Press, Mike and Cooper, Rachel (2002) The Design Experience: The Role of Design and Designers in the Twenty-First Century Aldershot: Ashgate
Guy Julier 02/12/03

If one of the jobs for the design historian is to investigate the relationships between what design theorists say in an epoc and the artefacts of that age, then Mike Press and Rachel Cooper's book The Design Experience will be plundered as evidence of the seismic shifts of the early 21 st century. With the subtitle, The Role of Design and Designers in the Twenty-First Century , Press and Cooper present a lively and optimistic argument for a re-orientation of design practice. Their stated motivations in writing the book are: a) the need for more self-definition among designers; b) to break their self-constraint and open up their potential contributions to society and c) because, 'the world is changing at an ever-increasing rate' (p.5).

Now, I normally flinch and recoil when I hear this last utterance. It is one of those truisms that is purveyed by politicians, brand managers and technological determinists alike, often as a fuzzy justification for badly thought-through decisions. But the authors do have a point here. Their opening shots feature Wendy Brawer's Green Apple Map for New York (1991) - a system for highlighting the city as a sustainable resource, providing information on cycle paths, community gardens, green markets and such like. This is followed by recounting Patricia Moore's pioneering ethnographic research of the 1980s into ageing and the hitherto unappreciated material obstacles of everyday life that relate to this inevitability. Jane Harris's 1990s digital textiles that incorporated new media with garment design follow. Thus, three new(ish) challenges for the 21 st century designer are recorded - sustainability, inclusivity and digital technologies. Later in the book (pp. 93-7) the authors expand on the number of current live issues at stake. These include changes to family structures, consumer values, crime and copyright and smart systems. These stimulate a reappraisal of what design is for, how it is done and where it will go. A new agenda for designers is in the offing.

Press and Cooper are by no means alone in this belief. A plethora of conferences, publications and research centres have sprung up in recent years dedicated to considering this issue. For example, the Cumulus 2003 conference in Tallin, Estonia brought designers together to consider inclusivity in relation to sustainability and new technologies issues. Spearheading this enthusiasm has been Ezio Manzini whose numerous recent publications and presentations have called for designers to engage the nexus of these three vectors. Currently, the Ikon Project within the Interdisciplinary Studies Center at Trondheim University, the 'New Design Culture' project at the Technical Research Centre of Finland and the 'Massive Change' project at the School of Design at Toronto City College, to name but a few, are dedicated to innovating new forms of design practice and intervention.

No doubt these movements have been given impetus by critiques of design and branding, from Naomi Klein's No Logo , through Rick Poyner's Obey the Giant to Hal Foster's Design and Crime . Not since Victor Papanek's Design for the Real World (1972) have such diatribes effectively impacted on designers and design students while also achieving wider, popular audiences. There is a youthful generation out there carrying 'cynicism with optimism' (as Gramsci once implored) and who are hungry for words to articulate this feeling and models to act on it. Press and Cooper are clearly in the business of providing for this demand.

In tackling this, the authors aim to bridge design management, design theory and cultural studies. This is a laudable ambition (and one I have attempted in my own book, The Culture of Design ). The convergence of these disciplines into a text about contemporary and future design that is critical, analytical and generative is a necessary process. The 'cultural turn' of first world economics - as mapped, for example, by Lash and Urry's seminal Economies of Signs and Spaces and followed more recently by Scase and Davis's Managing Creativity - demands a panoptic view of practices.

Press and Cooper's lens ultimately focuses on a not-so-distant view that beyond shaping products and services, designers are to create meaningful experiences. In doing so, the experience of designing changes to one that embraces, 'new roles, methods and activities' (p.8). Here is where, 'creative methods, effective communications and proactive entrepreneurship' meld. Hence, a good dosage of design, a bit of cultural analysis and some business studies are thrown into the pot.

Chapter 1 stridently maintains that the growth of consumer culture provides new grounds for fashioning interactions between design producers and consumers. In introducing the the 'consumer culture' notion - and associated Bourdieuan concepts of 'cultural intermediaries' and 'habitus' - the job is well done. It concludes that, 'People today have a greater need for emotional, sensual and expressive experiences' (p.32). (Steady on! Need or want ? And try telling that one to someone in the Gaza Strip or Guantanamo Bay!) Certainly the design historian of the future will be interested in mapping this shift and knowing whether this project becomes, in fact, a kind of reflexive designer's trope - as in, 'they keep telling us about that "aestheticization of everyday life" thing, so it must be true'! Will texts like this publication encourage this process?

Chapter 2 lays a parallel foundation by explaining the structures and processes by which the design industry gives cultural value and economic weight to products and services. The synthesis of these first two chapters comes in Chapter 3 where the authors argue that the designer can re-structure traditional cycles of production and consumption. More research and understanding of contextual issues can provide cues for design interventions that resolve assymmetries of creation and use. The authors do not refer to activities of de-alienation, for example through customization or domestic curation, that material studies specialists are so fond of. Rather, new forms of product and service encounter are in potentia.

Chapters 4 to 6 gently take the reader through ways of achieving this 'design experience' ambition. Firstly we learn a series of approaches to researching for design, amply illustrated by recent industry examples of consumer-based research. The shift to design as a team-based, iterative process that triangulates a range of players is highlighted. We therefore find out how important language and communication are in negotiating the dynamics between designers, their clients and their publics. The book concludes by mapping the current breadth of the design profession. The argument is then pushed into a concept of 'the new designer' (pp.196-200). Here the professional works at the hub of a wheel of sensibilities, taking in skills such as being 'internationalist', 'ecologist', 'networker', 'creative problem solver', 'active citizen' and more. This is giddy stuff. But Press and Cooper's text balances carefully recorded information with flights of inspiration in an accessible manner.

Design history has a long history of interest in design reformers (Arts and Crafts, Werkbund, Bauhaus etc.). Each of these moments is the product of historically specific circumstance. And each of these have been critiqued for their totalizing tendencies, as Press and Cooper might be in their account. Mark C. Taylor's most recent book, The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture (2001) argues for an appreciation of the interdependency of systems in the 21 st century that are nonetheless dynamic and adaptive. Thus the specificity of situations is also rolled into a bigger, but multi-layered picture. In its favour, The Design Experience has something of this attitude about it. Their thesis is far from despotic.

If, from the point of view of this journal, there is to be one key criticism to be levelled at Press and Cooper's approach, though, it is in its evident lack of historical consciousness. This may be viewed as a strength as the narrative refuses to get bogged down in explanatory details; instead it zips lightly along to maintain the reader's interest. Lengthy case studies are reserved for text boxes. Conversely, the absence of detailed analyses, as to how the issues that they touch on have come about, gives the text a slightly one-dimensional feel in places. For example, we are given a brief history of the rise of design management (pp.181-2); but this is not contextualised against recent developments in management theory and its own emergent rhetorics of 'creativity'. This would surely help expand their own critique of the discipline.

Similarly, the book is curiously anglo-centric, given the international reputation of its authors. The research case studies that are cited mostly come from UK university design departments when much of the most challenging design research (such as Product Service System innovations that strike at the heart of the authors' thesis) is currently taking place in mainland Europe. Globalisation gets a brief discussion (pp.16-17) but issues of transculturisation, hybridity and disjuncture that occur in non-Western or diasporic cultures are not considered. An opportunity for posing useful and challenging questions (particularly post-9/11) is missed.

Clearly the publishers, Ashgate, have spared plenty of expense on this volume. It is presented as an academic text. Lavishly produced and expertly edited it is not, though. Eleven tables, 20 text-boxes and 44 figures - almost one for each page spread - appear. Some of these will make for useful teaching resources. Others are either unnecessary or bear insufficient relationship to the main text to make them fully comprehendable. Footnoting and referencing is incorrect or misspelt in places. A conflicting definition (compare 'product lifecycle' p.88 and p.206) is given. The book's own design is miserable: its grim black and white, poorly-scanned photos, lamentable typographic layout and the dreary jacket design do nothing to convey the excitement of the authors' proposals. If the publishers have sought to distance this output from the legions of 'coffee-table styled' design books that clog our libraries and bookshops, then they have succeeded. But its form hinders its content and the authors must take some responsibility for allowing Ashgate Publishing Ltd. to get away with this.

The reality that design practice moves into an innovative and dynamic engagement with its actor-networks in the way that Press and Cooper articulate may still seem a long way off. As one designer cited by Kotro and Pantzar in Design Issues (2002, 18, 2: p.40) says, 'Compared to design based purely on user needs, there is one undefeatable advantage in copying of [artefactual] ideas. Ideas already are expressed in the language of solutions, as opposed to user needs, which are abstract and have to be translated into design solution - a task that is anything but simple'. This quote explains much about the continued gap between the aspirations of design critics and the realities of design practices. It is quicker and more lucrative, in the short-term, for designers to elaborate on given material and visual typologies than to take the plunge and engage in the multi-faceted approaches that these authors propose.

The Design Experience will be a useful text book for undergraduate teaching purposes, if read alongside other sources to bolster its claims. It remains to be seen whether this book, and indeed many of the others cited in this review, manage to effectively generate new practices and attitudes in design. But let's hope so.