Dead end at the Design Museum

The prize was the idea of the Design Museum's director Alice Rawsthorn

5 April 2012

Did design change your life last year? Perhaps the latest Dyson vacuum cleaner got your rugs smarter than ever before. Or maybe the new Upper Class seats on Virgin Atlantic gave you the best night's sleep you've ever had on an aeroplane.

Or possibly you feel that Westminster council's new street lights in Victoria Street are not only beautiful, but also reduce light pollution, while making you feel safer at night.

But you won't find any of these objects - all designed by Brits - at the Designer of the Year exhibition, which opened on Saturday at the Design Museum. In fact, you might not find anything at all, because the show is so badly laid out that it deserves a (designer) wooden spoon for exhibition design.

The four zones that showcase the four short-listed designers' work are hard to find, as they are tucked in the far corners of the museum's top floor. And all but one of the zones, which are curated by the designers themselves, are as dull as ditchwater.

Jasper Morrison, the cult furniture designer, has simply plonked a row of expensive chairs, tables, kettles and toasters on a plinth (minimal design, minimal effort). The design team at Penguin Books has - surprise! - filled a couple of cabinets with Penguin paperbacks. Hilary Cottam, who works in the public sector to improve the design of schools and prisons, is represented by a cluster of monitors displaying multimedia loops of kids who love their new classrooms. Yawn.

Only Timorous Beasties, the subversive Scottish fabric collective, have been remotely creative, using their handprinted wallpaper depicting drunks on park benches and other unsavoury scenes of Glaswegian lowlife to create a seedily atmospheric chamber.

The four are all vying for the £25,000 Designer of the Year prize, which will be awarded in June and which claims to honour the British designer "whose work made the biggest contribution to design last year". It is the brainchild of the museum's imperious director, Alice Rawsthorn, who sees it as a vehicle for promoting the cause of design while generating a good deal of hype for her institution.

Yet the prize, now in its third year, seems increasingly detached from the real world. In 2003, it went to Jonathan Ive, chief designer at Apple Computer, whose iPods, iMacs and Powerbooks not only perfectly marry beauty and function but have also been huge commercial successes. The choice of Ive was a masterstroke, as his output is lauded by both the design profession and the gadget-buying public.

Ive was always going to be a hard act to follow, and last year the prize went to unknown multimedia designer Daniel Brown. His websites and graphic designs are beautiful and innovative, but it's difficult to argue that his work had the greatest impact on the life of the nation in a year that also saw, for example, the hugely successful relaunch of the Mini, the acclaimed pedestrianisation of Trafalgar Square and the introduction of the congestion charge (the unsung red-and-white "C" logo, by an unknown designer, must surely be the most effective piece of graphic design of recent times).

Rawsthorn is clearly not interested in following public taste. Instead, she seems hell-bent on digging up people whose work defies previously accepted notions of what constitutes design.

This year's shortlist - with its civil servant, the team of book-jacket designers, a minimalist and an arthouse textile company - neatly reflects the identity crisis infecting the design world, which used to see itself as a discipline devoted to solving practical problems (How can we make this car more aerodynamic? How can we make this kettle easier to pour?), but which now seems unsure about what it does, and why.

Is design about styling? Is it about fashion? Is it about cheapo Changing Roomsstyle makeovers or expensive Philippe Starck lights? Is it about Ikea?

This confusion was best expressed by the bitter feud at the Design Museum late last year, when vacuum cleaner magnate James Dyson resigned as chairman of the museum's trustees in disgust at Rawsthorn's curatorial policies.

Dyson, an old-school problem-solver, hated the way the museum had abandoned its role as cheerleader for functional, engineering-based design and was instead showcasing work that had not traditionally been viewed as serious design at all, such as shoes by Manolo Blahnik and flower arrangements by Constance Spry.

However, the design community largely disowned dinosaur Dyson and rallied behind Rawsthorn, who had at last injected some much-needed glamour and controversy into the staid Butler's Wharf institution - the only national museum for a discipline that is witnessing a surge in popular interest.

This year's Designer of the Year shebang should, therefore, have been a triumphant affirmation of Rawsthorn's intuitive grasp of the zeitgeist. Instead, at the private view, London's design cognoscenti were left wandering up and down the stairs looking for the show and, on finding it, heading swiftly back down to the bar to swill cheap wine and mutter about how they might have better spent their Friday evening.

How could the museum have got it so wrong? How could it curate an exhibition that is so deliberately controversial, and yet so boring?

In part, it is because the museum has backed itself into a corner. By rejecting Dyson-style functional design, it cannot now be seen to champion anything too obviously practical - such as Dyson cleaners.

And as someone who has set herself up as an avant-garde taste-maker, Rawsthorn cannot highlight anything that is already popular, thereby ruling out the ingenious Virgin Atlantic seats and the exquisite Westminster street lights, both by London designer Pearson Lloyd.

It certainly rules out anything as lowrent as an Ikea sofa, which costs £300 and looks identical to a designer version costing 10 times that amount (and whose popular appeal was confirmed by the riots that ensued at the opening of the chain's Edmonton store a few weeks ago).

Rawsthorn's policy doesn't leave much room to manoeuvre, and she is thus forced by the law of diminishing returns to search in ever more obscure corners for things she can controversially claim to be design.

Intriguingly, the most contentious nominee this year is not a designer at all, and yet she has the best claim to the prize. Hilary Cottam is a policy-maker, nominated primarily for the governmentfunded School Works project that she initiated at Kingsdale School in Southwark.

The idea was to see whether better design could transform a failing academy. The architectural makeover she instigated, undertaken by architects dRMM and which is ongoing, is already showing signs of having an immense impact on the behaviour and attainment of the students, thereby making the case better than anything else for the importance of design.

However, Kingsdale and Cottam's other projects with the health and prison services don't lend themselves to engaging displays in fashionable museums. The benefits of her work are difficult to explain in soundbites.

Yet what she does is practical, functional and has the potential to change more lives than the rest of the shortlisted designers put together. If she wins, it will further confuse the debate about what design actually is. But at least Alice Rawsthorn and James Dyson might finally find something upon which to agree.

The Designer of the Year exhibition is at the Design Museum, SE1 (0870 833 9955) until 19 June; the winner will be announced on 9 June.

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