RCA Graduates Launch Dirty Furniture Journal to Reveal How Design Shapes the World

Editors Anna Bates, Elizabeth Glickfeld and Peter Maxwell elaborated on their chosen niche: ‘Dirty Furniture arose from our desire to create a publication that would experiment with and expand the field of writing about design. We found there was a disparity between the amount of focus the design and lifestyle press and international design festivals place on furniture, and the amount of critical discourse surrounding the subject, so we set about creating a publication that addressed this issue.’

Conceived as a finite series of six, the editorial in issue one further establishes Dirty Furniture’s aims: to use designed objects as a ‘springboard to explore topics spanning politics, history, technology, psychology, manufacturing... and the plain weird.’ Starting with Couch, future issues will continue to map domestic space with Table, Toilet, Closet, Telephone and Bed.

With articles tackling the aesthetics of mess, the history of comfort and the manufacture of foam, and interviews with an upholsterer and a ‘couchsurfer’, Couch amply demonstrates how a piece of furniture can generate a multiplicity of meanings. Reflecting on their first issue, the editors praised its ‘really consistent level of quality’, and singled out Will Wiles’ essay as embodying precisely the wide-ranging social, cultural and conceptual exploration that Dirty Furniture seeks to promote.

Design writer Wiles’s article provides a nuanced appraisal of the politics of the sofa. In it, he ‘addresses how the sofa (and, hence, a certain form of laissez-faire governance) inflected both Tony Blair’s and David Cameron’s premierships and contrasts that with the way the sofa is used by the redtop newspapers to position benefits claimants as inherently feckless. The essay has a really fascinating arc that deals with the sofa as object, metaphor and image at the heart of contemporary British political discourse.’

Other high-profile contributors to Couch include design historian Penny Sparke, artist Jeremy Millar, architect Sam Jacob and editor-in-chief of Disegno magazine Johanna Agerman Ross.

Dirty Furniture is also noticeably a publication where form and design reiterate textual and visual content. This reflects the reality of the collaboration between the magazine and its designers, Sara de Bondt Studio, best known for its thoughtful, playful, typography-led approach to design for clients including Tate, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Barbican, Nottingham Contemporary and the MIT Press.

Sara de Bondt expanded on the appeal of being involved, suggesting that the success of the project was very much underpinned by a shared ethos. For her, ‘Designing Dirty Furniture has been a very inspiring collaboration as it’s rare to meet such kindred spirits in a client. We are both trying to do the same thing in our own ways – demystifying the design process. This saw the collaboration go well beyond what you'd expect from a regular design commission, in that we were able to contribute ideas for content.’

As part of the first cohort to graduate from the MA in Critical Writing in Art & Design in 2012, Bates, Glickfeld and Maxwell also situate Dirty Furniture as an attempt to ‘maintain the atmosphere of discussion and sharing of ideas that was such a valuable part of the programme’. This is evident in the publication’s ambition ‘to reach across a huge disciplinary and literary range and search for new ways of looking at its subject’, as well as in its ‘somewhat waggish’ tone, a welcome alternative to the po-faced register adopted by much design writing.

As seasoned freelancers, launching a new design magazine had an additional, practical function. In creating a sympathetic platform for the editors’ own approach to design writing, Dirty Furniture also offers the opportunity to support ‘the many talented young critics that we had come to know over the course of our academic and working lives’.

Head of Programme Professor David Crowley further commended the original thinking behind the publication, ‘When we set up the Critical Writing in Art & Design programme in 2010 we set ourselves a rather high aim: that of producing new kinds of writing about art and design. What is really pleasing about Dirty Furniture is that it has more than met our ambition. We know that design plays a central role in life today. It is, quite literally, the world in which we live. But so much design journalism reads like promotion or marketing. Dirty Furniture treats design with the humour and intelligence that it deserves.’

Dirty Furniture: Couch is currently available to buy online, with issue two, Table, to follow in March 2015.