My mother’s kimonos were pieced together from stiff, rectangular cloth panels that somehow succumbed to the body once worn. They looked nothing like the shirtwaist dresses she wore as a Western housewife. The few mementos she brought from Tokyo contrasted sharply with everything else at home: a small wooden box painted with multicolor blossoms against unfinished wood grain; a portable chest with a mirror that attached to it via handcarved wooden screws, its shiny brown lacquer chipping off in thin shards; a shibori scarf covered with hundreds of tie-dyed “dots,” tiny 3-D peaks left unironed once the cloth was dyed, yielding pattern, surface, and structure through a single process. All this against a backdrop of nondescript ranch duplexes, Formica, Mattel, the emerging medium of TV. My mother also brought with her a particular gesture and pose: often sitting quietly, her head tilted slightly, hand to the side of her face, chin cupped in palm. Years later, in an art history class in college, I learned this posture had a name: lament.
I remember my father’s world: dark brown, blue, and white. The brown of his skin against the blue and white of our newly acquired Chevy, which occupied a visible spot parked on the street in front of our house. He would eye it admiringly in his jacket, sports coat, and slacks (they definitely weren’t pants), an ever-present Kool cigarette dangling from his lips. He looked every bit like a jazz musician when out of the immaculate uniform he wore proudly each day at work. Mostly he smiled, laughed, and reveled at the comforts military life afforded us, such a far cry from his own impoverished youth. We had it good.
My first-generation middle-class family consumed with a vengeance, and I came of age during the golden age of mass marketing, when so many things became massively “new” for the first time in history. Consuming took care of everything. We shopped in pleasure and in pain, to celebrate the financial security ensured by my father’s employment in the Army, to distract us from our collective melancholy. I never quite knew the source of our muted sorrow, only that shopping soothed us. A few hours at the mall alleviated, however temporarily, my mother’s depression, my father’s drinking, my brother’s furtive secrecy, and my own agitated sadness.
We seemed to buy just about every kind of thing in our wanderings as a military family, and our material indulgences spoiled me as a child by providing the goods I needed to create and re-create my own imaginary (but material) worlds. I remember Barbie and Ken and their foldable cardboard house (complete with tiny record album covers); Chatty Cathy, who talked when I pulled the corded ring attached to her smooth plastic body; Tressy, whose blonde locks magically grew through some apparatus I can no longer recall; a baby doll with a bottle of milk that seemingly emptied when I tilted it to meet her stiffly molded, pouting lips. I was so comfortable in my toy kingdom that I didn’t even notice how the white skin of my plastic family contrasted with the beigeness of my own.
My toy world was nestled within a lavish profusion of products that constituted our home. I remember a never-ending cavalcade of convenience foods, appliances, electronics, furniture, fashions, cars, knickknacks, that streamed through our household with an ebb and flow at first synchronized to my father’s paychecks, but later—through credit accounts—tied to the arrival of the latest Sears and Spiegel catalogs. Why did we buy? Because we could. How did we buy? By design.
That’s what Vogue and House & Garden taught me growing up in Kansas and Kentucky, as I imagined my own possibilities in high style. I fantasized a life of frugal, aspiring, understated elegance in Manhattan (like Marlo Thomas in That Girl), as an ambitious (but nice) professional woman (don’t call me girl) in marketing, advertising, public relations, fashion, or publishing. My humble studio apartment would include all the right allusions to Marimekko and Design Research, the originals of which I doubted I could afford. By the time I was a teenager, I somehow knew that my ability to reference the cultural codes of aspiration—through taste—was just as valuable (if not more so) than any actual ability to afford the originals. My fluency with the codes demonstrated that I got it without actually having it, which was quite enough (thank you).
I was enchanted with design’s ubiquity and pervasive power—power to persuade, power to declare. And so I took on design’s possibilities personally and later, professionally. In high school, I crafted many of my own clothes, splicing together Simplicity pattern pieces into Stephen Burrows and Zandra Rhodes–inspired hippie-chic: a floor-length, ruched challis gown with opulent paisley patterning; a satiny sheath with a plunging V-neck laced (tightly) with soutache cord and hand-set grommets; an embroidered Nehru jacket; macramé handbags. My fashion statements said everything my crippling shyness prevented me from saying, declaring a bold, sophisticated confidence and hip sensuality (giggle). Fashion placed me squarely front-and-center while armoring me against the cruel scrutiny of my teenaged peers. If I was going to be lonely and unpopular, I might as well do it in style.
In college, I’d replace fashion designers with a role model of another kind. Inge—pale, austere, precise, perfect—directed our graphic design studies with an indisputable authority, discerning the subtlest of distinctions in line weight, spatial distribution, value, and rhythm. We readily acquiesced to that authority, responding with rapt attention and obedience. It was worth it. Inge’s stern directives produced visible results—elegant formal compositions demonstrating the keenest sense of space and structure. Even more startling was the consistency of quality and expression throughout the class. We were in the throes of something powerful— visual authority. Our meticulous efforts in composition and color stripped away the flourishes of my fashionably frivolous sensibilities and replaced them with a studied minimalism. I was learning to see, and to make, quieter and quieter understatements. I was learning the language of restraint.
While fascinated and impressed by my class’s collective transformation from rowdy Americans into tasteful Swiss aesthetes, part of me recoiled at the paring away of my own clumsy eclecticism. While I admired Inge’s expertise and subtlety, deeply grateful for her teachings, it was all so… well… European, and… uh… modernist. Only then I didn’t know how to name it, and postmodernism had yet to prevail. Still, there was no denying the power of that style—the clean, assertive elegance of it, its unspoken authority. Basel, Switzerland was the pedagogical capital of graphic design in the mid- 70s, and now, in New Haven, I was being groomed as a disciple. Efficiently groomed, but also reluctantly. What did Basel know about my mongrel self?
I couldn’t help but compare the visual purity of Swiss design—its monolithic, self-assured insistence—with my own racial/cultural/aesthetic ambiguity and ambivalence. I knew from the innumerable faces that had gazed upon mine over the years—quizzical, contemptuous, aroused— that neutrality was the last thing I inspired. My pursuit of Swiss authority just seemed too ironic. It was indifferent and pure, and I wasn’t.
So I resisted Swiss perfection. In so doing, I jumped from the surety of the typographic plane, Swiss design’s ideological platform, and ended up landing in cyberspace, whose hybrid mutability matched mine (at least metaphorically).
In the mid-to-late 80s, the emergence of the graphical user interface of the Apple Macintosh computer coincided with the rise of new visual media formats, like laser discs and CDs. It was a time ripe with possibility, when someone like me, trained as a humanist designer, could find a place in Silicon Valley, making software more “user friendly” through accessible visual logic—screen layouts, menu structures, and icon designs that were easy to understand and interact with. Interaction design emerged as a new discipline during this time, and I was there as it took hold. I’d left the East Coast a few years earlier to get as far away as possible from personal rifts and the intellectual trappings of Ivy intelligentsia. San Francisco’s welcoming acceptance of “refugees” like myself, its physical beauty, its preoccupation with fine food and drink, and its location on the Pacific Rim made for a cultural climate in which innovation (technological or otherwise) went hand-inhand with comfort and convenience (read: lifestyle). Before moving to San Francisco, I never drank wine or used a computer; by the late 80s I indulged in both.
Oddly enough, I also felt right at home with all those geeky white boys. We were all outsiders of a sort, trying to carve out new territory and claim it as our own. I was looking for a new place to call home, and cyberspace welcomed me with open (if virtual) arms. My analytical tendencies dovetailed perfectly with a programmer’s penchant for logic, so I subordinated my graphic skills to the service of screen, designing user-friendly software for an idealized anyone. But unlike modernism’s anyone, which espoused a nebulous constellation of “universal” cultural values, technology’s ergonomic everyone (by way of Silicon Valley) had a human body, with physical and cognitive needs that demanded mediation. Screens, icons, menus, windows, dialog boxes, mouse clicks, touch screens, keyboards—how could we navigate this brave new world of coexisting real and virtual objects? Considering design questions in terms of sheer physicality and cognitive sense-making—by way of “human factors engineering”—provided me with a new model of universality, one that felt so much more pragmatically embodied than modernism’s version.
—
“Usability.” What a refreshing change from the whims of style and taste! In the down-to-earth challenges of making computers accessible to the new pointing-and-clicking masses, I found a mission for myself in and through design. My attention turned away from personally expressive design statements toward purposeful solutions: design as a way of making functions clear to “users,” but without any Bauhaus-inspired ideological baggage. I’d grown weary of my own designed self as a visible presence, as a system of cultural codes for those in the know, and I reveled in my newfound invisibility behind the machine.
For a while, it was paradise. The Web was an ecstatic start for a new generation of designers, but for me it was the beginning of the end. I’d thrived on the obscure problems presented in the early days of multimedia, but with the Web came a new burst of interest driven by the seductive allure of the next big thing. Finally, Madison Avenue and Hollywood got it. (Back in San Francisco, we had wondered why it was taking so long.) Without the stumbling blocks of limited bandwidth and access, the Web was ready to serve advertising and big money. The gold rush began. Those flocking to the Web were enticed by its glamorous power as the transformative medium of a generation. Suddenly, “new media designers” cropped up in droves, touting “interaction”and “experience” design as (supposedly) new areas of expertise. New professional organizations, publications, trade shows, and venture capitalists affirmed the significance of the internet as the new media pipeline, a single über-channel serving home and business alike. Of course, it made perfect sense. The next generation legitimately wanted something to call its own.
Still, I resented it. After all, I was there first (pout). The arcane expertise I’d honed over those years became increasingly worthless, commodified by these fashionable interlopers. My studio had designed everything from educational software for middle schoolers to interactive television prototypes for Paramount, help systems for Macintosh programmers to online flightbooking software for Sony. We’d weathered numerous technological innovations and innovators, among them, laser discs, CDs, HyperCard, Studio 8,
It was time to retreat, and I did, to academia. Serendipitously, I stumbled upon an ad that seemed written just for me, an art and design department at a major university seeking a tech-savvy designer with an interest in business, information, and art. Why not? I could use a change of pace. In record time, I dismantled an office, a house, and a life, and headed to the Midwest to begin anew. The academy provided a much-needed respite from the rigors of commerce, though not without its own demands. I grappled with the duties of the tenure track—faculty politics, funding sources, teaching and research—and while everything was moving toward success, I felt myself at a loss.
I was increasingly unable to rally myself around design. I didn’t know why, but despite all my clever ideas, I felt strangely immobilized. While the process of tenure stimulated a sure level of production, I felt like I was making stuff up. And worse: making stuff up that didn’t matter. My efforts to secure a sense of community within design also floundered. I just didn’t have much in common with designers anymore. Whatever it was I thought about, read about, looked at, or cared about, seemed increasingly not about design. I grew suspicious of design’s ubiquity, and disenchanted by its alliance with corporate interests, by its seductive power, by its protracted processes. It was getting harder and harder to muster the requisite enthusiasm for a field in which I was on my way to attaining tenure. So I left.
I’m still leaving design. I continue to pick up the occasional copy of Vogue, and more than once I’ve bought a secondhand Prada suit or Hogan bag on eBay. My friends say I’m stylish, but I’m still fluent enough to know how mismatched my design choices really are. My hair’s always a mess, and my shoes and handbags never go together. I shop Target and Orla Kiely, Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts. I’ve never bought a new car and currently drive an old Ford Focus station wagon. I’m not an early adopter.
—
But design’s doing quite well without me. It’s the cultural practice of the moment, since everyone designs these days as a matter of course—T-shirts, ’zines, websites, PowerPoint presentations, logos—all enabled by the democratizing powers of electronic publishing (in print and online) and social networks, real and virtual. Design has joined reading, writing, and arithmetic as a basic intellectual skill. And this visual literacy, however unschooled, has produced legions of sophisticated do-it-yourselfers eager to make their mark, aided by fill-in-the-blank templates and magazines like Make and Craft.
But while the loosely organized DIY movement suggests a rejection of mass market consumables, design is also thriving at the other end of the spectrum, as
branding burrows even deeper into everyday life. Design is the commodified means by which our cultural affiliations—our identities—are inscribed and bartered. It is the vehicle through which we proclaim, individually and collectively, our authority in the world, made material. No one knows this better than the corporate marketers hell-bent on toying with our emotional insecurities about how we appear to one another. Design’s pervasive presence in contemporary life speaks to an increasing faith in the power of willful cognition. What isn’t designed today? In ways visible and invisible, design shapes possibilities in the service of our desires. Whether in the form of genetic engineering and nanotechnology, cosmetic surgery, consumer electronics, or climate control, design is working to fulfill what we think we want, for better or worse. It should come as no surprise that the argument of “intelligent design” emerges at this particular moment in history—it challenges our secular preoccupations in terms consonant with contemporary cultural discourse.
So these days, mostly I’m watchful and wary, because I know there’s really no leaving design. I still teach part-time, and I’m careful not to deflate my students’ youthful enthusiasm about their own design—and designed—futures. After all, I was once just like them.