I propose that a similar fate will befall design. Just as we have reached the end of art in a narrative-historical sense, might we also reach the end of design? Recent history seems opposed to such a conclusion: while modernism in art has long since sputtered and stalled - the outcome of which was a freeing of creative energies of artists who otherwise had felt compelled to conform to increasingly narrow narratives - a modernist drive in design has flourished well into the twenty-first century. But before looking ahead it is necessary to take a look back.
A Master Narrative for Art
Danto sketches out a master narrative of art history marked by three eras: the era of imitation or mimesis, taken to define art from Aristotle down to the nineteenth century, the era of ideology, and the post-historical era where anything goes without qualification (Danto, 1997).
Before modernism, the narrative of art was that of mimesis: a story about increasingly accurate representation2. Modernism arrives circa 1880 and lasts for about 80 years until 1965 (Danto, 1997). With the advent of photography, painting lost its hold on the mimetic image and art went into a deep search for meaning that saw it become entangled in self-criticism. The work of Impressionists was connected with photography while Cubism was a direct reaction to its increasing primacy (Monaco, 2000). Despite a gradual acceptance of photography and other media as art, it is interesting that there has been no recovery of a narrative of mimesis.
What Happened to Mimesis?
With film, motion was able to be reproduced, so that while sculpture could still claim form as a unique mimetic quality, its inertness put it at some disadvantage. By the time photography was accepted as an art form within the broader culture, we had perhaps already arrived in the postmodern. The technologies of film were very much concerned with mimesis: the addition of sound and later of colour aren't about exploring what film essentially is, but about creating more convincing facsimiles of reality3. By the time film began to be widely recognized as art, with photography then more firmly established, 3D computer technology presented itself as a degraded upstart. With 3D there is the potential for increased mimesis, as form can be combined with motion so that it exceeds sculpture and film and there is the possibility for interaction, heightening the mimetic potential of what is displayed. Efforts continue to improve the mimetic power of computer graphics and to eliminate the "frames" that distinguish observer from observed (e.g. VR headsets to get rid of the screen, tactile feedback gloves to give feeling)4. The history of mimesis is ongoing and is linked with technological development5. What has ended is the association of any of these mimetic efforts with art. Or at least as part of an exclusive narrative of artistic development.
The Tyranny of Exclusivity
Modernism was the Age of Manifestos6. The manifesto proclaims a certain style of art as the only kind that matters, and while they flourished under modernism, the post-historical moment is immune to them (Danto, 1997). In its championing of a 'one true path' and seeking for only essential qualities, modernism became a history of purgation, the dark political analog to modernism in art being totalitarianism (Danto, 1997).
Any design taken to totality and exclusiveness becomes tyrannical. Helvetica is an incredible and versatile font; what makes it contemptible is its ubiquity. Such totalitarian tendencies were present in all of the various modernisms and it is only with the shift to the postmodern, with the end of art, that art was able to overthrow these impulses.
An Essential Paradigm
Modernism, in its seeking of the essential, was concerned with a materialist aesthetics. Modernist art draws attention to the limitations of the medium, bringing them forward as virtues rather than trying to conceal them: the brush stroke is no longer something that one is meant to "see past" but rather an irreducible part of the work (Danto, 1997).
Art became its own subject: painting became about only what the painting could do - flatness for example, to contrast with other media and discover its true essence. This is what Danto terms the local and materialist character of modernist painting and sculpture: asking the question, what do I have that no other kind of art can have? (Danto, 1997)
Modernism was dependent upon two conditions for its continuation: (1) a rich material medium full of 'depth' to be explored and (2) new material mediums open to exploration after the familiar ones had been exhausted.
The New Virtual Media
In 'art', the various media were not on an exponential technological development. Those artistic practices which dealt with technological media - film, television, video games and interactive installations - were less likely to be regarded as art. Modernism, a pursuit that aimed to explore the essentials of a given media, would necessarily exhaust itself when that media base was fixed. There are infinite paintings one can make on a canvas, but if true painting is to be solely about flatness - well, there are only so many monochromatic all-black canvases that are possible. An undue emphasis on the primacy of painting and a reluctance to admit the artistic potential of photography, film and video saw modern art drift off into increasingly irrelevant seas.
As modern art was losing its cultural cachet, arts in diverse technological media were flourishing: video art and installations, interactive media and more. However, these did not conform to a modernist narrative; that is, they did not seek to answer a question about their essential nature. The narratives around all this art became as diverse as the technological bases. The new media did not regenerate modernism, giving it new canvases upon which to explore, but served to negate it.
The End of Depth Perception
Why new technology did not help the cause of modernist art is perhaps due to the nature of that technology. The depth perception of modernism is dependent upon rich materiality: there must be depth to be perceived. New media sprang from telecommunications, and these virtual canvases espouse an ideology of surface. There is no depth of materiality to explore within their confines, just vast tracts of surface. With virtual media, a reduction to essential qualities leads to the same reduction across all media: information.
While material instantiations of technology may offer up material limits for exploration and exploitation (the raster of the CRT display for example), the free-floating nature of virtual media highlights the independence of these "essential" qualities and the informational substrate which produces the effects.
Modernist painting sought flatness against the texture and grain of real material, but with virtual media true flatness was discovered: what is the flatness of a canvas compared to the liquid crystal display, or better yet, the ones and zeroes which represent its image? Without depth, there is no essential character. Indeed, it is the nature of virtual media to be malleable and frictionless to the point that at the extremities they blend into one another: not only are they all surface, but they are also all the same surface.
The ascent of virtual technologies, or immaterial media, drove the imperative to quit a materialist aesthetics, bringing modernism to an end.
The Technological Trajectory
There seems to be no ceasing of the need for design, nor have ideals from modernist art movements such as minimalism fallen out of favour or become discredited. With each new technology, there are new media on which design can work and the same principles applied. This technology appears to increase without end, seemingly of its own accord. Just as the design of the phone seemed to be "done", along came the cellular phone and after that the smartphone which saw telephony and computing converge and brought about the need for new form factors and interfaces. In contrast to modern art, design willingly embraces new technological substrates and subsumes them within its ideology. However, the modernist drive in design requires a continuous supply of new technology to prevent stagnation.
Technology does not follow an exponential curve as is so often proclaimed, rather its development tends to be sigmoidal, following an S-curve, with an exponential portion followed by a severe levelling off.
Transportation technology achieved a kind of lift-off early in the twentieth century, improving exponentially until beginning to level off around mid-century. There were massive improvements in speed and power-to-weight ratios which have since largely abated.
One may not think of the design of the car as "done", but until the somewhat recent interest in vehicle electrification and autonomous driving, isn't that something one could reasonably say? The earlier decades of the twentieth century are marked by distinct changes in vehicle design7, but these sharp differentiators tapered off as the century wore on to the point that vehicles from the early twenty-first century may be nearly indistinguishable from contemporary designs. Increasing proficiency in aerodynamic design has certainly played a role here, but also of import has been the slowing down of the technological pace. Innovations in internal combustion engines became more refinement or rearrangement and vehicle architectures followed suit. It is only with the radical reconceptualization afforded by the move to an all-electric motor or with the complete removal of the human driver in the loop of autonomous driving that truly new design terrain has been opened up. The design of the car had run its course on the underpinning technology and only a completely new foundation could reinvigorate it.
The smartphone has followed a similar but compressed trajectory. Once home to a wide array of strange and quirky devices, the design of the smartphone has consolidated into variations on the same smooth flat brick. Only the odd hardware innovation or gimmick - say the introduction of additional cameras or the looming foldable phone - can temporarily breach the prescribed form of flatness and offer a vague glimmer of differentiation8.
As the frenzied pace of technological innovation begins to slow, design is challenged. There is a consumer appetite for ever-new design, yet the modernist drive tends to exhaust possibility, and it increasingly does so at a faster pace than the improvements in the underlying technology. The increasing time with which consumers must live with designs is loosening the grip of modernism over design.
Styles of Design
Danto refers to the latent properties within painting. These are properties to which contemporary viewers are blind as they only become evident retrospectively, in light of other artistic developments (Danto, 1997). Latent properties are not restricted to paintings, they can be found in everything subject to style: fashion, music, illustration, etc. As a style recedes into the past and its latent properties begin to become apparent, it is perceived as being dated. Eventually, given time, this datedness is recognized as a distinct style with its unique charm. For evidence of this one need only look to the rise in appreciation for ugly web design (exemplified in so-called Brutalist web and UX design and nostalgia for MySpace and Geocities) or bad '90s computer graphics. Now that those styles have been roundly defeated and pose no threat of dominating the cultural landscape, it is safe to appreciate them as one small corner of the pluralistic pie.
Presently, design can still be felt to have a dominant narrative thrust. There are clear styles that emerge that are rapidly and widely adopted until falling out of favour. These all tend to be wrapped up in a consistent design ideology: balancing visual simplicity and interest along with functional consistency, immediacy, and flattening of hierarchy. Good design enables the user to get from A to B quickly and efficiently.
Bad design principles are seen to be employed at the start of a new technology, and it is only later, through a process of gradual refinement, that they are purged from the system. Consider for just how long Apple's skeuomorphism and addiction to simulated sheen - turning everything into a plastic, candy-coated chiclet - held tyranny over the design-thinking on smartphones. But they do get weeded out until everything is more or less functional and inoffensive. And so, eventually, also boring. Without a change in the technological substrate, all the bad habits and growing pains from the early exploratory days begin to come back, now as stylistic conventions to be employed among a plurality of styles.
The appearance of intentionally bad design as a recognized style would seem to indicate that the end of design is already well underway or perhaps even fully arrived. An example of this is evidenced in the Depop rebrand by DesignStudio which utilized what the designers referred to as "clashy" colours, intended to be abrasive and attention-getting, combining certain recognized conventions of good design with eye-strain and other bad practices (DesignStudio, 2018). DesignStudio is not some rogue outsider in the design space, but the well-respected team behind the Airbnb brand. A more comprehensive example of intentionally bad design is evidenced in Snapchat before its mid-2018 redesign where the obscurity of its features was part of its appeal. Like a hip club that is only accessible via an alleyway back-door, obtuseness served to weed out those too uncool for the app while avoiding an explicit filter.
Obscure and obtuse design has long been employed in virtual media within the domain of video games. There the systems may be hidden, and uncovering the systems becomes part of the challenge of the game. With a game, the objective is not to accomplish some task (simply beating a game serves no purpose, if it did, all games would jump to the win condition upon being turned on) but to continue playing; the process is paramount.
Game design principles - those aimed at continual engagement with the design rather than serving an explicit use-function - have crept out of the game-space and begun to appear in all sorts of domains through a process referred to as 'gamification'. Gamification becomes prevalent in design where continuous engagement is desired over the accomplishment of some task, which tends to be the case where the business model is based around advertising.
But this is largely UI design, which, given its proximity to Graphic Design may have been thought to have naturally been caught up in the postmodern tide that lifted all the arts. The claim that UI design is coming to an end or has already come to an end is perhaps not so scandalous. What is more interesting is the assertion that UX design, and, more alarmingly, Industrial Design will follow. What is suggested is not simply the sparing use of a few usually taboo design practices, but the proliferation of designs with purposes at odds or tangential to those of their respective systems or products. In a sense, all objects become commodities of fashion, with their utilitarian purposes made subservient to the goal of making some kind of statement.
The End of Design
What I am forecasting is the emergence of the intentionally bad smartphone: one that is difficult to use but acquires cultural cachet through a 'so-bad-it's-good' logic. In a certain sense, this has already arrived, with the constant notification stream of the average phone serving merely to steal the user's attention while conferring no real benefits9. And this will not be limited to communications technology nor will these design trends be limited to the intentionally bad, it is simply that they will no longer be subservient to the overall function of the object. Here art and design appear opposed; for while design is concerned with objects with a stated use-function, one of the defining characteristics of art has been its lack of unambiguous use-function. Outgrowing the use-function of objects would see design lose its narrative thrust. No longer would we be able to say what design was for, or what was universally good or bad design10.
But what would cause such a seismic shift within design? With art the use-function was always a narrative fiction - first the Vasarian mimetic paradigm and later the Greenbergian materialist paradigm11 - so that it could be unmasked and, once exposed, abandoned completely. For design, the use-function seems so inextricably tied up with it that to suggest it could be undone approaches heresy12. In the modern context, design serves as the bridge between art and technology (Flusser, 1999). But just as with art, the notion of design as existing to serve the use-function of the product will be exposed as a narrative fiction, and, just as with art, it will be virtual technology that does the unmasking.
Virtualization increasingly expands into the domain of physical space as it begins to fulfill its promise/threat of subsuming reality. The first step is the mediation of all functions through software, a task that is already well underway. Consider the hailing of a taxi, now replaced by an Uber. The Uber is hailed entirely by software, the rider can even notify the driver in advance that they are not up for talking and so avoid any interaction throughout the trip, and the driver then uses Google maps to get to the destination given by the rider. Soon the driver will be completely replaced by an autonomous vehicle so that the entire trip is mediated by software. And it is not just Ubers: all major sectors of the service and retail economies will undergo similar levels of virtualization.
With virtualization comes liberation: software updates can be delivered on-the-fly and over-the-air and equipment can be appropriated for diverse and changing tasks. Liberation confuses the use-function of objects first to the point of ambiguity then to an almost undefinable level. When all that is required to change a car from a commuter to a speed-demon is little more than a software update13, what is there for the design to communicate about the vehicle's speed or fuel economy? Further, virtualization will tend to transform 'hard' surfaces into 'soft' ones: the shape of a car becomes no longer fixed as its outer skin is given over to minutely adjustable aero-surfaces enabling it to change its profile in mere seconds. Nor would these outer-shells remain pre-programmed configurations, rather they will be parametric and able to be updated. In-formation imposes forms on materials (Flusser, 1999), so that variable information will at first demand and eventually produce suitably pliable material. On the one hand, this will cause design to become more concerned with the meta-level system, yet the consumer appetite for the visual will not abate and design will find itself in a position where it primarily serves consumer fancy.
Design comes under subtle threat from two directions. First, its very purpose is called into question as the use-functions of objects becomes ambiguous. Consequently, design will have to become more artful and subjective. Second, the mediating function that design is understood to perform in the present context will dissipate in necessity: one will increasingly be able to realize what one conceives with minimal visible intermediary steps. Design's present location within the culture will become a colonized territory. This will signal the end of design. However, rather than there being a decline in design, there will instead be an explosion in design, a mass proliferation and outpouring of creativity in diverse directions. What will have ended is a singular place for design and by extension an overarching design narrative. Design will be everywhere and nowhere. We will no longer be able to clearly articulate what design is for, and yet the appetite for design will be greater than ever before.
Footnotes
1 Danto references Hans Belting's idea of "art before the era of art". This refers to art as having existed but not being recognized as part of a narrative of art, with the era of art lasting from circa 1400 to 1980 (Danto, 1997). Indeed, before the late 17th c., painting, sculpture, and architecture had never been included in the arts and it is only in the 18th c. that the distinction between artist and artisan arises (Monaco, 2000).↩
2 Like most simple narratives, this one is seen to break down under closer scrutiny, as clear stylistic conventions apply (e.g. mannerism, baroque, rococo, neoclassicism, romantic).↩
3 Within early film there was a dialectic between realism and expressionism: using the medium to reproduce reality as in the films of the Lumieres brothers or to replace it as in Georges Melies' Voyage to the Moon (Monaco, 2000).↩
4 The dialectic of early film, between reproducing and replacing reality, was recapitulated by the virtual reality pioneers (Monaco, 2000).↩
5 Giving mimetic objects agentic potential through the use of computer algorithms further the effect. Perhaps those in computer science working on such problems see themselves as picking up the torch carried by the Renaissance masters in continuing a mimetic tradition (e.g. The dream of walking through the picture frame of the Mona Lisa and being able to stand with her on the balcony and even speak with her).↩
6 Manifestos were, in their own right, one of the chief artistic productions of the twentieth century (Danto, 1997).↩
7 It is startling to look at the clear design trends that differentiate the decades of the '50s, '60s, '70s, and '80s.↩
8 This consolidation is not particularly unwelcome, as the settled about form factor is highly functional and its familiarity to consumers only makes it more so.↩
9 The carving out of a niche by the minimalist phone - phones such as the Palm Phone and the Punkt MP02 - suggests that smartphones have become beset by bad design. There is nothing that these phones can do that a smartphone cannot (well, perhaps last much longer on a single charge), yet their limitations are held out as features to be coveted. These phones, with their minimal screen sizes and emphasis on tactile buttons and shapely form factors also appeal to a consumer desire for novelty and tactility that is absent in the mainstream giant-screen devices.↩
10 One might counter that design would still have to serve a larger economic function, that of generating a profit, but this has always applied to art as well despite the many attempts of the art establishment to conceal and complicate the process to the point of inscrutability. That postmodern art is still enslaved under capitalist reality does not negate its post-historical character; in fact, it may be that capitalism is the dominant causal factor in this development.↩
11 Danto puts forward these two narratives in his master narrative of art history, named after Giorgio Vasari and Clement Greenberg. Vasari espoused the view that art was about increasingly sophisticated representation while Greenberg championed art as about increasing purity: art which is its own subject and eliminates the effects from any other medium (Danto, 1997).↩
12 The words design, machine, technology and art are all closely related. This connection has been denied since the Renaissance and there has been a sharp distinction made between 'soft' art and 'hard' technology (Flusser, 1999).↩
13 Already, Tesla has released over-the-air software updates that have had dramatic effects on vehicle performance, such as improving the braking distance of the Model 3 by an astonishing 16 feet (O'Kane, 2018). And while that particular change may have been more the fixing of a bug than a genuine improvement, the flexibility of vehicles can only be expected to increase in the future as they become more and more platforms for a design rather than fixed designs themselves.↩
References
Danto, A. C. (1997) After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
DesignStudio (2018) Untitled [Open Lecture]. Camberwell College of Arts. 31 January.
Flusser, V. (1999) The Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design. London: Reaktion Books.
Helvetica (2007) Directed by Gary Hustwit [DVD].
Jameson, F. (1991) Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press.
Monaco, J. (2000) How to Read A Film: The World of Movies, Media, and Multimedia, 3rd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
O'Kane, S. (2018) Tesla can change so much with over-the-air updates that it's messing with some owners' heads. Available at: https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/2/17413732/tesla-over-the-air-software-updates-brakes (Accessed: 24 May 2019)
