Steven Heller and Alice Twemlow are very concerned, very worried about the state of design criticism. “The volume of discussion about design has gotten louder and louder recently,” observes Twemlow, alluding to the profusion of writing about design online and in print. “But the profundity of the insights hasn’t increased with the volume. To me, it’s really important that there are some people who are actually thinking this through.” Heller and Twemlow have a developed a strategy to address what they consider this dearth in contemporary design writing, a plan they will begin implementing in the fall of 2008 when they premiere an MFA program in design criticism at New York’s School of Visual Arts (SVA). Through this, they will train a dozen new design critics, whom they intend to parachute into the field beginning in 2010.

Heller, already a grand poobah of design criticism and longtime art director of The New York Times Book Review, and Twemlow, design essayist and former AIGA conference head, want to inculcate in their students a very specific manifesto. Their intent: bring design criticism to the masses. Their program is to usher in an era in which design criticism isn’t confined to a microcosm of design magazines and blogs, or to the more esoteric realms of academic writing.

APPLICATIONS, NEEDS, PREPARATION
As Heller and Twemlow see it, critics who emerge from the program will write and author a variety of projects about all kinds of design—graphic, industrial, product, et al—that are compelling and accessible to the general public. “It’s a misconception that design criticism is for designers alone,” says Twemlow, sitting in her bright, airy office on the 12th floor of SVA’s 21st Street building. “Design criticism is about objects in society. I think it’s for a general readership. I’d like to see design criticism regularly in The New York Times.”

“We’re looking at the critic as a critic of design, who can be a journalist, poet, curator, filmmaker,” explains Heller, who began conceiving the program, nicknamed “D-Crit,” as he prepared to leave the Times in summer 2006. “We’re trying to say there are many platforms on which to evaluate design and many different ways to evaluate design. It’s not the trade journalism of yore, and it’s not the mass journalism of today.” In this paradigm, graduates of the MFA Design Criticism Department would apply the design crit sensibility in many contexts, which means they might curate a museum exhibition, produce a radio segment, create a multimedia blog or write an essay. The training comprises what Twemlow describes as “a practical approach to design criticism.”

To prepare their charges for the mission, Twemlow, who will chair the program, and Heller, its cofounder, plan to offer their brood a rigorous curriculum with three core components: a focus on design history that lasts a full academic year, an ongoing writing boot camp that requires students to consistently crank out editorial assignments ranging from blogs and feature stories to long- and short-form critical essays, and an examination of the philosophy and vocabulary of criticism in other areas, such as food and film, so students understand the rhetoric of criticism and the particularities of design writing. The idea is that critiquing the design of the new Tyler Brûlé magazine Monocle requires a different aesthetic and intellectual perspective—a different vocabulary—than writing a review of The Darjeeling Limited.

Among other classes in the curriculum—to be taught by an allstar faculty ranging from design writer Ralph Caplan to MoMA design and architecture curator Paola Antonelli to cultural commentator Kurt Andersen—are courses that will focus on curating and critiquing museum exhibitions, researching design in libraries and archives, conducting studio visits and even writing designcentric reviews of restaurants. Students in the program will be required to complete thesis projects and present them at a conference they will organize at the end of the two-year curriculum. The hope is that the conference, which will focus on a particular theme, will become a forum of essential importance to the industry.

WELL-TEMPERED ADVOCATES
If design criticism needs missionaries, then Heller and Twemlow are the ideal pair to spread the gospel. Heller’s zeal for criticism has resulted in such an extensive oeuvre of books, essays, feature stories and now blog posts that it seems impossible one man could have written them all. Through his contributions as a designer of seminal works of graphic art and his far-ranging writings, Heller has already had an extraordinary impact on the field.

Twemlow, too, has played a pivotal role in the design world with her writing, as well as her direction of AIGA conferences and events at a time when the organization began to broaden its reach. Her own academic training is an ideal foundation for her current role: She received an MA in Design History at a joint school of the Royal College of Art and Victoria & Albert Museum, and she is currently completing a Ph.D. in the Design History department in the same program. Her thesis, appropriately enough, focuses on design criticism in the U.S. and U.K. from the 1950s onward.

A NASCENT DISCIPLINE
The expansive vision of design criticism that Heller and Twemlow are advocating sounds well and good—and by the way, is SVA offering scholarships for writers already in the field?—but it is nonetheless worth asking: What exactly is design criticism today? “Design criticism is the analysis of design through a distinct point of view that illuminates and explicates the concepts behind, and the reasons for, a particular piece of design,” says Heller, who was the first writer for PRINT magazine’s “A Cold Eye” design criticism column, which premiered in 1983. “Why do you need it? You need it. It helps you understand and appreciate the world around you and what’s being thrown at you by people who are producing this stuff, for any number of reasons, not the least of which is that it can provide a certain amount of pleasure or joy.”

The fact that design does provide pleasure and joy is why design journalism is already mainstreaming beyond venues such as STEP, PRINT, Eye, Metropolis, I.D. and other niche magazines. The wider reach of such writing—The New Yorker’s profile of type designer Matthew Carter, Bruce Nussbaum’s BusinessWeek blog about design and innovation, or the coverage that appears in shelter and lifestyle magazines such as Dwelland Surface—is a reflection of the general public’s greater appreciation of design in its many forms. But this coverage isn’t always criticism per se. As those who read the blogs Speak Up and Design Observer know, the venues for criticism have proliferated beyond design magazines and books. Yet while such critiques—online or on paper—can be revelatory and highly informative, they can also lead to insular and navel-gazing discussions about arcana that can alienate even an audience of partisans who are themselves in the field—to say nothing of the general public.

CRITICAL BAGGAGE
“So much design criticism has been done by designers themselves,” observes Peter Lunenfeld, professor in the graduate-level Media Design Program at Art Center College of Design. “As interesting as I find it, I think it’s limiting. It’s been very much concerned with how practitioners involve themselves in the craft of making and often too little about the production of meaning. My eyes glaze when I read various disputes about fonts.”

Even impassioned supporters of design crit democratization like Lunenfeld wonder if such an upgrade is truly possible. “When you ask that question about wouldn’t it be nice if there were a more sophisticated dialogue about design in big media,” he observes, “I say ‘Yes, but. ...’ People in the labor unions have been asking for years why newspapers have a business section and not a labor section. Just because it would be nice doesn’t mean it’s going to happen.”

As an example of the sort of critic she admires, Twemlow points to Reyner Banham, who wrote about design and architecture beginning in the 1950s. She sees Banham as a good role model for her students because he was “democratizing the language and subject matter of design criticism.” His essays, addressing everything from potato chip packaging to surfboards, are connected to larger social issues. “This is, to me, where design criticism gets really interesting,” says Twemlow, “when the writer evaluates and explains an object or experience or idea and uses that as a kind of launch pad for discussing the ways it connects to society more generally and what effects it’s having for good or bad.”

THE PATH BETWEEN
Finding the right voice and content for design criticism in mainstream media requires a unique critical sensibility. “The great challenge is walking that fine line between commodity fetishism and serious cultural critic, and very few people can pull this sort of thing off in a way where the writing takes design seriously without fawning over it,” says András Szántó, former director of the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University’s Journalism School. “There are so many ways to go wrong—you can become a superficial mouthpiece for commercial PR. But it’s just as easy to compensate for this lack of legitimacy by writing in an abstruse way. Somewhere between the two is a writing that is not reifying or helping to sell these objects, but not too distant, and not just a jumping-off point for abstract analysis.”

While the SVA program aims to extend design criticism to the masses, the roots of it still reside in the design professions. “Part of the definition of a profession is having history, criticism and theory,” explains Katherine McCoy, former cochair of the Cranbrook Academy of Art and partner at High Ground Tools and Strategies for Design. “That self-reflection and self-critique is central to advancing a profession. If we can’t reflect on our own practice, how can we advance?”

To get graduate students to think critically about design during her tenure at Cranbrook from the ’70s to the ’90s, McCoy developed a curriculum that required them to read books and essays about graphic design, write critiques of their own work and author essays analyzing themes in their work and readings. Students had to incorporate this critical sensibility into their studio practices by designing a project as a critical response to a particular designer or movement. “We wanted people to be able to articulate their intentions,” she explains. “We always said to students that they needed to assume that to be a designer was to write about design and to read about design. Every designer should be a contributor to this discussion.”

Traditions of design critique in practice continue today, as at California College of the Arts, where Brenda Laurel heads the graduate program in design. “We’re teaching criticism as a way to do your job really, really well, not as a spectator sport,” says Laurel. “The hope is that student criticality pervades everything they do. It’s about asking the world interesting questions about what they’re designing, and designing in response to that.”

Ultimately, the value of design criticism is to allow us to create and live in a world more conducive to our well-being and enjoyment—the “pleasure and joy” design imparts. Improved design crit literacy should enable us to better comprehend aesthetic, economic and environmental implications of the designed objects we consume and make. “People have a responsibility and a right to develop a literacy around designed objects and … experiences that define their world,” says Laurel, “because that’s the first step in having a power over them.” Alice Twemlow and Steven Heller have assigned themselves the difficult task of mass-marketing design criticism. If anyone can accomplish the task, they can.

http://dcrit.sva.edu

TOP: FROM THE SERIES OF PROMOTIONAL POSTCARDS CREATED BY WALKER ART CENTER DESIGN FOR USE IN THE LEADUP TO THE SVA PROGRAM’S LAUNCH.