This article was originally published in Polish, in the Summer 2007 issue of 2+3D. I do not personally speak Polish, and as such I can’t speak to how it read in the end. Like for example, they added an additional lengthy footnote in reference to my use of the acronym “WTF”, presumably a translator’s note or a profanity recalibration, which I appreciated despite its inscrutability (I couldn’t scrute it, at least). In any case is what they were going off of.

If you’re a student in any sort of design school today, you are probably sick to death of hearing people ask “What is design?”¹ Foundation-year art school instructors will frequently trot this one out to kickstart discussions. Arbitrary definitions (“Graphic design is essentially typographic!”) will doubtlessly follow, which will be countered by contradictory edge-case refutations (“Oh yeah? What about Tomato and Ed Ruscha, then?”) … From there, the conversation will invariably devolve into pointlessly circuitous bickering and the wanton splitting of argumentative hairs, which is great if you’re trying to avoid doing any actual design work. The truth is that the nature of design is tautological: design is what you get when you design².

The rather slipshod arrangement of work at the National Design Triennial, currently up at the Cooper-Hewitt in New York, is like a physical manifestation of the classic “What is design?” conversation. It has the same basic ethos: a bunch of circumlocutions that, while entertaining, fail to assert any useful conclusion. The individuals whose work is on display have produced things of fantastic value, wonder, and scope, but the show incoherently fails to bring them together them in any meaningful way.

The show is called “DESIGN LIFE NOW”, with the emphasis squarely on “LIFE”. In writing her catalog essay, “Intelligent Design”, Barbra Bloemnik goes to great lengths to prove that design equals life, to the point where she compromises basic scientific facts³, as well as her own authority: Bloemnik’s starry-eyed praise for the iPod is unflinchingly sycophantic, and the subsequent comparison of the market systems surrounding the iPod to a living organism comes off as a stretch.

Many of the items on display are similarly overreaching in their context: one of the Triennials’ entries is Apple itself. It is not specifically the iPod that has been honored with inclusion; nor Jonathan Ive, the oft-lauded designer of the iconic music player; nor the iPod’s distinctive advertising campaign. It’s just Apple. Apple has been installed down the hall from a few prints of elaborate compositions that Joshua Davis, designer and programmer, had a computer generate for him. Davis’ images are rather unremarkable; to judge from the accompanying copy, they were included primarily to illustrate the stochastic processes Davis harnessed in his code. On their own, they are confusingly bland and meandering, and as such they rely on their accompanying texts to connect them back to “DESIGN” and “LIFE”. The Apple display is similarly confounding, as its broad scope weakens the link to the Triennials’ ostensible theme. I would hazard that these displays would benefit from inversion: simply showing us the iPod (rather than an invocation of the entirety of Apple Computer), and an installation with Davis’ software at work (instead of flaccid prints), would make more sense.

Figure 1. iPod Nano, Apple Computer, 2005.
Image courtesy Apple.

Figure 2. “022 – Coast of Kanagawa”, Joshua Davis, 2005.
Image courtesy Mr. Davis.

The same thing is true about most of the specific selections that comprise this Triennial: a little nudging would considerably reduce the “WTF?” factor. Some of the elements are truly important, like Ben Fry’s Processing, the display of which was handled quite well at the show. A product of the MIT Media Lab, Processing is an open-source programming environment, created with artists and designers in mind. The inclusion of a codified framework that gives rise to specific instances of design work was a smart curatorial move. Processing itself needs little introduction, and it easily fits into the show’s conceit. Its presence actively broadens the scope of what a gallery show can call “design”, and its inclusion naturally extends to the rather fantastic schmorgasbord of visualization work which Fry and his contemporaries have done with the system. The nature of the system itself encapsulates the potency of open-source and collaborative education as forces in contemporary design.

Figure 3. Articulate (detail), Casey Reas, 2005. Reas rendered this image using Processing code; infuriatingly, this is the only example the museum has furnished to illustrate Processing.

Unfortunately, most of the other entries don’t betray this sort of consideration. What is worse is that the entries themselves don’t readily speak to one another. That’s theoretically OK, as many an interesting story has been concocted from disparate parts. But there is no story here. The show reads like a junk drawer; little apparent curatorial regard shows through for the overarching relationships between the panoply of items on display… relationships that could have been coaxed out and leveraged. Samples of high-tech building materials appear next to some interesting artisanal glasswork, which is next to yet another paean to Chip Kidd’s book covers. There is a robotic lobster, and there are cartoons that teach you science pragma, and there is an assuredly comfortable chair (DO NOT TOUCH!), and there is a model of a building that looks interesting. But so what? There are no thematic groups or subgroups at all. The Army’s million-dollar AI soldier simulation⁴, for example, is across the room and down the hall a bit from Nicholas Blechman’s self-published war-themed book of satirical illustrations. They’re not close enough to be engagingly dissonant, nor are they far enough away from each other to create a sense of spectrum. Generally, you’re left with more questions than answers: why is this kayak suspended in the room tiled with intricate microprisms? Why are these proposal boards for an unbuilt super-sustainable laboratory complex in the same room as this flagrantly maximalist chandelier? Why are there 10,000 or so⁵ random entries related to OMA, who are based in Rotterdam?⁶

Figure 4. Basket office furniture, David Ritch and Mark Saffell
(for Hermann Miller), 2004

Figure 5. Scintilla wall paneling, Abhinand Lath,
with SensiTile (get it?), 2005

Figure 6. Empire (Nozone IX), Nicholas Blechman, 2004.
Image courtesy of the artist.

The show’s curators and shepherds have attempted to preempt such questions with a bunch of ex-post-facto lexical handwaving. Aside from Bloemnik’s aforementioned catalog essay (which screams “LIFE!”), Brooke Hodge (“CRAFT!”), Ellen Lupton (“HUMANS!”), and Matilda McQuaid (“TECHNOLOGY!”) all weigh in with an essay of their own, in which they each attempt to shoehorn the show’s participants into a specific big idea. Each tract glosses over a fact here and a fact there, in an effort to pull together a cogent theme. Preceding these, an introduction by Paul Warwick Thompson, director of the Cooper-Hewitt, explains away the inclusion of international starchitects as a strike against the “artificiality” of a curation program focused on American design⁷. That’s funny, because that “artificiality” is encoded in the Cooper-Hewitt’s stated mandate as “the preeminent museum and educational authority for the study of design in the United States”⁸, to say nothing of its history.

The denial of the museums’ past is further echoed in the exhibit’s complete and willing disregard for its formal context: hardly any of the work has been integrated into the Cooper-Hewitt’s ornate Georgian interiors. The book’s first and last four spreads, together with the covers, are all glossy full-bleed amateur-grade photographs of various designers in their workspaces. This works out a lot better than it does at the show proper, where the same images are blown up to super-human size and hung on panels in the museum’s front hallway. Unlike the 2003 Triennial, where printed patterns were hung so as to be consciously framed by the baroque moldings, the massive image panels scorn the walls on which they hang, suborning their visible history with the anti-aesthetic of the generic white-box gallery. Most of the individual exhibit installs follow suit in their lack of engagement with their environs. There are a handful of notable exceptions, of which the most visible is Electroland’s reconfiguration of the museums’ central staircase into a digital xylophone. The few standouts fail to alleviate the sense that the show is at odds with the museum that contains it, which in turn exacerbates the pervasive cacophony.

Irritatingly, the Triennial seems to want to compensate in attitude for what it lacks in vision. The haphazard treatment of the subject matter, further drawn and quartered (as it were) by the curators’ essays, allows for the easy weaponization of the loose theme of “DESIGN LIFE NOW” against would-be critics. “But, that’s what LIFE is all about!”, the Triennial seems to shout. “LIFE is random! LIFE doesn’t make sense, and so neither should we! Evolution, not revolution!” Yes, perhaps, but that sounds like an argument I’ve heard before, back when I was an undergrad.