograph-cum-memoir Industrial Design. ‘I still feel this is a good maxim.’⁵³

If he and Starck typified old-school designers, how do today’s designers differ from that stereotype? Many of them do not, because they have chosen similar ways of working, even if they are less wealthy and less famous than those Gallic show-offs. A critical difference is that they now have many other roles to choose from. Designers can pursue environmental, political and humanitarian causes by casting themselves as activists and adventurers like Nathaniel Corum, or social reformers like Hilary Cottam.⁵⁴ They can act as auteurs by deploying design as a means of self-expression in conceptual projects, whose function is neither practical nor commercial, but one of intellectual enquiry, or join the growing group of critical designers, who use their work to critique design culture, as Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard did in their writing. Or they can immerse themselves in specialist fields such as medical research, supercomputing and nanotechnology, which were once the preserve of scientists, not designers.

Whether their efforts are driven by empathy, outrage or curiosity, digital technology is likely to be an indispensable part of their practice. Take Emily Pilloton, who left a job in commercial design in 2008 to form Project H, a volunteer network of humanitarian designers, from the dining table of her parents’ home in California with $1,000 of savings. By the end of year one, Project H (the ‘H’ stands for humanity, habitats, health and happiness) had established local ‘chapters’ of volunteers in Johannesburg, London, Mexico City and six cities in the United States to provide learning tools for schools all over the world and clean water to rural communities in Africa. Pilloton started Project H on her own, armed with a laptop, on which she rounded up volunteers, funders and collaborators. She then raised awareness of its work by posting about it on social media networks and blogging on empathetic websites, before repeating the exercise for Studio H, an experimental high-school design course that started out in one of the poorest rural areas of North Carolina.⁵⁵

For a social design group like Cottam’s Participle, which deploys design strategically, digital technology is essential both as a communications tool and as a means of analysing huge quantities of complex data with the precision required to deliver smarter public services.⁵⁶ Rather than risk wasting resources by providing standard packages to everyone, as traditional social services dealing with, say, elderly people or the long-term unemployed have done, Participle marshals its database to identify what type of support each individual needs, then uses it to monitor their progress and, if necessary, to make modifications. Without such sophisticated analysis, it would have to employ so many people to crunch the same information that its new services would be impracticable in terms of time as well as cost.⁵⁷

Like Project H, Participle sets its own agenda. Rather than waiting to be commissioned by political bodies or charitable foundations, it identifies the areas where it wants to work, and drafts a plan of action based on focused research. It then pitches the plan to prospective funders and partners, before choosing the ones that promise to be the most productive collaborators. The same entrepreneurial zest is evident in other expanding areas of design⁵⁸ and has proved decisive in enabling designers to seize the autonomy that had long eluded them when they were restricted to commercial roles and subject to instruction from senior colleagues or clients.⁵⁹

Equally important is a close rapport with other disciplines. Participle’s projects are usually led by a designer and adhere to the conventional structure of the design process, but the participants are as likely to be economists, statisticians, ethnographers, anthropologists, psychologists, computer programmers, business specialists or social scientists (like Cottam herself) as they are to be designers. IDEO adopts a similar approach when applying design thinking in the commercial sphere by assembling teams of designers, behavioural scientists, engineers, psychologists and other specialists.⁶⁰ Designers also need to draw on the knowledge and experience of people with different skill sets for specific projects, for example when responding to new directions in technology. Some of the most interesting innovations in digital books have been executed, not by graphic designers, but by animators and film-makers.⁶¹ The same applies to designers’ efforts to help us to live more responsibly by developing a sustainable society. Much of this work would be impossible without specialist scientific input, which is why the American landscape architect William McDonough teamed up with the German chemist Michael Braungart to develop the ‘Cradle to Cradle’ system of sustainable design and production.⁶² If designers are to continue to grapple with such challenges, they will be likelier to do so as team players, than as go-it-alone ‘design-heroes’.

More ‘design-heroines’ should be joining them in future. Historically, design has been a boy’s club, and a white boy’s club at that, which is why design history books tend to be filled with white male faces, plus a few Japanese ones. Even the supposedly progressive Bauhaus limited women to studying ceramics or weaving during its early years. Successful female designers were relatively rare until recently, and many of them belonged to couples, like the American product designer Ray Eames and her husband, Charles, and the German interior designer Lilly Reich and her lover, the architect Mies van der Rohe.⁶³ Unfortunately, they were often overshadowed by their male partners. Poor Ray Eames suffered the indignity of being introduced to the audience of the NBC television show Home in 1956 with a condescending: ‘This is Mrs Eames and she is going to tell us how she helps Charles design these chairs.’⁶⁴

When the twenty-three-year-old Charlotte Perriand arrived at Le Corbusier’s architectural studio in Paris in 1927 hoping to persuade him to offer her a job, he rebuffed her with a brusque: ‘We don’t embroider cushions.’ Days later, he saw a room set designed by Perriand at the Salon d’Automne exhibition in Paris, and hired her on the spot.⁶⁵ She worked in his studio for ten years, becoming the lover of his cousin and collaborator Edouard Jeanneret, before embarking upon a successful independent career. Yet Perriand was a rare exception, as was Charles Harrison, who became the first African American designer to win a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York in 2006. When he had applied for a design job with the retail group Sears Roebuck fifty years before, Harrison was told that the company had an unwritten policy against hiring black people. He was taken on by a commercial design consultancy, where he executed several assignments for Sears. Five years later, Sears offered him a job, and Harrison worked there for over thirty years, becoming chief designer and developing some of its best-selling products.⁶⁶ Like Perriand, he set an encouraging precedent, and the design profession has since become more diverse in terms of gender, ethnicity and geography. Design’s expansion into new terrain should accelerate future progress, not least because ‘outsiders’ tend to flourish in new fields where there are fewer barriers to entry and no established order to close ranks against them.⁶⁷

As the profession opens up, so will the design process. One catalyst is the growing popularity of open source development, which was pioneered by Dennis Ritchie and his peers in the 1970s to enable people to scrutinize each stage of a design project as it evolves, and to critique it.⁶⁸ Another is that we ‘civilians’, the people who use designers’ work, are becoming less inclined to allow them to play ‘the master’ as Jan Tschichold did in his day, and are increasingly eager to design for ourselves, either by making things from scratch or by customizing them. Maker Faires have sprung up all over the world, where DIY designers show off latter-day versions of Benjamin Franklin’s stove and Charles Darwin’s wheeled chair.⁶⁹ No sooner did the first iPhone go on sale in 2007 than hackers found ways of devising unauthorized apps to download on to it. Apple eventually bowed to public pressure by allowing them to be sold on its Apps Store, keeping a hefty percentage of the proceeds as a quid pro quo. Soon, it was selling over a billion apps every month, mostly the work of self-taught programmers.⁷⁰

Nor is the zest for customization likely to ebb. On the contrary, it will accelerate with the progress of digital production technologies, like three-dimensional printing, which are so fast and precise that products can be made individually or adapted to meet each person’s needs at no extra cost. Eventually, every neighbourhood and village could have its own 3D printer, which will operate like an old-fashioned blacksmith’s forge by making new things for local residents and businesses, and repairing old ones.⁷¹ Ensuring that these technologies are put to good use is an important challenge for designers in their traditional role as agents of change. To discharge it successfully they need to redefine their relationship with the rest of us by enabling us to participate in the design process, and to do so constructively.

If more and more people cast themselves as designers, where does this leave the professionals? Will they disappear? Or will their influence be gradually eroded? Not if they prove their worth. In this respect, design is not unlike psychology. Lots of us like to think of ourselves as self-taught psychologists, and often use rudimentary psychological techniques when coming to instinctive conclusions about other people’s actions or motives. If we are lucky and observant, our judgements may be correct, but surely they would be more perceptive if we had studied psychology, or were able to draw on the knowledge, discipline and experience acquired from years of professional practice. Much the same can be said of design, just as long as the professionals can match the originality and resourcefulness of Blackbeard, Qin Shihuangdi, Nicholas Owen and other ‘accidental’ designers.