27
Design and Democracy
Gui Bonsiepe
I shall present a few thoughts about the relationship between
democracy and design, and about the relationship between critical
humanism and operational humanism. This issue leads to the ques-
tion of the role of technology and industrialization as a procedure for
democratizing the consumption of goods and services, and finally
to the ambivalent role of esthetics as the domain of freedom and
manipulation.
The main theme of my lecture is the relationship between
design—in the sense of projecting—and autonomy. My reflections
are open-ended, and do not pretend to give quick and immediate
answers. The university still offers a place to pursue these questions
that normally will not be addressed in professional practice, with its
pressures and contingencies.
Looking at the present design discourse, one notes a surpris-
ing—and I would say alarming—absence of questioning design
activities. Concepts such as branding, competitiveness, globalization,
comparative advantages, lifestyle design, differentiation, strategic
design, fun design, emotion design, experience design, and smart
design prevail in design magazines and the all too few books about
design. Sometimes, one gets the impression that a designer aspiring
to two minutes of fame feels obliged to invent a new label for setting
herself or himself apart from the rest of what professional service
offers. I leave aside “coffee table” books on design that abound in
pictures and exempt the reader from intellectual efforts. The issue of
design and democracy doesn’t enjoy popularity—apart from a few
laudable exceptions.
If we look at the social history of the meaning of the term
“design,” we note on the one side a popularization that is a hori-
zontal extension, and on the other side a contraction that is a verti-
cal reduction. The architectural critic Witold Rybczynski recently
commented on this phenomenon: “Not so long ago, the term
‘designer’ described someone such as Eliot Noyes, who was respon-
sible for the IBM Selectric typewriter in the 1960s, or Henry Dreyfuss,
whose clients included Lockheed Aircraft and the Bell Telephone
Company ... or Dieter Rams, who created a range of austere-look-
ing, but very practical, products for the German company Braun.
Today, ‘designer’ is more likely to bring to mind Ralph Lauren or
Giorgio Armani, that is, a fashion designer. While fashion design-
ers usually start as couturiers, they—or at least their names—often
are associated with a wide variety of consumer products including
cosmetics, perfume, luggage, home furnishings, and even house
© 2006 Gui Bonsiepe
Design Issues: Volume 22, Number 2 Spring 2006
This is a slightly abbreviated translation
of an acceptance speech in Spanish of
an honorary doctorate from the Metropolitan
University of Technology, Santiago de Chile,
in June 2005.

Design Issues: Volume 22, Number 2 Spring 200628
paint. As a result, ‘design’ is popularly identified with packaging:
the housing of a computer monitor, the barrel of a pen, and a frame
for eyeglasses.” 1
More and more, design has moved away from the idea of
“intelligent problem solving” (James Dyson) and drawn nearer to
the ephemeral, fashionable and quickly obsolete, to formal aesthetic
play, to the “boutiquization” of the universe of products for everyday
life. For this reason, design today often is identified with expensive,
exquisite, not particularly practical, funny, and formally pushed,
colorful objects. The hypertrophy of fashion aspects is accompa-
nied and increased by the media with their voracious appetite for
novelties. Design thus has become a media event—and we have a
considerable number of publications that serve as resonance boxes
for this process. Even design centers are exposed to the complicity of
the media, running the risk of failing to reach their original objective:
to make a difference between design as intelligent problem solving
and styling. After all, it is a question of a renaissance of the tradition
of the Good Design Movement, but with different foci and interests.
The advocates of Good Design pursued socio-pedagogical objectives,
while the life style centers of today pursue exclusively commercial
and marketing aims to provide orientation for consumption patterns
of a new—or not that new—social segment of global character, that
can be labeled with the phrase: “We made it.”
The world of everyday products and messages, of material
and semiotic artifacts, has met—with rare exceptions—in cultural
discourse (and this includes the academic discourse) in a climate of
benign indifference that has its roots in classical culture in the medi-
eval age, when the first universities in the West were founded. This
academic tradition did not take note of the domain of design (in the
sense of project) in any of its disciplines. However, in the process of
industrialization, one could no longer close one’s eyes to technol-
ogy and technical artifacts that more and more made their presence
felt in everyday life. But the leading ideal continued to be cognitive
character in the form of the creation of new knowledge. Design never
established itself as a leading, parallel ideal. This fact explains the
difficulties of integrating design education in institutions of higher
learning, with their own traditions and criteria of excellence. This is
evident in doctoral programs in design that favor the production of
discursive results, and don’t give projects the same value or recogni-
tion as the production of texts. The sciences approach reality from
the perspective of cognition, of what can be known, while the design
disciplines approach reality from the perspective of “projectability,”
of what can be designed. These are different perspectives, and it is
hoped that, in the future, they will transmute into complementary
perspectives. So far, design has tried to build bridges to the domain
of the sciences, but not vice versa. We can speculate that, in the
future, design may become a basic discipline for all scientific areas.
But this Copernican turn in the university system might take genera-
1 Witold Rybczynski, “How Things Work,”
New York Review of Books LII: 10 (June
9, 2005): 49–51.