Design: A Dirty Word

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In the 1970's my father sold pipes. Bing Crosby was one of his best customers. I'm not making this up. Despite this celebrity endorsement, gentleman's pipes were not a boom industry in the 1970's. My father was always looking for ways to expand his limited customer base and find new markets, more potential pipe smokers. So he came up with an innovation: the Lady's Pipe. It was very similar to the standard male version except it was smaller, perhaps a third the size, and had a clear perspex stem instead of the usual black plastic one.

Leaving aside the question of whether a view of the cancerous fumes funneling towards one's lungs was an attractive feature, the Lady's Pipe was a slightly comical, ultimately doomed, attempt at marketing a thoroughly male product to women. When friends of my parents came to dinner, my father would always produce his box of cigars and obscure Turkish cigarettes at the end of the meal. Any female guests would be enthusiastically offered the Lady's Pipe. There were never any takers.

I was reminded of this childhood trauma while reading Adrian Forty's book Objects of Desire recently. In it the author charts the role of design in capitalism's desire to seek out new markets. In particular Forty looks at how assumed differences between the sexes are articulated through design to create parallel sets of male and female products. This creation of superfluous alternatives is particularly acute when it comes to beauty products. Identical versions of the same things - razors, moisturising cream, shampoo etc. - are subjected to nuances of styling to distinguish their intended market. Even to call them beauty products is to ascribe them female characterestics. For men its always called grooming.



The interesting thing about this (leaving aside the dubiousness of the sexual stereoyping) is the role of design in creating this sense of difference. Here design is about pure styling, largely removed from function, practicality or use. The Gillette M3 Power razor, for example, works just as well in Barbie pink as it does in sci-fi neon green. The obsessive articulation of sexual difference (and therefore the appeal these products make to our sexual desires and the possibility of satisfying them) masks the fact that the products involved are basically the same.



So male products appear like a combination of custom car and training shoe; all fins, grills, rubber pads and bulbous curves. These add-ons are given automotive names: turbos, injections, triple super pro action - a conjunction of science, sport and technology, the holy trinity of male interests.

As well as looking different female beauty products accentuate their therapuetic qualities using the full lexicon of pampering so correctly loathed by Julie Burchill. For men the products take on a different descriptive language of buffing, scrubbing and performance. Look at this recent Nivea ad for men's skin products where acceptable reasons for worrying about having bad skin include partying and working too hard, complete with generic indie-rock soundtrack.



If all these ruses are about designing (sexual) difference into essentially the same product, then perfume represents the most extreme example of trying to articulate nothing but difference itself. Perfume is perhaps the most perfect piece of design and the most perfect product of capitalism. It is Marx's commodity fetish and Freud's sexual fetish combined, an almost magical product of mythical sexual properties. It creates value out of almost nothing but thin air.

In the packaging and form of perfume design has it all to do. This is why perfume adverts are so fabulously and perfectly absurd. There is almost literally nothing to say about them beyond; "Wear this. Get laid". If all products use sex to sell, most have another stated purpose. There ar no facts, no statistics and no information when it comes to perfume. The epic levels of pretention in Chanel's recent ad starring Nicole Kidman works to counteract its literal lack of content. Similarly the genius of Jean Paul Gaultier's perfume and aftershave range is to sexualise the packaging - the bit that isn't even the product itself - making the act of holding the bottle an erotically charged (if intentionally camp) experience.



Here is a version of design far removed from the realm of pragmatic problem solving or ergonomic functionality. It is about the conjuring of value out of next to nothing, a confluence of aura, glamour, sexual desire and the black arts of marketing and branding. It happens in all products of course but in perfume it reaches its apogee. This version of design is about spectacle, a suggestion of desirability that sparkles on the surface of objects. It is about pure style.



Style in design has become a dirty word. It is now a perjorative expression implying superficiality. To discuss design in terms of style is to risk appearing shallow, interested only in surface qualities rather than depth or content. In fact the whole rhetoric of art and design criticism rests on these spatial metaphors. Value is always assumed to lie behind things, an inherent property of the object, rather than on its surface. To understand something we must somehow get behind it or delve into its depths.



Design is always anxious to justify itself in terms other than (mere) style. Designers aim for their work to be useful, innovative, functional, worthy. To say that you designed something like this or like that simply because you liked it, or because you wanted someone else to like it too, appears shockingly decadent. The theory surrounding Parametric modelling can be read this way, as an attempt to provide an intellectual justification for the sparkling and vivacious surfaces of contemporary architecture. Perhaps though it is closer to the suggestive curves of Gaultier's perfume bottle or the bulbous pseudo-ergonomics of Gillette's M3 Power razor.

Style always raises the spectre of design's guilty secret; that it is just might not be that important. Its use might be simply to catch our attention. Design is always eager to please, always out to seduce us.