The Layman's Almanac

Allan Chochinov

Chair and co-founder of the newly minted SVA MFA in Products of Design Program, Allan Chochinov regularly writes on design education and the impact of design on contemporary culture. He has been a guest critic at various design schools in including Yale, NYU, University of Minnesota, RIT, and RMIT, as well as lectures around the world at professional conferences including IDSA, AIGA and IxDA. Also a partner and editor-in-chief of Core77.com, the widely read design website.

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LA: It seems every generation tries to define itself though a philosophy; where do you think today's generation lies?

AC: Well, I think that this generation of students is again trying to create meaning as much as they are creating things. And I think they're having a hard go of it, because the imperatives of design are largely assumed to be commercial.

And so, one of the reasons why we're starting this new program is to investigate the values of creation that aren't necessarily monetary, and tied to mass production and commercialization. So I think this generation comes in thinking and feeling this, but when they get out into the real world it's somewhat challenging to find that meaningful work, and to be able to make a living out of this.

The next generation of designers is going to either be very hopeful or very desperate. Depending on what this generation of designers does. If we can start to create some positive action that is sustainable and participatory, I think we'll be in good shape. I think if we continue down this road things could get really desperate and it may turn out that the need for engineers is going to be urgent. Designers could still play a part in translating between various stakeholders, but right now I think we have an opportunity to use our talents to promote our marketing and engineering, and ecologists and business people, and anthropologists to create complicated structures that would be good.

LA: What are your thoughts on the term "Design Thinking" and how it's been used in the industry?

AC: I think it's great. I think largely – and that many of the proponents of design thinking would agree – that it's a usually (a set) of common sense principles good designers always use. Things like being user-centered, and prototyping quickly and often. Learning from iteration. Thinking sustainability both in materiality and in use. In business, involving your client in the design process, perhaps to the point of co-creating… at least some participation, but being very, very strategic about what you make and how you make it.


So I think it's terrific. There's obviously a backlash against the term, but there are backlashes against all terms. I think part of that is just a consequence of the media running away with it. I don't think it'd be as popular if it weren't fundamentally a good idea. So I'm all for it. I also have no problem with the term "innovation" because to me "innovation" means design. But it rhymes with business, (because) the word lets us communicate better with the business side of what we do.

LA: Education can be the exploration of discovering one's own process - often by taking pieces of others and making it their own. What is your design process and whom, if anyone has been an inspiration?

AC: For me, it's about less. Always less. And I think that probably comes most directly from Bucky Fuller, who really believed that weight was one of the most important criteria of design. If something weighed less, it was better, which I largely agree with. So I'm really inspired by that, and I'm always encouraging myself and others to try and accomplish what they're trying to accomplish with less. "How would you make this out of nothing?" "What if this were free?" What if it were made out of something that came out of the ground and went back into the ground?

So less. And parenthetically, "less is more" is obviously a compelling idea but that would be secondary to the first use of that word that I articulated. I often name things before I create them, and I have a lot of fun with that. We're coming out of a stage of "design irony" right now and more into a stage of design commentary, with speculative objects – although, we may actually be coming out of that period as well. Those products aren't necessarily "funny ha-ha" but they're curious and provocative in a way that uses some of the same principles of humor. Sort of unexpected juxtaposition of things. So I think it's a really, really useful tool. As serious as the challenges we're facing are, I've found that if designers are having fun, they do a better job, and often humor gets you a nice ways down the road.

LA: How has technology changed your process or the way you do business?

AC: Technology is completely destabilizing (unintelligible). It's certainly not to be ignored. It's also not to be mindlessly embraced. It's sort of the biggest player in the room I think… and even if you're creating something that doesn't have obvious technology in it, let's say electronics, or (using) electricity, or a display, there's plenty of technology to manifest it in the world. Even in supply chain management. So it's absolutely in the DNA of anything mass-produced, because it's good and full of consequences.

LA: As opposed to only mimicking what has come before, what would you like to see this new generation of designers take on or do?

AC: I've always said that designers are in the business of two things: solving problems and celebrating life. There's probably a whole pile of other things that they're in the business of, but I find it useful to boil it down to those two. So we have a lot of very unhappy people who are living in very privileged places. Not wanting for food or shelter and so, low on the happiness scale. And of course we have billions of people who are incredibly disadvantaged, marginalized, in poverty, in war-torn areas, oppressed in a myriad of ways. So there are a lot of problems to solve, and people have argued that designers are not equipped to solve them. But again, I believe that designers have this unique ability to provide the connective tissue between various stakeholders; whether government officials, regulatory, health-engineering, transportation, things to do with food, medicine and access to agriculture.

We speak a lot of languages as designers. So we're uniquely equipped to, in some ways, moderate the facilitation of problems that are fundamentally systemic. Perhaps all problems are systemic and not sitting there in isolation waiting for a solution.

LA: What is the biggest contribution you hope you can make as a designer and educator that will directly influence your daughter, and her children's children?

That's an important question, and I think if more people thought of their progeny they'd be creating things of more value. Nathan Shedroff boiled down the definition of sustainability to: don't do things today that will make tomorrow worse. For a group of people who pride themselves on problem solving, designers have been complicit in the creation of an awful lot of problems. So in some sense it's now time to be working on correcting some of the errors we've made, and working towards what Alex Stetson would call: a new kind of prosperity for everyone, not just for the privileged.

So through journalism I'm able to help contribute to the dialogue of some of those conversations, or at least direct them a little bit. And as an educator, I feel charged with helping young designers feeling empowered, but that their actions have consequences and those consequences could be wonderful.

And part of that activity is actually tearing down what they think their mandates of design are. As designed by our culture, and by business as usual, as I mentioned before. To make students understand that especially in the design business, where you are presumably creating many of one thing, that you actually are not in the design business. You're in the consequence business. When you're in the consequence business you see that you design things differently.

Currently one of my overall goals is to change what designers see as their output from artifacts to impact. And these are tricky conversations. They're incredibly complex equations; they're often hard to measure and hard to prove. There are a lot of people who are intent on keeping transparency down, and not allow people to see how goods and services are actually created and distributed. And so it's a real challenge of our age.

LA: How do you think the term "Industrial Design" will be viewed in 50 years?

Well, it's a term that has always been problematic. Designers have always complained about that. So a lot of people have switched to using the term Product Design. It seems to be clearer, although most people in the world really don't comprehend that products, of all kinds, are intentionally created by someone sitting and thinking about them. People really do think that (products) just manifest themselves in the world. It doesn't occur to them that that glass at your restaurant table was actually a drawing, and a mold, and there was labor involved. So this whole thing is forever problematic in that way, but I think the term is pretty anachronistic now because we're starting to see that the product is only one part of the whole in many senses. It's a prop in the many behaviors that make up what we call culture. And if you can view the product in it's role that way, it really becomes a means as opposed to an end.

People love products for all sorts of things. They love them for nostalgic reasons, because they've imbued them with meaning, perhaps they belonged to a family member. They love them because they are metaphors, or stand-ins, or representations of who they are, or who they want to be; the clichéd example being the car or clothing. Their way to self-identify or project an idea of the self that you're working towards. And often they love them because they enable things. People will love an iPhone because it's a great piece of Industrial Design, but what they really love about it is what it enables. The system and services, the access, the socialization, tools that live within that artifact or are enabled by that artifact.

So the challenge for designers is how to twist them a little bit, so that they are a part of helpful, nurturing, sustainable systems that can continue. Again, that don't make tomorrow worse.