People who believe it is possible to "get a new life" will not be overly concerned by the suggestion that all truth is socially constructed, or think that accepting it means relinquishing one's moral compass.
Mark Lilla, 'The Politics of Jacques Derrida,' The New York Review Of Books, June 1998.

Mark Lilla's piece in the New York Review of Books examined the particular attraction of deconstructivist philosophy to Americans, pointing out that "America has something of the de-centered, democratic swirl" that Derrida tries to produce in thought. The shifts that have transformed the design professions, professions that are relatively nascent at that, strike me as having similar destabilizing characteristics. Indeed, one must include design as among the practices forced to redefine itself at the close of the century, partly as a consequence of thinkers like Derrida and partly as a consequence of the following trends and circumstances:

-- the ongoing democratization of culture, the elision of "high" and "low" cultures epitomized in the fine arts by Duchamp's found object sculptures, further explored by Surrealism, Dada, Fluxus, Pop and Op art; fostered by theories and studies of the everyday from Henri LeFevre to J.B. Jackson; and manifest in the design through the Eames's, Venturi, and subsequent generations' refusal to position the vernacular-- be it Disneyland or urban graffiti-- not as the "other," but as equal in value to professional production. Ellen Lupton's 1996 Mixing Messages exhibition portrayed the borders of this dichotomy between the street and the academy, the everyday and the tutored, as porous, where neither is free of each other’s influence, neither is pure. Design is ubiquitous; it is a language with many dialects.

-- the disciplinary additions of anthropology, ethnography, psychology, artificial intelligence, and other hard and soft sciences that further elevate the user to equal status with the designer. Even granted that these are tools now commandeered by designers, rather than marketing directors, they challenge the notion of authorship in the same way that deconstructivist thinking demurs a determination of the meaning of texts to the reader. Design is invisible: it is all a process of becoming.

-- the success of design (understood as a quality of lifestyle endeavor) on the Home & Garden TV cable station, Martha Stewart, countless shelter publications, collector list serves, all of which trace their legacy to the decorative arts traditions of connoisseurship and consumption. In this realm design becomes a series of cultural markers, static signposts of identity. Process is eschewed. Design is in the details.

If "design" is understood to exist in these three broad realms of discourse which I would call: the street, the market, and the museum, has it expanded beyond recognition? It has certainly compounded the task of design educators exponentially. To bring it back home, I hear two constant refrains since Cooper-Hewitt became Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum.

One is from our traditional, core audience, asking why have we abandoned the decorative arts. Don't we care about beauty? The other is from the design community, asking when we are going to be a "real" design museum. Aware of these two audiences, we have pursued a calculated strategy to present a range of exhibitions from the industrial design of Henry Dreyfuss to the Renaissance concept of disegno, from contemporary graphic design (Mixing Messages) to the jewelry of René Lalique. But it is beginning to seem that this kind of bundling of disciplines and pedagogies is cumbersome and potentially self-defeating if we're alienating both communities. Is design and the design museum suffering from what Mark Scrower calls the synergy trap?

To go back to the deconstructivist legacy to design, my sense is that it served to question design as a mechanism of the class system, specifically a Western European value system, produced and embraced only by an educated eye and sensibility. Deconstruction arrived on our shores at the same time our distinctively American habit of deflating pomposity and pretension was being aggressively played out on television, beginning with Archie Bunker, continuing through Rosanne, Howard Stern, the Simpsons, and now South Park with its new levels of scatology. The decons and the dumb-and-dumber compete for the thinking designer and design historian's attention. Which is why today we can examine Disneyland as a prototype for ideas of living, as is being done in the Canadian Centre for Architecture's exhibition The Architecture of Reassurance: Designing the Disney Themeparks. Philosophically, these trends leave designers in an interesting interpretative role, one that can't ignore populist taste, no matter now infantalizing, for it is "real" and can't forsake their own traditions of craft and education, which are just as "real."

Perhaps this is why design would seem to be following a general cultural trend towards personalization and domestification. Delivery rooms are now birthing rooms; restaurants are themed; focus groups happen in living room settings not behind one-way mirrors in conference rooms; cars have bud vases. Storytelling is back with a vengeance. Everywhere we look the "once upon a time. . . " phenomenon is with us. From essays on skiing with your four year old in the L.L.Bean 1998 holiday catalogue to specially commissioned short stories by authors the likes of John Irving for Absolut Vodka ads (see the September 21st issue of The New Yorker).

This is not necessarily a bad thing, this layering of narrative. Mostly it's a good thing as Martha would say. Taking the high road, it's focusing on the consumer and the experience over the material world's very monk-like disposition for a very material society.

The question is how much room for risk and art in design is there in a culture of narcissists? We are often called "les grand enfants," a nation of overgrown children. What kinds of toys do we really need? Can design aid and abet a cultural maturation process, or should it? Was modernism a failed attempt to do just that? Now that modernism is back as a style in Wallpaper, how do we escape the circle of irony? And how can we reconcile the three models of design: the street, the market and the museum? I believe the answer lies in rethinking the possibility that commonalities of pleasure and beauty can overlay the undeniable differences that exist across various demographic, educational and cultural states of being. Indeed, those qualities are why we work as designers or talk about design or collect its products at all.

To that end, I recommend Dave Hickey's essay, "Shining Hours/Forgiving Rhyme" in his new book Air Guitar-- in fact, I recommend all of them, as they are particularly timely and pithy pieces on culture and democracy. But in this one, Hickey recounts tagging along, at age 8, with his jazz-musician dad at a jam session somewhere in freshly suburbanized Texas. The cast of characters included the mortgage holders in the new subdivision and the session's hosts Ron and Mary, a German lady named Magda, Diego from the drycleaners, and beboppers Butch and Julius. Their mellow musical repartee, was living proof to Hickey that America was a "successful society. . . with incongruous people. . . (all who) got their solos." However, on reading Hickey's romantic recollection of that afternoon, his wife speculated, to the contrary, that it will be read as "an allegory of ethnic federalism in which two African-Americans, a Latino, four Irish-Americans, and a German Jewess seek refuge from the dominant culture in order to affirm their solidarity with the international underclass." Hickey counters: "But it was not that way at all!. . . Imposing the cookie-cutter of difference not only suppressed their commonality, it suppressed their differences." He mourns that ". . .we don't cherish that flavor of democracy anymore."

To my ear, much of the conversation at High Ground had a similar refrain-- a longing for a more generous understanding of the designer and the user in which both parties are not mutually suspicious, but engaged in a mutual enterprise of living well and well-being without sacrificing those solos or disbanding altogether. The street, the market and the museum have just begun to jam.

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© 1998 High Ground Design. Reprinted from www.2011_highgrounddesign.com