Design is…

Selected excerpts from a conversation between Madame L’Amic and Charles Eames, 1969

“What are the boundaries of Design?” “What are the boundaries of problems?”

—

“Is it a method of general expression?” “No. It is a method of action.”

—

“Does the creation of Design admit constraint?” “Design depends largely on constraints.”

—

“What do you feel is the primary condition for the practice of Design and for its propagation?” “A recognition of need.”

“What is the future of Design?” (no answer)

This is my answer.

“How would this work for Dutch?”

While Patricia Moore was designing under Raymond Loewy, her grandfather, Dutch, remained in her mind. When she asked about designing for him, for those in wheelchairs, or those with arthritis, her coworkers would tell her, “Pattie, we don’t design for ‘those’ people.”

“I didn’t understand this hierarchy by design, that some people deserved good design and other people didn’t.”

With support from the firm’s management, she returned to her studies. Biomechanics, then gerontology and counselling. Reading and talking weren’t enough. Study alone couldn’t let her feel the weight of age. Patricia decided to disguise herself as a woman in her eighties. She taped her hands to simulate arthritis, wrapped her body in a hunch for spinal fractures caused by osteoporosis, and encased herself in a second skin which made her feel claustrophobic.

When she walked into a room of her friends and peers, she was dismissed or viewed as part of the furniture. Taxi drivers and attendants gave her gentle looks and made allowances for her. Young boys assaulted her, leaving her with no feeling in two fingers. She saw a constant optimism in the older people she met and their pride in the younger generations, what they would build, and what could be left behind for them.

Patricia helped pioneer universal design. Design for ‘those’ people, for people like her grandfather, Dutch. For all people as equals.

Why wouldn’t they be?

“make it Vuitton’s work for Stephen, not Stephen’s work for Vuitton”

That was Marc Jacobs’ goal as the creative director of Louis Vuitton when he released a collection in memory of Stephen Sprouse. Stephen had worked with Marc in 2001, three years before he died.

Stephen was the street, graffiti, and fashion. He dressed Blondie’s Debbie Harry, and brought Andy Warhol’s imagery into his clothes. By contrast, the LV monogram was the symbol of luxury, unchanged for over a century. Working together, Stephen and Marc defaced the monogram, making the brand more valuable through destruction. In 2009, Marc returned to the street, reinterpreting Stephen’s graffiti and rose, two “iconic Sprouse motifs”, in fluorescent Day-Glo colours. The launch was timed to coincide with a retrospective by Deitch Projects and a book by Rizzoli.

In 1992, Marc claimed grunge – a culture of poverty and the working class, made famous by Nirvana – in silk and cashmere. Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain and his wife Courtney Love burnt the samples he sent them. Within months, Marc was named the Council of Fashion Designers of America’s Womenswear Designer of the Year. Yet Perry Ellis fired him, killing the collection.

2009 was different. Marc claimed the street for Stephen, creating an altar for his friend. In the words of Yves Carcelle, LV’s CEO at the time: “somebody who disappeared years ago is going to be the center of life worldwide”.

Stephen lived again.

“From ’96-’00, it was as if New York City and Broadway had eaten the Public’s identity.”

In 1995, Paula Scher released the posters for Bring in ’da Noise, Bring in ’da Funk, part of the season’s shows at The Public Theater. They became New York City. Her graphics were everywhere, and they were “loud and proud, complicated and crowded”, echoing the spirit of the city. For Paula, this fulfilled her “fantasy of what graphic design could do”.

Every season, Paula created one poster, which her team extended across tickets, posters, and items of crapola. For Noise/Funk, she was inspired by the show’s tap-dancing to create a style where type jumped off the page, an example of “typography that ‘talked’”. As Noise/Funk hit Broadway, it was “imitated, then parodied, and finally, blatantly ripped off”. The Public’s identity itself was taken. For Paula, the worst was the 1996 revival of Chicago. It had the budget to go bigger than the Public could, and she recalled having to see promotions for it on the side of every single bus in New York City.

Paula has done many seasons since, but after she was forced to change her style, the Public never felt the same to her. Still, she said: “I love when you make these languages and they go out into the world and other people start stretching them and playing with them”.

Chicago still plays.

“Ugly is attractive, ugly is exciting.”

As a political-science PhD and a member of both the Union of Italian Women and the Italian Communist Party, Miuccia Prada was embarrassed by her work within a bourgeois leather goods business. A business she had inherited from her grandfather.

“I decided that it was the instrument I had, so I tried to practice what I believed through my company.”

Debuting in 1988, Miuccia began to define what a Prada woman was. Looking back at the show, fashion critic Bliss Foster pointed out the models’ Vibram soles, which evoked working men’s shoes. Allowing movement and independence in a time when “most designers, honestly, were making heavy use of stilettos”.

For spring/summer 1996, Miuccia presented Banal Eccentricity. Kate Moss, a defining symbol of ’90s femininity, walked the runway dressed in trompe-l’œil tweed of three colours. A high neckline, open jacket, a skirt widening towards the knees, and flat shoes. These gave less emphasis to her figure. The proportions felt deliberately awkward.

The press attached the label ugly chic to the show. Miuccia often wears similar silhouettes. Skirts to her knees, high necklines, and flat shoes.

Miuccia is the Prada woman.

“Whatever we do, if not understood, fails to communicate and is wasted effort.”

Massimo Vignelli wrote this law into The Vignelli Canon, while at Vignelli Associates with his wife, Lella. Forty-four years before the Canon was published, Bob Noorda, a partner of Massimo’s at Unimark International, spent three weeks in the tunnels below New York.

Bob watched strangers. He watched where they would enter and exit, when they’d transfer, where they’d need information to help make a decision. Using experience he had from designing the Milan Metro signage two years before, Bob worked with Massimo to design a signage system for the New York City Subway in the typeface Akzidenz-Grotesk, then sold as Standard. The Transit Authority didn’t keep Unimark on for implementation, and what followed was “the biggest mess in the world”. Opening a single station caused so much confusion that the TA had to use hand-lettered cardboard signs to help move people along. Following the chaos, the TA re-hired Unimark for a proper rollout, with the contract ending in 1970.

R. Raleigh D’Adamo, the head of inspection and review from 1970 to 1975, recalled writing a memo on legibility, attaching a technical article on the subject. To test it, he stood mid-platform with an internal TA team and watched an empty train carrying a new route-designation sign with a black background and a regular train with its usual white background slowly enter and stop opposite each other. Everyone agreed that the sign against black was more legible. Black backgrounds became the standard.

Massimo had no part in it.

“to reduce the many to the one”

You’ve used a soy sauce bottle. Red plastic top and clear glass. Someone made it.

Kenji Ekuan grew up in Hiroshima, returning to the city as a teenager weeks after it was bombed. Confronted by emptiness, he searched for evidence. Tangible creations saying that we were here, we existed.

Sixteen years later, Kenji created a soy sauce bottle for Kikkoman. The dripless pour, created by two identical spouts cut at an inward angle, was found on prototype 101. Warm red chosen because it stood out. The bottle itself had a wide mouth for refilling, and a bell shape for stability and comfort. Unchanged since 1961. The same pursuit of the single blossom arrangement, the beauty of all flowers in one instance.

The perfect solution for this moment.

“If this is a ‘nanny state’, then I am proud to have fostered one.”

Within his lifetime, Lee Kuan Yew and the People’s Action Party took Singapore from a developing nation to having a higher GDP per capita than Britain, its former coloniser. There was a cost.

“Whoever governs Singapore must have that iron in him”.

Joshua Benjamin Jeyaretnam was the first non-People’s Action Party politician elected since independence. He accused Lee of nepotism, corruption, and judicial capture, and Lee viewed Jeyaretnam as against the system of Singapore, rather than his policies. Lawsuits followed. Criminal convictions politically buried Jeyaretnam and led to his eventual disbarment. The British Privy Council (the highest court a Singaporean could appeal to) revoked his disbarment, writing that it was a “grievous injustice”. So Lee’s government abolished appeals for lawyers’ disciplinary cases to Britain. They blocked all appeals to Britain in 1994.

Removing Jeyaretnam was unofficial policy. Officially, ministerial salaries were benchmarked to the private sector, racial mixing was enforced through public housing quotas, and housing was made affordable for citizens. Lee’s landmark policy was the “Garden City”, showing both the world and Singapore itself that it was well governed and disciplined. It has yielded over two million trees, and expressways and transit networks designed with planting in mind. What started as a way to differentiate from other developing nations became Singapore’s identity.

When you land, you feel it. Lee prioritised the corridor between Changi Airport and the city. As you drive the expressway, with trees overarching, tropical heat battling ordered green, you enter Singapore.

Even this was designed.

“Punches were cut in anticipation of the printing process … so if one were to simply trace them you would end up with rather anemic looking shapes”

Antonio Cavedoni sat with over three thousand “tiny sculptures that record each glyph shape in hardened steel”. These punches were struck into copper to create an imprint from which to cast metal type. The cast type was used in a printing press. Stored at Cambridge University Library, the punches bear glyphs as small as 1.2 mm, much smaller than even a fingertip. All of these punches are original or later additions to the Baskerville typeface, first designed by John Baskerville in 1754, and refined until he died.

With the help of macro photographs from Robin Hull, Antonio and his colleague Riccardo Lorusso built LoveFrom Serif. A house typeface designed to “interpret Baskerville’s intentions and try to be authentic to these”. This meant bringing the weights of individual letters closer together. Changing shapes for spacing. Taking a nearly geometric o and keeping it organic, not fully perfecting the circle. This meant dealing with collisions, where neighbouring letters could overlap. Different forms for different combinations. Three descender heights for J, three Ks, two Rs, and many others.

Baskerville’s intention, in Antonio’s own words, was to create “a blend between geometry and fluidity, between precision and beauty”. To help create this blend, Patch Kessler built a program to mathematically smooth letterform corners. LoveFrom modifies the typeface per project, including a Welsh-language version for the British crown. “We consider this a living project, because it’s internal to us. We keep tweaking, revising, adding to it, just like Baskerville used to do.”

One more look.

“True beauty is not made, it is born naturally.”

It took years for Sori Yanagi’s Butterfly Stool to be born.

In post-war Japan, the government was desperate to revive the country. To stimulate the market, they sent designers to the United States to learn American techniques. While in the US, Sori visited Charles Eames and saw a leg splint made of moulded plywood. This same layered plywood technique that protected a soldier’s leg had been applied to create the Eames chair.

Returning to Japan, Sori began experimenting with tarpaulin, standing in for the plywood which he couldn’t manufacture. Two or three years of trial and error followed. In his words, “after incessantly carrying on with this process, I began to imagine that it could become a chair.”

The Butterfly Stool gradually took shape, but because it was so different, no workshop helped him build it. Sori eventually found an engineer to work with him at the Industrial Arts Research Institute in Sendai, but even after they built it, no manufacturer was interested because it was “a shape they had never seen before”.

Sori still had the prototype they’d made. He entered it into the 1957 Milan Triennale, and after the stool won gold, factories began approaching him. He agreed to let Tendo Mokko make it.

Not forced, allowed.

Now it’s yours.