Everyday design
Dialogue with Claudia Marina
Design theorist, writer and creative director working at the intersection of design and culture. She teaches architectural history and theory at Parsons School of Design, The New School, where she is a part-time assistant professor.
Q: Why theorize design as an everyday thing?
Sometimes it seems almost silly to theorize something so simple as design, but for me, theory has no value if it doesn't explain our everyday life. I started thinking about design in these terms during my MA in Design Studies at Parsons, when reading and writing about design brought me more questions than answers. I have a background in journalism, which shaped the way that I look at the world, because my mind is trained to find stories in everyday life and to locate what is potentially special about them. This got me interested in observing my daily life routines such as getting dressed, putting on makeup, cutting my hair, making a meal and arranging flowers. Why are these things not considered design?
A lot of things in everyday life go on a continuum of permanence, from not existing to existing, from being a tool to a finalized object, from a medium to a final thing. Sometimes we literally eat what we make, or we put it on, we wash it off, and then we do it again in a cyclical nature. It is difficult to theorize design in everyday life because there is less of a commodified product or static image of it, because everyday life is not static.
Judy Attfield’s idea of “design in the lowercase” became very important to my own thinking on theories of design, as it recognized design as an activity that could be ephemeral. But I wanted to push the idea of ephemerality more literally, as if there is no privilege of an object at the end of the practice of design.
Victor Papanek described design as “cleaning and reorganizing a desk drawer, pulling an impacted tooth, baking an apple pie”; but why is it that he's not affording any sort of theoretical analysis to opening the drawer and organizing it? What happens cognitively? How does it relate ethically to bigger scales like industrial design or architecture
Design history comes from a lineage of art history that privileges the object and designer, while overlooking the generalized practice. For me, the everyday is not a factor only in the background, so I decided to really look at daily practices that are not perhaps considered “worth” studying from an institutional perspective. One of my past projects involved researching cooking to question if what we do while we cook is the same as what we might do in the studio, and how certain contexts or backgrounds, and the concepts of space, materiality and ephemerality play into what we consider design. We might be able to understand cooking more as a design practice when it happens in a professional kitchen, the same way we might understand design as “design,” and not as craft when we do it in a studio rather than at home.
Design is something that everybody absolutely does; we do not do it all the time, but it is present in a lot of practices of our everyday life. And what happens in our minds while we design is not privileged to any sort of institutional or formalized idea of design. Take makeup, for example, we have different products and techniques that we use in the hopes of designing the self or a certain look for an event, for a date, or for a job interview. Theorizing design as an everyday practice means moving theory outside the ivory-tower and applying it into the seemingly boring parts of everyday life to attempt to explain them.
Figure A: Different recipes showing different ways of making flan. Courtesy Claudia Marina.
Figure B: Material study of flan, exploring different ingredients and techniques to question what makes flan "flan", and how this process of developing recipes is similar to design processes. Photo: Tom Newton. Courtesy Claudia Marina.
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Figure C: Claudia recreating a friend's makeup look following her instructions with the tools and products available at the time. Putting on someone else's "look" questions whether the final "look" is someone else's design. In the end is it Claudia or is it her friend? Courtesy of Claudia Marina. Clip "Better Consumed in 24 Hours" available on YouTube .
Q: Who gets to call themselves a designer?
I am drawn to the provocation of erasing the term “designer”, but I don’t think that will happen because we live in a culture in which nomenclatures are useful for giving identity to people. Nonetheless, I like having these conversations because I have a hope that they could lead to fairer and more equitable ways of relating to each other. So much of design is tied to socioeconomic status and to ideas of value and knowledge, I think this needs to be challenged.
The idea of the “designer” is constructed by culture, it is not inherent. In the Renaissance design was a sketch or a plan, and it wasn't institutionalized until the emergence of industrial design. In the mid-century, a designer’s job was more like styling, but today design has merged with aspects of engineering. The concept of design and who is a designer are always changing, and they are always tied to culture. I'm really interested in making visible that design is a practice that everybody does, and exploring in what cases people get to call themselves designers. If we are talking about design and identity, I do also think feminist questions of difference, including gender but also race and class, plays into the distinction between who feels comfortable enough calling themselves a designer and what a designer is afforded in society—culturally, politically—in jobs or in a room where you might have authority or not to speak on a topic.
Edgardo Giménez, the Argentine artist, recently did an interview*1 where he mentioned being a self-taught architect, but yet one of his first projects ended up being selected for an exhibition at MoMA in the 1970s. It took the institution of MoMA and the press surrounding that show for him to probably see himself as an “architect.” It was something that was “given” to him—I wonder, almost as if a gift— to be taken more seriously. So is “designer” a descriptor that somebody else gives to you? Or is it something that you give to yourself?
I think that we're still in a place where it doesn't mean much to give it to yourself—publicity still plays a role in the cultural shaping of things. We still rely on other people to call us designers—and I feel that too, I'm not above these conversations. When I was writing the essay “On calling yourself a designer” featured in Feminist Designer, I still didn't know if I would consider myself a designer, even though I do believe that writing is design.
1 1 Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) “Do whatever you want: Edgardo Giménez in dialogue with Gonzalo Guerrero”.
Q: How can we democratize ideas around design?
I believe that if theory is not in practice, there is no purpose to theory. I’ve been involved in a workshop with the journal Design and Culture that sort of mentors emerging writers through the publishing process, preparing them for peer review and things like that. The other workshop organizers and I are now theorizing what that workshop meant, and what it could mean for the future in exploring the boundaries of design conversations, especially what other experimental forms it can take besides academic papers. I think it takes a group of dedicated people, against the odds, to challenge normative ideas and to be brave enough to publish something different knowing that it might not be taken seriously at the beginning. We need to push different ideas out and not only through academic publications, but also independent and popular publications. Moreover, it’s important to leverage institutional weight to legitimize these different forms of design and how they can appear to the public. I think that this can really help to democratize design.
There are other ideas in design discourse that attempt to answer the democracy question, such as the concept of co-design, but I get the suspicion that it can be patronizing. There is a community, but there is always the question if you are designing “for” or “with”. It seems that, in general, what I’ve seen when I go to studio reviews or talk to architects, attempts at designing “with” is some form of giving stakeholders a creative activity to do in a workshop setting, documenting it, and then using that experience as data, but not really engaging with the community after that.
I think we have this idea that design comes in to make everyday life more efficient, but everyday life is not efficient. The idea of efficiency is also perhaps culturally rooted in the influence of industrialization. So, to what degree are we thinking about making life easier and efficient? How might that change linguistically? How is it still gendered? What is more domestic or formal? There are times when we don't want to make things easier. I can say that about my design practice in writing. I do not look for things to be easier, that doesn't help me. Design theory production is a long process, and it takes years to produce an article or book chapter, it's not efficient nor profitable. In order to get something that I'm really proud of, I expect a lot of mistakes, and from those mistakes, a lot of learning and sensing. I think we lose a lot of the everyday when we don't factor that into design.