DESIGN AS AN AGENT FOR CHANGE
Marchelle Abrahams chats to British design critic Alice Rawsthorn about design fails, re-imagined designs and how it influences different spheres of life
DRESSED in a navy blue jumpsuit and wearing a trendy blunt bob, Alice Rawsthorn, 61, looks like she’s about to take on the world. But you’d be surprised to know the British design critic had just completed a speaker session before sitting through a series of interviews. Cool, calm and impeccably gracious, she greets me with a warm smile before inviting me to take a seat.
We sit for a quick chat on the fringes of Design Indaba 2019, where she’s been invited to be one of the 30 speakers at the 3-day event. An award-winning design critic, influential public speaker and the author of the acclaimed book, Design as an Attitude, I was intrigued by the direction in which her years of experience had taken her.
“Design has adopted many different roles and different guises at different times and in different contexts, but I believe it’s always had one elemental role, and that’s as an agent of change,” says London-based Rawsthorn.
It’s an interesting analogy, and one that many don’t take into consideration when discussing design and how it impacts different spheres of life, be it politically, socially or culturally.
Moments before our chat, she had commanded an auditorium on how bad designs can reflect outdated stereotypes and, if used correctly, how design can be a powerful tool to tackle the massive problems faced by South Africa today.
For instance, we live in a country with a huge divide between rich and poor. Can design be used to lesson the gap between the haves and the havenots? Rawsthorn says that’s a difficult one, but it can be done. “I think design is increasingly being deployed through the practice of social design to tackle those big political and economic issues.
“This is a time of growing inequality, tragically all over the world. But one of the many positive developments within design culture in recent years is that politicians, economists and social scientists have increasingly recognised that design is a powerful tool that can help address these issues,” she says.
As gifted and creative as they are, really good designers don’t always get it right, often struggling to grasp the realism of the situation. Rawsthorn uses the example of the recent Gucci “black face” sweater fail. “What possessed those incredibly wealthy, powerful, amply-advised companies to allow those products to be released? And why did no one there raise the alarm about them?” she asks. Astonishingly, the black face sweater had actually been on sale for several months before social media got whiff of it. As soon as that happened, Gucci apologised and withdrew it from sale.
“The alarm was raised at Burberry when one of the models not wearing the controversial noose hoodie on the runway was so distressed because there had been a history of suicide in her family. “Had people been more watchful, it wouldn’t have happened,” she says.
There are ways bad design can make our lives more problematic. Rawsthorn mentions as examples Mattel’s Frida Barbie not being a true representation of the Mexican artist; speculation about Apple draining their iPhone batteries; and allegations of Uber labour disputes – all of these bad designs ended up hurting a brand.
But what is an example of an excellent design, and one that has stood the test of time?
“One of my favourite personal examples is a soup spoon that was designed by Danish designer Arne Jacobsen in the late 1950s. He studied soup spoons rigorously and then abandoned everything he studied in order to re-imagine the soup spoon in its ideal form,” she says.
“An interesting fact is that those very spoons were used in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey because he wanted all his props to look like they belonged to the future, even though it was designed a decade before.
“I still use my Jacobsen soup spoons today,” said Rawsthorn.