Evaluating values

Design criticism shapes the economic and intellectual landscape of design practice and informs the way design history is written. To date, however, the mechanisms through which it assigns value and the nature of the value it assigns have not been examined.

My research looks at the ways in which design criticism has been produced and consumed in Britain and the USA since the 1950s, and questions how it might be used to gauge the changing relations between culture and commerce during this period. It considers the connections between the marketplace and the organs of opinion (such as publications and exhibitions) through which criticism is broadcast - between what cultural critic Richard Hoggart has referred to as 'the inter-relationships between writers, politics, power, class and cash'. Specifically, it focuses on the events or conflicts in the second half of the 20th century that provoked changes in these relationships. Design criticism, as I define it at the outset, is the public expression of informed opinion about an aspect of contemporary design in which the views and values of the author (and/or those of the institutional body that funds their dissemination) are made explicit and are intended to be transformative and productive.

Shifting parameters and preoccupations

The first stages of the project have been to hone the definition of design criticism, based on an assessment of critical theories across several disciplines, but focused mostly on those associated with literature, culture, architecture and art. Once its parameters have been located, and its qualities have been differentiated from other types of commentary about design and from other types of criticism, the definition can then be used as an analytic filter to test a range of texts, entities and events that might contain or constitute design criticism.

In addition to close textual analysis of the various examples of criticism selected for this study, supplementary sources will include personal interviews and archival material relating to individual critics, curators, producers and editors, as well as to their corresponding institutions and media outlets. These findings will be used to plot the shifting preoccupations of design thinkers and to determine the impact of their work on designers and consumers. The results will be studied in the context of the institutional, media, political and cultural history of the period.

Design criticism as subject not tool

I draw on design criticism a great deal, both as a design writer (I contribute to books and periodicals such as Eye, Design Issues, ID, Print, New York Magazine and Architect's Newspaper) and as an academic - I teach critical thinking to MFA students at the School of Visual Arts and the Rhode Island School of Design, and am chairing the School of Visual Arts' new MFA in Design Criticism, scheduled to open in 2008. Working for my MA in Design History (from the programme run by the V&A and the RCA) led me to consider what design criticism had to tell us over and above its use

fulness as source material. By considering it as a subject in itself - by putting it at the centre of design historical enquiry, rather than merely drawing on it for other research purposes - I aim to elicit new voices, ideas and vocabulary that will provide a fresh reading of the prevailing historiographies of post-war design.