In the age of the internet, there is no shortage of opinions on design, both professional and amateur. Why is it important that critics be responsible for defending their ideas before a public audience?

You have to start by asking “who is the public?” I’m reminded of Bertolt Brecht’s ironic comment re East German politics in the late 50s, something like “If the people are not able to move forward on these issues, it may be necessary to dissolve the people and elect another.” We all want to imagine that the “real” public consists of people who secretly agree with us.

So this question is really about managing echo-chamber effects that can happen in almost any profession. Critics in design, as in other fields, have developed a language that can sound ethereal if not wacky to the man on the street, and sometimes even to people in connected professions. I refer not just to the specialized words for specialized needs that any profession requires, but characteristic patterns of syntax, tone, and cadence that mark a text as belong to the discourse of design. The language is what Foucault called a “discursive formation.” It can be justified partly by the specialized topic, but as Foucault insisted, it is always partly exclusionary. Its effect, intended or not, is to sort the audience into “people who can understand this stuff” and “people who can’t.”

But in fact, many (perhaps most) people are capable of understanding design, but don’t understand the language of design critcism and are not sure they should have to.

So I think the interesting question is the critic’s responsibility to translate his ideas in a way that engages those people, so that you’re talking to the totality of the potentially interested public instead of just the ones who’ve gotten past your profession’s language filter.

This is about more than language. Design must draw expertise from many connected disciplines. One of the worst effects of overly exclusionary language is that it excludes people whose expertise you need if you’re going to form a resilient idea about what’s a truly good design. If an architect listens only to the people who understand his language, he may not listen to enough plumbers, and as a result, he may design a beautiful building whose toilets will explode. That’s an exaggerated example, obviously, but at subtler levels this is happening all the time to our collective detriment.

So it’s a good question!

Friday, May 6 at 2:20pm