The Future of Design
A School of Art and Design has the task to prepare students for their professional future, while working with teacher designers of the present. The word future is referring to something which is not yet present and thus cannot be known. Writing about the future of something is extrapolating current developments. If the word future is used for design than the current notion of design is seen as changing. Design of the present will clearly not be the same as the design in the future.
The fact that design has changed is easily inferred from documentation of design or design exhibitions of the past. For instance the Rotterdam Design Prize Exhibition of 2011 in Museum Boijmans van Beuningen showed works of autonomous art (Matthijs Munnik, Microscopic Opera), shops selling bread (Vlaamsch Broodhuys), fashion, and lamp design on equal footing. Around 1987 when I was a student at the Rotterdam School for Art and Design, now Willem de Kooning Academy, this mishmash of art, sculpture, social projects and design of this Rotterdam Design Prize Exhibtion would be unthinkable. Painting and Sculpture were the main subjects of study, with small groups of students in the department "Publicity" and "Fashion".
During my study at the Art School critics declared Painting "dead". Although Art was declared dead already by Hegel in the 19th century nobody could deny the success story of the Art and Painting in the beginning of the 20th century. But what "Art" should be has changed during all times. The Art of Hegel cannot be considered the same as Art 100 years later. In the years following my graduation painting was indeed disappearing from the attention of the public. The painting hype was over. Instead photography, video, drawing become fashionable. But as fast as these domains became leading the popularity disappeared again. Leaving currently a very small group of autonomous artists, very much working in a small niche of ever more shrinking autonomous art.
Nowadays designers and architects are the rock stars of design. Art, autonomous art is just a part of design. Already during the first decennium of this century autonomous artist were going "social", even in Rotterdam. Although Rotterdam as a city is not insignificant, the artist of Rotterdam follow global trends. Art is very much global, which means practically the same in every country and every city overcoming enormous cultural differences. Social projects, working in the neighborhood, considering people and their behaviour as your medium was becoming normal, rather than working in a studio which was considered outdated.
Ten years later the curriculum of the WdKA, School for Design and Art gives students in the minors "social design" the opportunity to become socially engaged. Not designing a chair, a dress or making an illustration is leading, but a social design problem. Preferably a social problem which cannot be solved - called a "wicked problem". The way to approach is called "a project".
The difference between the autonomous artist working with people and a designer working in the social domain is that the former artist is still living his or her own dream, while the designer wants to signal problem. The solving a design problem - that is starting to make, design or create something - is not fashionable anymore.
Solving a problem is not the main point, because the indicated problem is only a problem when it cannot be solved within the project. When humains are trying to live together problems can be found very easily. Already on their own everybody not living an average life can be called a problem. Not only the homeless, the poor, the uneducated, also the handicapped people, older people, younger people, pregnant young mothers, the deaf, the blind, prisoners are all easy targets. These are isolated groups. Then all these groups trying to form a community, living together, interacting. The number of problems is unquantifiable. But don't underestimate the inventivety of these socially engaged design students. Before you know it you yourself are a social design project. When you don't own a TV set, don't read a newspaper, don't have a relation, are not divorced, are beginning to get older (which is easy from the perspective of 22 year old students), not submit to the terror of the social media you could be become a social deign project.
The hyper modern WdKA teaching curriculum is based on research about the future of design. The school doesn't want to educate students the way this was done when I was a student. Not teaching painting and drawing when indeed very few people can earn a living with these skills. The WdKA curriculum is apparently foreseeing many possibilities for social design and the contributions which can be made to society coming from young designers, illustrators, advertisers.
This task of a school to foresee the future can be seen in the perspective of contemporary developments. Abundant at the moment are exhibitions and publications around fashion and textiles containing the word "future". For instance "The Future of Fashion is now" 2014 in Museum Boijmans van Beuningen. Fashion has a future. This seems trivial. But the same cannot be said of "art', more specifically "autonomous art", like painting. Language is a tool and this tool is shaped by the users. The word combination "the future of art" or the "future of painting" is used only a few times and the video's of Erik Niedling called the Future of Art are mainly documenting contemporary art, art galleries, collectors. The contrast with the normality of talking about the future of fashion or the future of design is striking.
Art has become contemporary, as most of the exhibition showing recent art are called (Dutch: eigentijdse kunst, German zeitgenössische Kunst). Contemporary indicates from this time, and stating this also reinforces the notion that art has no future.
If Google Image search is used to find images of "future art" you get science fiction views of cities in a gloomy apocalyptic style. Or at best you get some exhibitions called "the future of art showing contemporary art.
Modern Art is even referring to art of the middle of the 20th century. Modern is followed by postmodern before the collapse of the system of naming and identifying currents in art. This collapse occurred at the same time as the evaporaton of general interest in contemporary art. The public is still interested in art, as can be seen in the booming of museums and exhibitions an all cities big and small, but this interest is either for the architecture, e.g. Bilbao, with the building of Frank Gehry, which by the way could be called the future of architecture, or subject matter of the "modern art" period, or even more older, very much approved art, like impressionism. Future is of course a notion which resides in language since it cannot be materialized yet. Stating the category language on it's own is dangerous because it suggest that language can be separated from the rest and even be isolated living on its own, for instance to use language as different from and maybe even opposed to "the visual". Language and certainly text has a tendency to consider itself superior to everything else. Writing about something is dominating it. Writing is criticizing, while doing, acting painting, designing is the victim of this writing. Writing itself becomes creating and can be written about. Much more difficult is it to design for instance a dress criticizing a text using fabric, shape and form.
In a moment of despair about the dominance of text over the visual arts and also very much in admiration of famous texts I once made a figurative drawing which shows a figure eaten by a book with the title "You are text". Philosophy was seen as so elevated and much more important than visual art. Looking back at this drawing of 10 years ago I realize that this drawing is outdated already. Not only the medium "drawing" looks terribly old fashioned, retro in this time of "likes" and "retweets", more importantly the notion of the superiority of text has disappeared. Philosophy seemed to have lost its charm but for a very few experts. The god like giants Derrida, Foucault, hero's during my study are totally unknown by current students. Are these thinkers punished for not foreseeing the internet and the terror of social media? Theory on the art school is a shadow of what it tried to be 20 years ago. Theory is trying to save some of the old canon, meaning that which has happened after 1990, not a coincidence, the time of the rise of the internet. Theory as study subject is replaced by what is called research, artistic research, which differs from scientific research, we are in the social domain.
Coming back to this drawing mentioned above, if I would make this drawing again it would probably be called "You are a project". Everything has become a project. Calling building a museum or making a movie a project seems natural, since there is a client, a time span. You have to prepare, to organize, materialize and the museum is delivered, opened for the public, and the project is finished, resulting visits of the public can be measured, the bill can be sent. In the end the result of a project is a spreadsheet of numbers. This way of working has taken over all styles of working and threatens to take over "living". Everything nowadays is a project. Painting in the old sense was developing yourself, working on change, slowly molding your style, opening new vista's while working with a always recognizable signature is not considered right - because it cannot be called a project. Nowadays if a designer wants to "do" a painting you organize the production of this painting in China. But not only that, living itself tries to divide itself in projects. Raising a child is a project, marrying and separating. Nothing can exist outside this project timeframe . Nothing is allowed to develop itself without a goal, a bill and a resulting spreadsheet of "likes". It cannot be a coincidence then that sooner or later everybody will become a project - of a social designer. But this project is contemporary, what could be the next step, the future?
Combining the drawing and the future of design, the title of this drawing would not be "you are a project", but "you are a wicked problem". The wicked problem terminology could be the next step after "the projectification of life". The wickedness is indicating that the complexity is not allowing a solution, within the time of a project. But then the project structure fails - although the designers and researchers are happily sending the bill after making the actors of the wicked problems talk about their problem. The wicked problem construction ensures that the next project follows naturally from the first. In this perspective, indeed, you cn make a living as a designer posing design problems.