Because, as Kurt and John have said, design is a collection of activities rather than a single industry, it is hard for the media (or anyone else) to see it clearly. But I think design treatment in the media suffers as well from limiting what we mean by design to the kinds of things professional designers do. It’s true that just about everything we encounter in the built environment is designed, and laypeople are often amazed when this is pointed out to them. But the near ubiquity of design is not confined to the making and arrangement of objects or to communications, but includes academic curricula, politics and foreign policy and sales strategy.
I don’t really think designers need “humanizing,” but I think the process of design does. It is important to show what’s behind the faceless mechanization that produces goods. I was impressed with the first Copco cookware I ever saw because when you turned a pot or pan over, you found “Designed by Michael Lax” printed on the bottom. This was not an attempt to exploit a famous name. Michael was not well known at the time, and never became famous. But putting anyone’s name on a product implies that someone cared about it. “Designed by Edmund Smirch” would have had the same welcoming effect. It is of course easy to do that with products — like pots, pans, and chairs — that can, however unfairly, be attributed to a single person. James Dyson can say concincingly that he designed his vacuum cleaner, but it is harder to attach design credit to a Miele or an Electrolux.
The question of stars and names in the media gets all wound up with credits. If Bush’s parodic victory landing were a Hollywood production (which it was in every respect but its release) Karl Rove would have been credited, along with a multitude of gaffers, best boys, accountants, hairdressers, caterers and haberdashers.
There aren’t many designers whose fame edures long enough to make them household names, but then households don’t last as long as they used to either. Paula mentioned Michael Graves, Phillipe Starck, and Rashid as the only stars that come to mind, but I’m not sure Rashid is much known outside the design community, despite John Seabrook’s revealing piece on him. When Raymond Loewy hired Betty Reese as his press agent, she asked him, in the manner of all consultants, what he wanted to achieve. “I want my picture on the cover of Time,” he said. “It will take ten years,” she said, and it did.
I like Laurene’s emphasis on depth. Coverage is easier to come by. I think Patty Brown’s front-page piece in this morning’s NY Times treats Walter Hood’s work in as much depth as we have any right to expect from a feature story. She does these articles on design-related phenomena all over the country, and they’re excellent. But there’s still no one I know of in
the general media who writes about design in the depth that, say, Dinitia Smith brings to books or Elvis Mitchell to movies. Maybe that gets into Paula’s promised next topic — reporting and criticism.