Some barbarian or another is always at the gate
“Design swept the 20th century like an invading horde. It leveled craft guilds and their stratified structures of apprenticeships. It endangered masons and clothiers and ironsmiths and poets by demystifying production. It gave us the mechanistic writings of Joyce. It gave us the unstoppable thrust of the Model T and the vast territories of blacktop along which it traveled. It shattered the idea of the artist, the genius, the creator, the One, in favor of a repeatable universe of objects, images and places, without an end in sight.
Throughout the last century, design was a natural ally of revolutionary movements.”
My commentary about the revolutionary potential of design introduced the inaugural issue of the Design Museum Magazine.
The Design Museum is a nomadic institution, presenting traveling exhibitions and programs that touch on all aspects of contemporary design culture, from creative placemaking to universal access for people with disabilities. For the inaugural issue of its publication, the Design Museum Magazine, I wrote an opening essay that situated design as a formative influence on modernity.
Its potential, I suggested, was to disrupt traditional modes of making and living, assaulting establishmentarian fortifications with tools of curiosity, iteration, and creativity. Riffing on the Museum’s nomadic mission, I alluded to an essay by psychoanalytic critics Deleuze and Guattari, who posited that all vertical structures of authority (e.g., hierarchies, skyscrapers, cities) were in perpetual conflict with horizontal structures of diffusion (e.g., rhizomes, communes, nomads.) Design itself, then, is a nomad: a wanderer that infiltrates the walls of the establishment, a troublemaker, an agent of revolt.