Thoughts on the 40th Anniversary of the Shopping Trolley
There are three things that everyone knows about shopping trolleys. One, a strangely large number of them end up in canals. Two, they are virtually impossible to steer. And three, people like to push each other around in them whilst drunk. None of these has anything to do with shopping.
The supermarket trolley was invented by Sylvan Goldman, owner of the Piggly-Wiggly supermarket in Oklahoma as a way of getting people to buy more food. And its true, they do. According to someone who found this out customers will buy an average of 7.2 items with a trolley for every 6. 2 they do with a basket, and they double sales of large items.
Goldman came up with the idea in June 1937, making the trolley 40 years old this month. That’s officially middle-aged. Unlike most middle-aged things though, they look pretty much the same as when they started out. The basic layout is ubiquitous and unchanging. There is a big basket on wheels. The basket is instantly recognisable for the graph like visual spacing of its metal bars, able to hold anything from a bar-b-q to a single tomato. There is a fold down plastic seat in which you can imprison a small child so that it looks like a particularly unwieldy purchase. The basket has a tubular plastic handle for pushing which you can also use to lean on when waiting to get clear access to the bread counter. The handle forms the single point of store branding. Otherwise they all look the same. When stored in the snake like chain gang of interlocked trolleys at the supermarket entrance, the repeated store logos form a strange nightmarish vision of shopping trips yet to come. The trolley is designed specifically for the task of navigating the serpentine route of supermarket aisles. The fact that the wheels all point in different directions reflects perfectly the fact that no one knows which way they want to go.
While other prosaic products like washing powder or biscuits go through almost constant minor and largely pointless innovations, developing ever more baroque permutations, the shopping trolley continues in its clattery, crude, hard to steer form. The reason for this flat development curve is that nobody actually buys them. As a product with no consumer purchase potential there is virtually no point in re-invention. These days, the desire for new markets is the only reason anyone does anything at all. Everyone owns a mobile phone or a razor. The only way to get us to buy another one is to improve it. Offer new functions, more blades, better deals, 3 mega-pixel cameras, improved smoothness, celebrity endorsement. No one ever buys a shopping trolley so what’s the point?
The shopping trolley is an utterly generic form of design, barely existing on our visual horizon. It has proved strangely fixed as a design statement, seemingly un-improvable and immune to the vagaries of fashion or style. I can only think of two innovations: One is the shallow, half depth model. This is apparently to attract male shoppers who generally shun trolleys, preferring instead the unmistakably macho appeal of the hand basket. The other is the electronic front wheel that locks when you try to escape the perimeter of the store car-park.
Without anyone working feverishly to try and sell us a new one, shopping trolleys will languish forever with their ugly styling and wheels that point the wrong way. If supermarkets stopped offering them to us and we had to buy our own, we would be immediately deluged by a baffling variety of new styles and credit opportunities to pay for them. So, perhaps, in a world gone consumption crazy, we should cherish a product immune from marketing. Immune, in a way, from design.
Friday, July 6, 2007
Tuesday, May 8, 2007
In the year 25/25
Seems a bit unfair, I mean I don't have anything personal against the design musuem but, another month, another crap exhibition.......
25/25 is an exhibition celebrating twenty five years of the Design Museum. In it, twenty five designers have been invited to choose their favourite designs from that period. Visiting it is like reading one of those ‘Books of the Year ’ lists beloved of Sunday supplements. You know exactly who they’re going to ask and exactly what they’re going to choose. So, for Melvin Bragg, Julian Barnes and Jeanette Winterston substitute Terence Conran, Paul Smith and Ilsa Crawford.
Like the tendency for writers to choose their friend’s books, this exhibition is an exercise in self celebration. For example, Paul Smith chooses the graphic identity of the Lloyds building designed by Richard Rogers, who in turn chooses Issey Miyake’s A-Poc fabric. Hoover hero James Dyson selects Richard Sapper’s whistling kettle, while Dyson’s own DC02 vacuum cleaner is nominated by John Maeda. Philippe Starck’s Jim Nature TV appears courtesy of Konstantin Grcic, while Stefano Giovannoni returns the compliment by selecting Grcic’s Chair One. Jonathon Ive gets two nominations (for the Imac and the Ipod). Of the younger designers, the Bouroullec brothers’ choose Enzo Mari’s cheesegrater, Maarten Baas selects Ron Arad’s Big Easy metal armchair and Gill Hicks goes for Trevor Bayliss’ Clockwork Radio. Suffice to say, no one chooses Pop Tarts, leg warmers or anything from Ikea. I started to wonder: are there really this few designers of note in the world, and this few products worth celebrating?
The answer of course is no, What’s being celebrated here is a very narrow definition of design based around an equally narrow idea of good taste. Its not that there is anything wrong with the choices just that they are utterly predictable and devoid of any sense of surprise. This is a shame because the origins of the Design Museum were less predictable and more iconoclastic. It’s probably the fate of most cultural innovations to become the new orthodoxy, but the Design Museum seems to have ended up creating its own officially sanctioned canon. All of which is a long way from its more itinerant beginnings as the Boilerhouse project, started up by Terence Conran and Stephen Bayley in the basement of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Strange as it may seem now, it was a genuinely radical move to incorporate commercial and contemporary design into the halls of the V&A at that time. Conran and Bayley then moved the project to its current curiously retro home near Tower Bridge. I’ve always found it odd that they chose a pastiche of 1930’s Modernism for the home of contemporary design but its preserved-in-aspic feel has become increasingly appropriate.
The recent history of the museum has been fractious. It has just appointed Deyan Sudjiic as its new director to replace the controversial Alice Rawsthorne. She enraged trustees Terence Conran and James Dyson by flouting the orthodoxies of good design in putting on a show about flower arranger Constance Spry, amongst other heresies. Like Stephen Bayley, she is conspicuous by her absence from this exhibition’s potted history.
25/25 might be seen therefore as a moment of quiet celebration by the victorious Conran and Dyson; good sense and good taste restored. It remains to be seen how orthodox an approach Sudjiic will take. Let’s hope he steers it away from the narrow clique represented by this exhibition.
25/25 is an exhibition celebrating twenty five years of the Design Museum. In it, twenty five designers have been invited to choose their favourite designs from that period. Visiting it is like reading one of those ‘Books of the Year ’ lists beloved of Sunday supplements. You know exactly who they’re going to ask and exactly what they’re going to choose. So, for Melvin Bragg, Julian Barnes and Jeanette Winterston substitute Terence Conran, Paul Smith and Ilsa Crawford.
Like the tendency for writers to choose their friend’s books, this exhibition is an exercise in self celebration. For example, Paul Smith chooses the graphic identity of the Lloyds building designed by Richard Rogers, who in turn chooses Issey Miyake’s A-Poc fabric. Hoover hero James Dyson selects Richard Sapper’s whistling kettle, while Dyson’s own DC02 vacuum cleaner is nominated by John Maeda. Philippe Starck’s Jim Nature TV appears courtesy of Konstantin Grcic, while Stefano Giovannoni returns the compliment by selecting Grcic’s Chair One. Jonathon Ive gets two nominations (for the Imac and the Ipod). Of the younger designers, the Bouroullec brothers’ choose Enzo Mari’s cheesegrater, Maarten Baas selects Ron Arad’s Big Easy metal armchair and Gill Hicks goes for Trevor Bayliss’ Clockwork Radio. Suffice to say, no one chooses Pop Tarts, leg warmers or anything from Ikea. I started to wonder: are there really this few designers of note in the world, and this few products worth celebrating?
The answer of course is no, What’s being celebrated here is a very narrow definition of design based around an equally narrow idea of good taste. Its not that there is anything wrong with the choices just that they are utterly predictable and devoid of any sense of surprise. This is a shame because the origins of the Design Museum were less predictable and more iconoclastic. It’s probably the fate of most cultural innovations to become the new orthodoxy, but the Design Museum seems to have ended up creating its own officially sanctioned canon. All of which is a long way from its more itinerant beginnings as the Boilerhouse project, started up by Terence Conran and Stephen Bayley in the basement of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Strange as it may seem now, it was a genuinely radical move to incorporate commercial and contemporary design into the halls of the V&A at that time. Conran and Bayley then moved the project to its current curiously retro home near Tower Bridge. I’ve always found it odd that they chose a pastiche of 1930’s Modernism for the home of contemporary design but its preserved-in-aspic feel has become increasingly appropriate.
The recent history of the museum has been fractious. It has just appointed Deyan Sudjiic as its new director to replace the controversial Alice Rawsthorne. She enraged trustees Terence Conran and James Dyson by flouting the orthodoxies of good design in putting on a show about flower arranger Constance Spry, amongst other heresies. Like Stephen Bayley, she is conspicuous by her absence from this exhibition’s potted history.
25/25 might be seen therefore as a moment of quiet celebration by the victorious Conran and Dyson; good sense and good taste restored. It remains to be seen how orthodox an approach Sudjiic will take. Let’s hope he steers it away from the narrow clique represented by this exhibition.
Decent Proposal
This rant is a response to an invitation to contribute to Tongue and Groove, an architectural magazine published by Nottingham Univesity architecture school. Probably not what they wanted but.....
How We Teach Today
In the unintentionally hilarious early ‘90’s film Indecent Proposal there is a scene where Woody Harrelson, playing a penniless architecture tutor, delivers a stirring address to his students. Harrelson portrays the architect as dreamer and romantic loser. He keeps a polyboard model of his dream house under his bed. He can never afford to build it. Occasionally he shares with his wife, played by Demi Moore, his most intimate thoughts about space and structure. On their honeymoon he takes her on a study tour of his favourite buildings. In the classroom he holds up a brick and quotes Louis Kahn and his students look on in rapt awe. Harrelson is the architecture tutor par excellence: inspired, charismatic, a lone voice in a sea of philistines and moneymen. He stands for the architect as symbol of artistic integrity. He works alone, unencumbered by staff, builders, engineers or, if he’s really lucky, client interference. He turns to teaching because the world is too cruel, too venal, too ignorant to take him seriously. Bizarrely, this myth is the basis on which most architectural education is currently set up.
Partly as a result of post-modern attacks on both the orthodoxies of modernism and the plausibility of the disinterested professional, educational teaching increasingly favours subjective and personal approaches to education. Post-Structuralist inspired critiques of architecture’s mono-cultural value system have resulted in a belief in a pluralism of value systems. The unit system of teaching that most architecture schools use today was popularised at the Architectural Association in the 1970’s. This system replaced the previous monolithic mode of teaching where all students studied the same course with a fragmented one built around the individual interest areas of charismatic design tutors. Their chosen thematic – the Po-Delta, concrete, Brechtian theatre, the mating habits of bees etc – are set to students as the basis for individual study. The most popular tutors are those that have already cultivated a level of fame within the profession, but increasingly the system itself can be used to gain notoriety. Individual student’s work within their group becomes a kind of personal and experimental research wing of the tutors own ‘practice’. Units, or interest groups, develop into a personal fiefdom whose territory is aggressively defended against intruders.
After a while the tutor becomes too famous or successful to have time to teach at which point he or she bequeaths a successor to the throne. This is invariably a promotion from the ranks, almost always a favoured student from the previous few years. After a short initiation period when the former student is invited to attend crits in order to rubbish the work of their former colleagues (an important test of character this and an indicator of whether he or she is able to make the transition to the ‘other side’), the young pretender will be handed the ropes. This new tutor, fluent in the arcane interest areas and stylistic quirks of the previous one can manage an almost seamless transition. The second-generation tutor is obliged to invite their benefactor to return at various points to monitor the progress of ‘their’ unit. After another five or six years this process is repeated and a new successor is found. In this way the ‘gene pool’ of new ideas becomes every more shallow. The area of study is drawn from an increasingly incestuous genealogy and the unit becomes a strange kind of oligarchy.
All of this is championed under the banner of personal research. This is the leitmotif of current teaching ideology. The increasing lack of history and theory lectures (frequently dismissed as so much stodgy academism) means that this narrowing of focus is unaccompanied by any structure to give it meaning in a wider sense. The successful student absorbs the value systems of his or her tutor through osmosis and is not required to articulate its wider significance. Demystification is avoided at all costs.
This process is placed in direction opposition to the professional requirements of architecture. Studying is seen as a period of experimentation and research based on an explicit critique of normative practice. The student is inculcated into a belief system based on the idea of the singular genius of the individual and the star system of architecture, reproduced in miniature at unit level.
I can’t help thinking that increasingly education leads students into a dark forest without a map to get back out. Is there a way for architectural teaching to re-engage with the realties of practice? Or, to turn it around for a moment, is there a way for the possibilities of architectural practice to reengage with the realities of education? For surely, the cliché of the individual genius propagated by the unit system is a pretty hackneyed one. What was once excitingly open ended now seems increasingly doctrinaire and prescriptive. In order to do this, to liven things up a little, some things might need to change: the cult of the tutor, the anachronistic theatre of cruelty that is the ‘crit’, the internecine mock warfare between units, the idea of the architect as lone gun, the lack of collaboration or teamwork between students, the distrust of other related professional such as engineers, surveyors etc. In short what might have to go might be Woody Harrelson and his idea(l) of the architect as dreamer and romantic loser.
How We Teach Today
In the unintentionally hilarious early ‘90’s film Indecent Proposal there is a scene where Woody Harrelson, playing a penniless architecture tutor, delivers a stirring address to his students. Harrelson portrays the architect as dreamer and romantic loser. He keeps a polyboard model of his dream house under his bed. He can never afford to build it. Occasionally he shares with his wife, played by Demi Moore, his most intimate thoughts about space and structure. On their honeymoon he takes her on a study tour of his favourite buildings. In the classroom he holds up a brick and quotes Louis Kahn and his students look on in rapt awe. Harrelson is the architecture tutor par excellence: inspired, charismatic, a lone voice in a sea of philistines and moneymen. He stands for the architect as symbol of artistic integrity. He works alone, unencumbered by staff, builders, engineers or, if he’s really lucky, client interference. He turns to teaching because the world is too cruel, too venal, too ignorant to take him seriously. Bizarrely, this myth is the basis on which most architectural education is currently set up.
Partly as a result of post-modern attacks on both the orthodoxies of modernism and the plausibility of the disinterested professional, educational teaching increasingly favours subjective and personal approaches to education. Post-Structuralist inspired critiques of architecture’s mono-cultural value system have resulted in a belief in a pluralism of value systems. The unit system of teaching that most architecture schools use today was popularised at the Architectural Association in the 1970’s. This system replaced the previous monolithic mode of teaching where all students studied the same course with a fragmented one built around the individual interest areas of charismatic design tutors. Their chosen thematic – the Po-Delta, concrete, Brechtian theatre, the mating habits of bees etc – are set to students as the basis for individual study. The most popular tutors are those that have already cultivated a level of fame within the profession, but increasingly the system itself can be used to gain notoriety. Individual student’s work within their group becomes a kind of personal and experimental research wing of the tutors own ‘practice’. Units, or interest groups, develop into a personal fiefdom whose territory is aggressively defended against intruders.
After a while the tutor becomes too famous or successful to have time to teach at which point he or she bequeaths a successor to the throne. This is invariably a promotion from the ranks, almost always a favoured student from the previous few years. After a short initiation period when the former student is invited to attend crits in order to rubbish the work of their former colleagues (an important test of character this and an indicator of whether he or she is able to make the transition to the ‘other side’), the young pretender will be handed the ropes. This new tutor, fluent in the arcane interest areas and stylistic quirks of the previous one can manage an almost seamless transition. The second-generation tutor is obliged to invite their benefactor to return at various points to monitor the progress of ‘their’ unit. After another five or six years this process is repeated and a new successor is found. In this way the ‘gene pool’ of new ideas becomes every more shallow. The area of study is drawn from an increasingly incestuous genealogy and the unit becomes a strange kind of oligarchy.
All of this is championed under the banner of personal research. This is the leitmotif of current teaching ideology. The increasing lack of history and theory lectures (frequently dismissed as so much stodgy academism) means that this narrowing of focus is unaccompanied by any structure to give it meaning in a wider sense. The successful student absorbs the value systems of his or her tutor through osmosis and is not required to articulate its wider significance. Demystification is avoided at all costs.
This process is placed in direction opposition to the professional requirements of architecture. Studying is seen as a period of experimentation and research based on an explicit critique of normative practice. The student is inculcated into a belief system based on the idea of the singular genius of the individual and the star system of architecture, reproduced in miniature at unit level.
I can’t help thinking that increasingly education leads students into a dark forest without a map to get back out. Is there a way for architectural teaching to re-engage with the realties of practice? Or, to turn it around for a moment, is there a way for the possibilities of architectural practice to reengage with the realities of education? For surely, the cliché of the individual genius propagated by the unit system is a pretty hackneyed one. What was once excitingly open ended now seems increasingly doctrinaire and prescriptive. In order to do this, to liven things up a little, some things might need to change: the cult of the tutor, the anachronistic theatre of cruelty that is the ‘crit’, the internecine mock warfare between units, the idea of the architect as lone gun, the lack of collaboration or teamwork between students, the distrust of other related professional such as engineers, surveyors etc. In short what might have to go might be Woody Harrelson and his idea(l) of the architect as dreamer and romantic loser.
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