Evgeny Morozov: “To save everything, Click Here”

Last night I went to the LSE to hear Evgeny Morozov speak about his new book, ‘To Save Everything Click Here’.

Morozov set out from the beginning the main territory of his argument, which essentially concerns the increasingly networked relationships between three groups: Designers/ Technologists at Silicon Valley, Policy Makers/Consultancies and the Government.

He argues that these technologists are irresponsibly using new tools such as sensors, big data and ‘gamification’ to intrude on the personal and political environment in ways which have not been fully discussed or considered by the public- morally, emotionally, philosophically. The increasingly central, and, as he would see it, dangerously empowered role designers now have in shaping the world through social media and technological tools, has been encouraged and driven forward both by the directives of neoliberal markets and lazy governments who would rather use quick fix ‘solutionism’ to social problems, than plan and design longer-term infrastructural change.

Morozov appeared to have a uniformly black vision of the role of designers at Silicon Valley  (maybe his book presents a more nuanced account?). He painted a pretty dark picture of how facebook, google and other evil forces have used cultures of creativity and design to sustain their market monopolies.

However, he was not pessimistic about the role designers can play in general. Rather he singled out the work of designers in Scandinavia who have employed an emotional approach to design and trigger a more thoughtful and morality-based response to social problems through the Never Hungry Caterpillar extension cord, which tells the user when it has been consuming too much electricity by twisting and contorting in ‘pain’.

I’m looking forward to reading Morozov’s book for a fuller account of some aspects of his paper which I found slightly contradictory- his at times moralistic and reformative attitude to public behaviour and at times quite narrow conception of the role and intent of the designer.

If designers and technologists have become as powerful and central as Morozov suggests, then this book will, I think, be part of an important debate for the design community about the social responsibilities it has in being a positive force for change.

Objects of a Passion

This evening I went along to a Professorial Lecture given by Amy de la Haye at the London College of Fashion. Entitled ‘Objects of a Passion: Exhibiting Fashion and Dress in the Context of the Museum’, de la Haye took the audience on a journey through her work as Dress Historian, Fashion Curator and Ebay addict. As an undergraduate student,  De la Haye’s book Defining Dress, (1999), was one of the first texts that got me interested in fashion and design culture (I had to hunt it down in the anthropology section of the uni library along with Elizabeth Wilson’s Adorned in Dreams!), so I was really keen to go to hear her speak. 

The lecture began with some historical contextualisation of fashion curation, through a discussion of two major exhibitions at the V&A Museum: Britain Can Make It in 1946 and Fashion: An Anthology by Cecil Beaton in 1971. Both of these exhibitions, she argued, focused primarily on the designer and not the wearer; the emphasis being on the production rather than the consumption of design. Some fascinating archive material was shown, including a fantastic photograph of Cecil Beaton posing for a self-portrait  in his early twenties and some meticulously kept scrapbooks of his work. De la Haye was hinting towards the ways in which Beaton curated his own life through his exhibitions. 

She then moved on to discuss her own work, which started at the Brighton Museum in, The Messels: Six Generations of Dress, (2005) which told a very personal and yet universal story about the power of fashion and memory in a display of this family’s wardrobe. The next exhibition she discussed was Land Girls: Cinderellas of the Soil, (2009), which deconstructed the uniform of the Land Girl during the second world war. 

In addition to the unique archive material in her presentation,  it was de la Haye’s anecdotal asides that I found most inspirational (for example, the gushing way she described finding lipstick on a dress or how she got in contact with people who were out-bidding her for historical dress on Ebay to find out why they wanted it). Her work as a dress historian, fashion curator and Ebay addict has been held together by a genuine passion for the object. For me, her work has a real integrity, driven by the humanity of material culture- the reasons we wear clothes, rather than the reasons they are produced. 

RCA: 175

Tracy Emin, The Perfect Place to Grow, which lends its name to the title of the RCA Exhibition.

This morning, on my way to the National Art Library for another day of writing, I stopped in at the RCA to see their exhibition, “The Perfect Place to Grow”, which celebrates the school’s  175th year. The exhibition is to be part of a year long celebration of ‘the world’s oldest art and design school’.

The first room of the exhibition consists of what is essentially a timeline of esteemed alumni and staff: starting with Henry Cole and ending in James Dyson, with Sylvia Pankhurst and Tracy Emin in between. Although there are occasional references to internal shifts which mark greater social change (eg. admission of female students in 1841), this does quickly become quite a monotonous homage to the RCA celebrity-design-genius I think I’m pretty bored of reading about.

The rest of the exhibition is divided into four key themes: Art and Industry, Public Purpose, Personal Expression and Political Expression. In many ways the first section sets out the dominant theme for the whole exhibition, which seems to me to be the complex relationship between art and design at the school. The text to this section acknowledges that this debate, and the schools attitude to it,  has been unresolved or, as Christopher Frayling put it in his history of the school in 1999, ‘swung back and forth like a pendulum’. Interestingly, it also stated that this debate had been ‘laid to rest’ with the acquisition of the Royal Charter in 1967, after which the school had become more comfortable with the idea that ‘artists inspire designers’ and ‘designers inspire artists’. There was certainly evidence of how this had worked in some parts of the exhibition, particularly in the ‘critical design’ section in which designers used artistic ideas to challenge the commercial pressures of industry.

What was perhaps most interesting to me was the statement that today it is proud of the ‘cross-fertilisation’ between the two, which has made it a ‘formidable educational model’, when in fact from my research I know that the relationship between the two has been a source of anxiety rather than intent. If, as the press release states, on the of the main aims of the exhibition was to explore ‘the politics and polemics behind the perennial question of how Britain should train its artists and designers’, it would seem to me that the answer was that the RCA had arrived at its particular model by accident, rather than by design.

The exhibition had some really iconic and classic pieces of art and design by past students on display which will certainly cement the idea, (if it needs any further cementing), that the RCA is the place to study to really make it in design and that it has undeniably played a major role in Britain’s design history. What was missing, for me, was a greater sense of the character, values and ideals of the school which have been inculcated and handed down from generation of student to the next. Although the names of the students were boasted throughout, their voices and viewpoints were notably absent from what could have been a really fascinating exploration of what it has actually been like to study there.