VOGUE LIVING VIEW
Collaboration in the design world has reached fever pitch with big-picture challenges presenting pathways to new frontiers. By Alice Rawsthorn
The answer was ‘no’ whenever cousins Agnes and Rhoda Garrett tried to persuade an architect to take them on as apprentices in London during the 1860s. The reason was, predictably, their gender. An architect friend, John McKean Brydon, eventually agreed to hire them in 1873 on the condition that they would go nowhere near dirty, unladylike building sites.
About a year later, the Garretts cofounded A&R Garrett House Decorators, London’s first firm of female interior designers. As well as designing what they called “solid and unpretentious” interiors, in stark contrast to the fussy decor of the day, they published a book, Suggestions for House Decoration in Painting, Woodwork and Furniture, and travelled throughout Britain as star speakers in the fledgling women’s suffrage movement.
Friends since childhood, the cousins relished their professional collaboration. When Rhoda died of typhoid in 1882, Agnes was so distraught that she considered closing the business. But she continued until she retired in 1905 to devote her time to the suffrage campaign. Even so, she kept the ‘R’ in the firm’s name as a tribute to Rhoda.
The Garretts are part of a long tradition of collaboration in design. Take the mid-20th century, when Charles and Ray Eames operated as a husband-and-wife design team in Los Angeles. Brothers Achille, Pier Giacomo and (for a while) Livio Castiglioni similarly teamed up in Milan, where architect Gio Ponti was working closely with engineer Pier Luigi Nervi. Many similar examples exist today. Brothers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec practise together in Paris, as do design school friends Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby in London. Likewise, furniture designer Chris Liljenberg Halstrøm and textile designer Margrethe Odgaard have collaborated for years in Copenhagen.
Yet the nature of design collaborations has changed radically to reflect changes in design practice. As designers have expanded their work beyond graphics, products, interiors and other conventional disciplines to tackle urgent ecological, social and political challenges, they have developed new ways of working more intensely with collaborators from an ever-wider range of specialisations.
These changes have produced collaborations that are both more sophisticated and more transparent. Pleasing though it is to think of the Garretts, Eameses and Castiglionis having worked together for so long, other past design collaborations were less open and less equitable. Many were invisible, typically because one collaborator (generally male) received all of the credit. Take Le Corbusier, who is routinely cited as the designer of the Modernist furniture developed during the 1920s, even though Charlotte Perriand did most of the work. The same applies to German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, whose lover, Lilly Reich, was the principal designer of the most famous pieces of furniture attributed to him.
Time’s up, thankfully. One reason is that the gender politics of design are becoming more inclusive (albeit too slowly). Another is that the new design collaborations are so ambitious and complex — and the consequences of their failure so grave — that mutual respect and openness are critical to their success.
One of the most dynamic areas of design is the emergence of long-term research programs that investigate its ecological and political impact by drawing on the knowledge and insights of specialists from diverse fields. Take Ore Streams, an investigation into the gigantic, often illicit global trade in digital waste conducted by Italian designers Simone Farresin and Andrea Trimarchi of Studio Formafantasma in a commission from the 2017 NGV Triennial in Melbourne.
Charting shipments of waste from country to country and assessing their environmental and human impact involved collaborating with scientists, politicians, ecologists, manufacturers, recyclers, other designers and Interpol agents. Farresin and Trimarchi, who have worked together since meeting at design school in Florence, have since nurtured other collaborations. For example, they’ve analysed how design can assuage the political and environmental damage caused by the global timber industry for Cambio, a new design research project exhibiting at the Serpentine Galleries in London.
Similar cross-disciplinary networks of collaborators have been assembled for other ambitious design endeavours. Examples include The Ocean Cleanup, which is developing systems to clear plastic trash from the oceans, and Forensic Architecture, which is dedicated to securing justice for the victims of human rights abuses, environmental destruction and war crimes.
Equally inspiring are the collaborative design experiments that specialists from other fields are staging. Among them is the work of British social scientist Hilary Cottam, who has conducted more than a decade of research into using design as a tool to develop more effective strategies for addressing acute social problems such as isolation among elderly people, homelessness and long-term unemployment.
Traditionally, a designer’s role in tackling such issues was to produce websites or brochures explaining what social scientists, politicians or economists had decided to do. Cottam has instead embedded them in decision-making by forming cross-disciplinary teams of relevant experts, such as psychologists, coders, statisticians and ethnographers. Each team has a designer at its helm, uses design language and adheres to the design process.
Cottam does so because she believes that this collaborative approach empowers design to produce the best possible outcomes, which is just what we need at this deeply turbulent time.
New design collaborations are so AMBITIOUS and complex that mutual respect and OPENNESS are critical to their success