April 8, 2009, 10:11 pm

Designing Through a Depression

Addressing other nations at the G-20 last Wednesday, President Obama suggested that the United States was unlikely to return to its role as a “voracious consumer market.” If Obama’s right — and the experience of Japan, post-recession, suggests he may well be — what might that mean for design?

The impact of the economy on design has generated a lively round of journalistic debate. In “Design Loves a Depression,” a piece in The Times in January, design writer Michael Cannell argued that designers need to be taken down a notch and shift gears from creating luxury high rises and limited-edition Nymphenburg porcelain cows and “actually find a new sense of relevance in the process”; Murray Moss, owner of the eponymous Soho temple to design and purveyor of limited edition Nymphenburg porcelain cows, rightly responded at Design Observer that designers (and everyone else in their right mind) hate a depression — and also that there’s no shame in creating beauty (including that which takes the form of expensive objects).

Design editor Pilar Viladas echoed Moss, focusing her essay in T magazine on her love for (and support for the ongoing production of) a $900 Royal Copenhagen plate — and “for those of you who can actually afford it,” she concluded, “mazel tov.” And, never one to shy away from an opportunity, provocateur/designer Philippe Starck jumped in and attempted yet again to end his own career with the suggestion that any talk of the beauty of the designed object ” . . . seems a bit obscene.”

I do agree with Moss that design doesn’t love a depression, and indeed, it’s obvious that designers don’t “deserve” a depression any more than autoworkers, chefs or airline pilots. Nor are they responsible for having created one. Designers may make fantastical one-off objects destined for collectors’ vitrines, but it’s more likely they work for clients and companies whose demands and desires dictate. As one designer put it to me in an e-mail recently, “There is no crime in the creation of the occasional design equivalent of a cream puff. I’m just hoping the pursuit will not return with such perverse attention.”

For every designer who stands guilty as charged for designing platinum cellphones there are now — as there were six months ago, a year ago, a decade ago — far more designers quietly working on more purposeful pursuits. We just weren’t hearing as much about them — or about the constituents their projects and products serve.

So the seeming prevalence of more — shall we call them “shovel-ready”? — design projects may be attributable to current economic realities, but it’s more likely this work has been happening all along. Maybe one way the recession as good for design is to see it not as a form of punishment for frivolous designers but rather as an opportunity to allow for a rethinking of design itself — and the role of the designer within it.

This rethinking needs to come not just from designers but from the manufacturers, companies and other clients who decide what products and projects will be produced. There’s no excuse not to examine and re-examine what’s made, how it’s manufactured, what materials are used (and which are recyclable), what benefit it’s giving the consumer (or lack thereof) and what contribution, if any, it’s making to anything other than landfill.

And all of us who purchase these things should be thinking — and no doubt are, more and more these days — do I need this? Is there another one that’s more efficient? That uses less packaging? Will last longer? Has less square footage? Looks better? Is more fun to use? Is something I want to pass on to my grandkids? (This last notion, which aims for design to create things that are not throwaway but built to last, was recently termed “heirloom design” by innovator/inventor Saul Griffith, who under the umbrella of Squid Labs is working on everything from wind power to low-cost eyeglasses for the developing world.)

The work that springs from this sort of questioning does not have to sacrifice beauty for utility, vision for practicality. Designers can work to improve on existing necessities as well as future ones: why, for example, can’t toothbrushes be designed to last longer? When will we see a lamp that casts a truly flattering glow from compact fluorescents ? (Vu1 is just about there, having created an electron stimulated lightbulb that is as efficient as a CFL but is mercury-free.)

Courtesy of Vu1 Electron stimulated lightbulb

What about a house that heats itself? A refrigerator cooled by magnetic fields — rather than one with an iPod docking station? High-capacity batteries powered by genetically engineered viruses (it’s happening at MIT)? Solar panels that are as cheap and ubiquitous as vinyl siding? More cool bicycles like the Strida folding one that could help make giving up the car that much easier?

Folding bike by Mark Sanders for Strida.

Designers have already been thinking about how good design can change that; now maybe it can happen faster.

Designers — and their collaborators — can reimagine cities and infrastructure and schools. An organization like Architecture for Humanity is doing this on various fronts with their new Classroom Challenge, which invites not just designers and architects but also teachers and students to design the classroom of the future — in order to address the World Bank’s prediction that 10 million new classrooms across 100 countries will be needed by 2015, and to prevent those classrooms from being built like the infamous FEMA trailers. (By the way, AFH celebrates 10 years of reimagining the role of design this week.)

Created by design students, Project M’s Buy a Meter initiative uses graphic design to highlight the poor’s lack of access to safe water. Public Architecture has created initiatives like 1% (which challenges architecture and design firms nationwide to pledge a minimum of 1% of their time to pro bono service, and connects those with nonprofit organizations in need of design assistance), and has also designed prototypes like the Day Labor Station, a simple, flexible structure using green materials and designed to offer not only basic amenities like shelter and toilet facilities but also foster safety and community.

Courtesy of Public Architecture Day Labor Station by Public Architecture

Large-scale projects like architect Stephen Holl’s Whitney Water Purification Plant and Newtown Creek Water Pollution Control Plant by Polshek Partners show how architects can make things as mundane as utility plants not only functional but pleasing to the eye and spirit.

Courtesy Steven Holl Architects Whitney Water Purification Plant by Steven Holl Architects.

Planet Reuse connects architects and designers contractors and material reclaimers, enabling them to find and source reused building materials. And many designers already excel at transforming those materials into useful and beautiful objects wherein something as ubiquitous as a telephone book can be used to create a coffee table. I’m not suggesting that everything designed today has to reuse something, but at minimum designers should aim for longer use, fewer materials.

Table from Inhabitat’s Spring Green Design competition by Rodrigo Jaroseski.

At its heart, design is about problem-solving, but it’s also about problem-identifying. Instead of creating a need for things, designers can now focus on responding to things we do need. We may have never been confronted with as many problems as we are today; the blame for them can’t be attributed to designers, but many future solutions can — and will be.