Paying Dues for a Purpose

Most devotees of design are either refined connoisseurs or starstruck fans of big-name designers.

I'm a devotee too, but I'm not at all like that. I'm a science fiction novelist. My own devotion to design is literary, anthropological, theoretical and spooky. I'm looking for ways and methods to comprehend, describe and codify the impact of technology on society. That search led me to the design world many years ago. This adventure of mine required a few things that might perhaps be construed as the paying of dues. I have listened attentively, for years on end, to the phosphorescent ramblings of design's public intellectuals. I've attended ICSID, and AIGA and IDSA, and furniture fairs on various continents. I've read ID, and Metropolis and Wired, and about eight hundred megatons of design-centric email.

But I can't say I found this experience grueling. Not at all, really. It conveyed major benefits to my science fiction practice. Design has a tradition of being ahead of its time. Designers are already doing a lot of my science-fictional work for me; to benefit by their labor, all I need to do is take them at their word.

“My own devotion to design is literary, anthropological, theoretical and spooky.”

Since I'm a futurist, the designers I admire most are dead ones. The driving forces of technosocial change go deeper and last longer than today's celebrity and cachet. As a design critic, I strongly identify with the “judgment of posterity.” To study the past with care is to understand that the future is primarily shaped by contingency. We're not the people that our great-grandparents hoped, expected and wanted us to be, and our own great-grandchildren will be quite the same way, thank you.

Design is also subject to contingency, but design is not about contingency. Design is about a heroic human attempt at order and purpose in the material world. Design is about imposing deliberate thought on the fabric of civilization. Design is vision, which tends to be looming, comprehensive and grand, and also execution, moored in the faulty, multiplex grain of the material. Those are mighty endeavors. They survive the individual designer.

That's why I ardently seek the spoor of John Ruskin, the echoes and after-effects of Art Nouveau and the Bauhaus, the technosocial tipping point that transformed Henry van de Velde from decorator to industrialist. The legacies of Dreyfuss, Loewy and Stevens, in cleanlining, MAYA, and planned obsolescence, are vivid, vital phenomena to me. They strike my eye like golden shimmers in the technosocial fabric. For someone from the literary culture, the paradigms of design might seem arcane, hermetic and technocratic. They are ideas and practices about things, not about words; for users, not for readers; creative of products, not rhetoric. But by now, by dint of years of determined hanging-out, by prying, peering, wondering and scribbling notes, I've painlessly internalized the values of design. I don't work like designers work, but I can think like designers think.

Especially, being a writer, I can talk like designers talk. I write about topics other than design, but I do rather a lot of design writing. That field is seductive, hard to resist. The design press is too small and elite an area of discourse to support a cadre of professional journalists. So most design writers are designers, or design academics, or design curators. These people have paid their dues; so when they write about design, one often senses that they mindfully carry the fate of the profession on their backs.

When I myself write about design, I'm on holiday. For me, design writing is a life-enhancing divertissement, full of color, brio and gusto. Being a design writer, rather than a normal, workaday sci-fi novelist, is like having a second home on the beach. Not just any old dull home, either, but a rather dashing, innovative home, something like, say, the Lautner Chemosphere. Designers pay their dues and they suffer. I've personally seen them do it. However, I must also point out that designers are rather happy people by nature. We authors really know how to wallow in our creative angst; we tend to be acidic melancholics. Designers are jolly, assertive, radiant beings. They're congenial, multi-talented characters, who can surf, dance, patch leaky roofs, cook, fix broken toilets, and throw a great house party. Unlike the members of many professions-the military comes to mind-designers are not their own worst enemies. Their worst woes inflicted on designers come from well outside the design profession.

Being creatives, designers have a peripheral position in their industrial value chain. So their creative atelier often comes to grief when it interfaces with big-budget institutions. “When elephants fight, the grass is trampled.” A designer knows designer agony when a brilliant scheme is crushed by some daffy whim from the finance department of Three Initial Corporation. The abandoned prototype is the saddest of human artifacts. Design is service, and the worst pang of service is to offer to serve well, and to be scorned. Intellectually speaking, I know that must hurt, but since I'm not a designer, that never hurts me in a visceral way. When an author suffers, I really sense that; I can see drops of sweat dotting the margins of the pages. By the last chapter, sometimes I can even smell the empty whiskey bottles. But that's not the case when I encounter design. I can admire the talent, skill and dedication of designers, without being wracked with unsought pangs of creative empathy. For me, design is an intellectual tonic. It's an inspiration, and a reason to be cheerful.

“When I myself write about design, I'm on holiday. For me, design writing is a life-enhancing divertissement, full of color, brio and gusto.”

Design makes me happy. However, I do have one sneaking suspicion about my long involvement with design. I may be having rather too much fun with it. I'm not paying heavy dues to be a design critic, dilettante, theorist and sometime academic. However, I do pay opportunity-costs. I might well have become a rather better novelist if I'd sternly ignored design, designers and design issues, and stuck close to my own whirring grindstone. But that would be worse than a crime; that would be folly. It would mean the loss of my beloved Freedom Chair, that best friend of a writer's suffering back.

No matter how we pass our time, we only live once. Why should I crassly deny myself the benefits of genius? Niels Diffrient, that august disciple of the great Dreyfuss, is vigorously pushing 80. If anybody has paid his design dues, it's this grand old man. I'm sitting in his Freedom Chair as I type these words. Although I could never make this ergonomic chair, I've learned how such things come to be in the world. So I don't merely sense (as anyone would sense) that this is a really good chair. I know why the chair is a triumph of design. My acquisition of that knowledge gave me freedom. That's how I know that designers pay dues for a purpose.

Bruce Sterling
Visionary in Residence, Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA