Most afternoons, on my way to get groceries, I try and cross the street going around Russell Square in London, which is notoriously difficult to do. There, you don’t find the typical cars-moving-no-faster-than-chickens, but vehicles are spaced such that just when you have decided to run for it, another car comes screaming round the corner of the square. Luckily, they have a traffic light.

Luckily? You press the button and nothing happens. You press it again (maybe it did not register?), but again nothing happens. Then you remember that there are some traffic lights that take a while to ‘recharge’ just after a switch, to allow the queue of cars to clear. Not with this one. It simply waits for nothing. 10 seconds feel like a long time when you are waiting for the signal to change, but trust me, this traffic light laughs at 10 seconds!

So while you slowly get annoyed, you have plenty of time to wonder whether it actually makes a difference, from a scientific, traffic-flow-management-point-of-view, if cars are stopped instantly, or a bit later. Every afternoon I come to the same conclusion: heck no! However, it certainly makes a difference for the pedestrians. Judging by the barrage of road safety campaigns on British television, posters and billboards depicting movie-stars-to-be getting smashed, you would think fast-changing traffic lights are way up on Ken Livingston’s list. If I got the traffic flow management bit wrong, and there really is a hidden meaning behind the long wait, at least show some LEDs at the end of the tunnel and introduce a count-down system like they have in Japan (see pic below).

Still reading? I am still waiting. But now I finally had enough and cross the red light between two racing buses. Just then, and I swear I could hear a chuckle, the light changes.

[Berlin] I have become, over a short period of time, obsessed with dispensers, of all kinds. Ones that slide, snap, drop, carry, shuffle, lash and grab. Each one designed, I think, with a certain character and mood. If a machine is refunding you change they tend to drop it. If you are demanding money it tends to slide it to you (if they are a bank) or count it into a draw if you’re using a convenient in-shop cash dispenser. When you’re purchasing tickets for travel - the machine certainly spit your notes out when they refuse to take them.

But recently I had a new experience, I was in a bank and I had to literally stick my hand quite deep into the machine and pry the notes out of the its clutches. Strange I thought, when withdrawing money from a bank (unless you’re overdrawn) its your money you’re accessing. That got me thinking that surely there could be a other ways of communicating the transfer relationship between bank and customer than this…

There has been much talk about ‘design thinking‘, ‘critical design’, and ‘design interactions‘. And I have been following all the various different debates with great interest and with some confusion and frustration. So to let out some of that frustration, and hopefully to make some things clearer to myself, I want to just briefly focus (in my own way!) on a ‘relatively’ new and small ‘oeuvre’ which is gaining lots of interest but not much serious or constructive criticism or debate -’Critical Design’.

I was quite relieved on WMMNA that Jan Boelen the curator who worked on the Designing Critical Design exhibition said:

‘that the idea for the exhibition stemmed from a disappointment: when the work of Guixé, Bey or Raby & Dunne is featured in a design magazine, journalists usually focus on the gadget, gimmick side of the pieces‘ and that ‘There’s also an international crowd out there that merely seem to imitate that gimmicky aspect of the critical designers’ work.‘

… Maybe someone is finally trying to establish some criteria to how contextualise and critique this new genre/movement sensitively and seriously in all its good and bad forms?

For ‘critical design’ to be appreciated in the way it wants to, it must never be ‘above’ criticism itself. But it is difficult to criticise something that like some art, defines its purpose as purely raising debate. In effect it means that any criticism can actually be seen as confirming its success.

Art criticism can be vicious, highly intellectual, and steeped in the history of aesthetics, philosophy and art history. But although ‘Critical Design’ is often presented and behaves in a similar fashion to Art, it is not Art. Its makers’ state that it is Design - so luckily for some designers, it avoids the art criticism for which some of it would certainly be slated.

But traditional Design critics will also have a problem with trying to critique it. And both sides, (the designer and critic), might also feel that the traditional Design critic might be not in the right position. A traditional design’s success is often measured against how well they have worked with certain constraints, the qualities of the idea and how well they have been executed and the human factor of how easy it is to use.

Unlike traditional design, Critical Design is focussing on the communication of an idea rather the development of a product or service. Therefore any constraints that a designer might find in developing a product or service, such as budget, limited materials, time, physics, difficult clients, are for a Critical Designer only constraints in terms of the presentation of the idea. In a way, Critical design seems to need to set itself free of the constraints, and focus only on a thematic constraint so that it is able to be truly critical.

Often much of the work is a comment or a gesture, using communication channels such as photography, video and prototypes and sometimes through a specific - narrative way of naming the work. Often these comments and gestures are made towards scientific developments or political policy or on the design world itself. So maybe scientists and political journalists should be in a better position to critique it (there is at times certainly some dodgy and pretentious science going on). But … as this type of design work is mostly experienced in galleries, museums or through niche publishing, they might never get to see it.

I am trying to highlight, that by shifting a discipline into a new area it becomes very difficult to critique it and also very easy for designers not confront criticism by inferring that critics are interpreting it aims and purpose wrongly. I for one want to be able to critique some of the work without being told that the criticism stems from not ‘getting it’, when at the same time the creator fails to make the point with his/her work.

I see this type of design work as a really important element to the design landscape. Some of the works are fantastic food for thought and some pieces I want to take home with me and live with and some of it is really just lazy ideas presented slickly.

There have to be tough questions that go beyond the ‘is it art is it not’ debate and critiqued for what it is and what it is trying to be. Otherwise a lot of the one-liner and gestural work (reminiscent of some of the bad Brit art) will blur what is good and what’s not so good and it will be difficult for this genre/movement ever to evolve and establish itself meaningfully.

Maybe this exhibition will prompt a start to a more sophisticated and constructive debate - I for one, hope so.

A short comment on the Exhibition art_clips at the Media Museum ZKM Karlsruhe, Germany.

This exhibition is curated by Gerhard Johann Lischka and shows 90 short clips produced between 2000 and today, for the purpose of hammering the message home dubbed ‘art_clips’, from three countries: Switzerland, Austria and Germany. The DVD is available in the local Museum Shop.

What is worth a comment about this exhibition is the fact that this exhibition unintentionally raises the question what’s happening to the way video art gets distributed these days.

The resume states that these “art_clips” are the “subject-centered answer of art to the end of industrially produced music videos for television.”

Thinking of why one has to pick the music video industry as the point of reference, in order to define oneself, leaves one with plenty of question marks. But the desperation for one’s own position on the curator career ladder in art history shall be not of our interest in this case.

In times when Filmmakers like Michel Gondry and Chris Cunningham are shown on various Music TV Channels, selling successfully their work in form of DVDs on unpretentious places like Amazon, one might wonder what the point is this exhibition tries to make?

There is clearly the attempt to offer artists a forum, a point of access to the ‘market’ – which is definitely a good thing as such.
And the ZKM is a well established place do do so … but why do they opt for an exhibition? Videos in exhibitions are boring Everybody who has been to an exhibition presenting predominantly videos, knows how fantastically well those work.
And why on top of it release a DVD as a distribution method for clips, which are obviously for a fragmented niche market?
Would it not be better to seek the challenge to broaden this niche, to allow that niche, wherever it can be found, access to this material? Instead of opting for making yourself at home in the corner of clichés and using a distribution method which is simply to expensive to make it work well?

In times when artists take it on themselves to put their clips up on You Tube, when their clips become very popular and even get commissioned by the likes of Coke, and you see yourself as a curator for the good cause why not become the filter for particular clips you call art_clips , open an account on You Tube and offer your choice – or even better create something like You Tube only better suited for your peer group (there is definitely space) since you are not only a museum but also a research facility?

Funnily enough the flyer of the exhibition (above) makes use of the top level domains (.de, .ch, .at) - maybe as a subconscious reference to where it should be heading. While underscores might be popular with file names, they are a no no if it comes to URLs - if only the ZKM would know … !

The exhibition is open until the 25th of March – and the DVDs can be bought in the local Museum Shop long after …

Two Christmas presents, one useful and one… er well… bright, and about ten sizes too small..

So what to do with those socks…..

Hmm….

Aha …camera settles nicely in foot … ankle is easy to grab…and when not in the company of other bright socks its easy to find.