Holly, I agree that writing critically about design is different in some ways from writing critically about film or literature (just as writing about either of them is different from writing about the other), but I’m not sure it’s the difference you describe. A film is an experience to be compared to a critic’s appraisal only if you’ve seen it. Often you (or at least I) haven’t. For that matter, I don’t usually own the backpack or flatware I’m reading about. I read critical material about the Sistine Chapel and the Elgin Marbles for years before I ever saw them, and reading The New York Review of Books today means having to take seriously works I haven’t read and in most cases, won’t.
I think critical writing means treating aspects of the culture as though they matter and that design criticism means writing about design as if it matters, as we all know it does. That, in my view, is why we need design criticism. What I believe is a difference is that design encompasses both the aesthetic and the functional — even the prosaic — and it’s frequently very hard to consider them simultaneously. At a panel at MOMA the anthropologist Ashley Montague complained to Arthur Drexler, then curator of design, that the Wedgwood in the museum’s current good design show became smudgy when washed. “We’re not Good Housekeeping,” Drexler retorted dismissively. I doubt that he, or any curator, would be so contemptuous of practicality today; yet museums and magazines still find it hard to choose objects in full confidence that they perform as they should. Ordinarily, curators and editors are not equipped for, or charged with, testing them.
I’ve been thinking of Don Norman whenever I confront a door fitted with handles that give no hint of whether to push or pull, a serious concern at present because I have a torn rotator cuff. In her initial email about this roundtable Paula asked rhetorically, and humorously, “Should we be content with Consumers Report?” No, and neither were they when they began. The founding editor Dexter Masters wanted an industrial designer to write product criticism, but couldn’t find one.