Positive Change

We are living through an age which permanently confronts us with change and challenges, from environmental crises, pandemics and wars to gigantic leaps in technology and science. In this context, design can manifest an impact that may be positive or negative. London-based design critic Alice Rawsthorn is a meticulous researcher and storyteller, whose books present precisely this dichotomy and the varying contexts and wide-ranging forms taken by design from past to present, in order to convince us first and foremost of the positive power of design. Her most recent work, with Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator of Design at MoMA in New York, is ‘Design Emergency: Building a Better Future’. Spanning a podcast and research platform as well as a book, it brings together the duo’s countless interviews with designers, architects, activists, engineers, artists and scientists, in which they share their remarkable stories and visions. In this scrupulous and insightful interview, she describes how the project came about, her intentions and her passion for it, and the role she believes design should play.

As a design critic, you have spent decades writing about design. What would you say has changed over time in terms of design under­standing? 

 

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One of the fascinating things about design that has impelled me to write about it for so long is that it’s constantly changing. Design is a ubiquitous force in our lives; as our world changes, so does design, its big challenges, its big oppor­tunities and so on. You constantly have to rethink your understanding of it, its interpretation and application. The world has changed ineluctably in recent decades, and so has design. As it has responded to those changes, so has our under­standing of it. 

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What drives you to write about design? 

 

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My mission is to write about design as a social, political and ecological tool and to raise public poli­tical understanding of it by quashing the stereotype that it’s solely a styling or promotional tool, which was how it tended to be perceived in the Industrial Age. Obviously I’m not the only person doing this. There are a great many incredible people in the field, and there has been a shift in public and political perceptions of design—nowhere near as radical as we would like, but things are changing, and in the right direction. I think a practical example of that would be the changing priorities of design students; the sort of industrial-era design courses for furniture, products and so on are closing at universities and design schools all over the world, because there’s diminishing demand for them. However, there’s incre­as­ing interest in all aspects of how design relates to technology, but also in humanitarian and social ­design.

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You published the book Design Emergency together with Paola Antonelli. Why the title? 

 

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We chose it because when Paola and I started the Design Emergency project, it was at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis and we faced a major global emergency. A lethal pandemic was rapidly spreading across the planet which even the most eminent scientists and medical professionals didn’t recognise, didn’t understand, and had yet to work out how to treat. 

 

It was a tragic and turbulent time, when there was so much curiosity among so many different people from different walks of life to find out about the design response to COVID. I’m very grateful that we had a modest opportunity to make a contribution to that process. That is why we called it Design Emergency.

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How did Design Emergency begin?

 

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Paola and I have been friends for many years. We’ve always contributed to one another’s projects, and had always wanted to collaborate on something together. When COVID struck, I used my personal Instagram feed to track the design response. On my feed, I identify a theme for every week and write about a different iteration of it each day. It can be anything from the life and work of extraordinary designers to design debacles, design as an activist tool, different aspects of design’s role in developing solutions for the climate emergency, the refugee crisis, growing inequality, the rise of bigotry and so on. 

 

I started writing about the design response to COVID at the end of week one of the first lockdown. There were so many incredible ­examples that I did another week, and another, and it carried on. Paola and I were Zooming a lot, as friends did during that time. She was very interested in what I was doing. She said, why don’t we develop the idea of exploring the COVID design response on a different platform? So we very quickly came up with the concept of Design Emergency. 

 

It seemed to us that Instagram Live would be the best platform to do this. So what we did was to conduct one interview a week for about ten weeks. Our long-term mission was that we were absolutely convinced that the chaos and trauma caused by COVID would—as so many previous historic emergencies had done—presage a major reflection on how to redesign and reconstruct many aspects of our lives, and that this would be likely to be done in a much fairer, more ecologically and socially responsible way. So after ten weeks, we redefined Design Emergency to focus on that long-term process of reinvention.

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So Covid was the trigger for Design Emergency, but the examples relate to all kinds of crises and challenges?

 

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Yes. I think that when people who aren’t part of the design community see practical examples of how designers are intervening in major crises, it makes it much easier for them to understand what otherwise can be a rather complex, ­often self-contradictory and abstract concept. Suddenly design seems a much more convincing tool to tackle complex challenges. Having decided to focus Design Emergency on design’s power to contribute to long term changes, we identified and interviewed the designers, architects, engineers, improvisational designers, who­ever, who had developed practical projects that were already making a meaningful difference to our future. That’s what Design Emergency has done ever since. 

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What can the role of design be in times of crisis such as COVID?

 

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Design is one of the most powerful tools to help us to address major crises, if it is deployed intelligently and responsibly. When I began posting about the design response to COVID on my feed, there was general terror and bafflement about COVID-19. The general media were desperate for good news stories to counter the endless sea of tragedy. Design, technology and engineering were providing them, whether by improving the design of ventilators for use in hospitals, designing templates for schools and conference centres to be converted into temporary medical facilities, developing public information campaigns about COVID, and so on. These are all great proven examples of design’s practical value in a global crisis.

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