Alice Rawsthorn Design Touches Everything

Alice Rawsthorn Design Touches Everything

The design writer and critic Alice Rawsthorn counts the photographer and filmmaker László Moholy-Nagy as one of her heroes. Her book of essays Design as an Attitude draws its title from Moholy-Nagy’s Vision in Motion, in which he argued for the connections between art and life, and how design is characterized by resourcefulness, invention, and the needs of a community.

This principle carries through Rawsthorn’s work, where she consistently champions design’s potential to address complex challenges facing societies around the globe. In 2020, Rawsthorn cofounded the Design Emergency project with the Museum of Modern Art curator Paola Antonelli, to investigate the design response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The project started with an Instagram account. It’s now also a podcast, YouTube channel, and a book, Design Emergency: Building a Better Future. The initiative swiftly expanded to tell stories of how designers are reacting to ecological and sociopolitical emergencies, and how advances in communication and technology are influencing change. These are themes that Rawsthorn has previously investigated in her design columns for the New York Times. Last winter, writer Billie Muraben met Rawsthorn at her London home, where they spoke about how stories of design are often told through photographs.

We began by identifying what we saw as the key areas of all our lives that needed positive design interventions.

Billie Muraben: With Design Emergency, why was it important for you and Paola Antonelli to have an open definition, or interpretation, of what design is and who designers are?

Alice Rawsthorn: Well, I can’t think of any other way of defining design. And Design Emergency really reflects the vision of design that I’ve shared as a writer, and that Paola has shared in her exhibitions. The books Hello World: Where Design Meets Life (2013) and Design as an Attitude (2018) were predicated on the notion that affordable, easily accessible, incredibly powerful digital technology was transforming, or had transformed, the practice and possibilities of design. It liberated designers from the restricted roles they played during the industrial age, when design was routinely stereotyped as a styling and promotional tool, generally under the instruction of someone else. Designers have been liberated to work independently and to pursue their own social, political, and ecological goals. We developed the idea for Design Emergency initially as a response to the COVID-19 crisis, at the start of the first lockdown.

BM: Design Emergency features the research and practice of highly skilled designers and many brilliant examples of improvisation by people working in the moment with available resources and being responsive to their immediate context, whether that is the COVID-19 pandemic, natural disasters, or sociopolitical turmoil.

AR: We began by identifying what we saw as the key areas of all our lives, in the broadest possible sense, that needed positive design interventions. We then identified the people who, we believe, were at the forefront of innovation in those fields and who, crucially, had already delivered practical projects. While they might also engage in a lot of purely experimental or conceptual work, they had to have proven that their approach would work, because we wanted to reach a general audience beyond the committed design community.

We drew a list of all the complex challenges we face, but also the opportunities, and then identified who was tackling them. One of the joys of design, particularly if you write about it, is (a) it’s a ubiquitous force in our lives, so it touches absolutely everything, and (b) it can be interpreted in so many different ways by different people. Some of the people we interviewed work in what could be seen as a more conventional form of design, but they have all done so in a really exemplary, innovative, original, and iconoclastic way. A wonderful example is Irma Boom, the book designer. Book design is one of the oldest conventional areas of design, with centuries of rich and inspiring history. And Irma is so brilliant, she has reinvented it completely.

BM: How does photography come into Design Emergency as a research tool, or otherwise?

AR: All sorts of new photographic technologies have been made available, many of which have enriched and empowered design. Also, many of them are particularly pertinent to terrible emergencies of different types. If you think of the climate emergency and photography’s impact on that in terms of design, until recently photography—other than in photojournalism—played a relatively restricted role. But that has changed dramatically, partly because the technological changes of satellite images, drones, and advances in geospatial imagery have completely transformed the way we can visualize the climate emergency.

One strategic design project I’m interested in is the Great Green Wall in Africa, which is the epic design endeavor to cultivate vegetation across a fivethousand-mile strip of the southern edge of the Sahara Desert, from Senegal to Djibouti. That is very difficult to portray at scale, but the satellite imagery, particularly from the ESA [European Space Agency], has done so brilliantly.

BM: And what about individual photographers?

AR: One example would be the Bangladeshi photographer Asif Salman, who works with Marina Tabassum, the humanitarian architect. Bangladesh is a country at the forefront of reinventing the design of flood defenses by moving away from the gray infrastructure of concrete dams, which we know doesn’t work, to literally letting flooding flow naturally to irrigate the land and, ultimately, cause far less damage. His photography of Marina’s work has not only made people realize how effective that has been, but he humanizes all her projects.

Similarly, Iwan Baan—who is a famous architectural photographer and has produced very intelligent and elegant images of works by architects including Rem Koolhaas, Herzog & de Meuron, and so on—recently did a body of photographs for the Room for the River project in the Netherlands, which, again, is all about the switch from gray infrastructure to naturalistic flood defenses.

BM: How can photography contribute to investigative design research and respond to issues such as refugee crises?

AR: There’s been incredible photojournalism in that field, with large-scale satellite images showing the sheer scale of refugee settlements like the Za’atari camp in Jordan and the Cox’s Bazar settlements in Bangladesh, which, I think, have more than a million people living there. But also the work of photographers such as Salman, who’s humanized the crisis, and the Italian photographer Matteo de Mayda, who for years has traveled to refugee settlements but has also done a lot of photography of the support for migrants in Italy.

If you look at investigative design research, which is a hugely important, rapidly expanding new area of design, photography is absolutely integral. Groups like Formafantasma, the Italian design studio run by Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin, have mounted long-term investigations of complex and contentious areas of our lives that have seldom been explored, such as the gigantic, often illicit global trade in digital waste and the ecological damage caused by the international timber industry.

BM: Forensic Architecture, the multidisciplinary research group that investigates state violence and human rights violations, makes use of photography to reconstruct crime scenes, sites of conflict, and other architectural spaces to communicate evidence.

AR: Forensic Architecture has been one of the great design phenomena of recent years, and one of the first people I wanted to interview for Design Emergency was its founder Eyal Weizman. He’s absolutely extraordinary. He says that it’s all down to not just smartphones but the first feeble cell phones that could make photographs with just a few kilobytes, which basically empowered citizens to witness instances of abuse and criminality, and to provide evidence that could be used for government policy reviews and legal cases to secure justice for victims.

One of the things I love about Tillmans’s work is the way that he investigates the materiality of daily life.

And it’s not just photography that has contributed to this, it’s the whole phenomenon of open-source intelligence, everything from CCTV-footage apps such as Find My, satellite imagery, and video clips. All of this is analyzed by Forensic Architecture and the teams of relevant specialists that it assembles to investigate climate crimes, miscarriages of justice, contested killings, and so on.

BM: Open-source intelligence is being used and analyzed more widely, as a way to prove or contest claims during conflict.

AR: At the New York Times, or even BBC Verify, where journalists analyze and visualize evidence, there are less complex and sophisticated investigations than Forensic Architecture’s, but there are important ones, particularly at a time of such horrific catastrophes and emergencies as those we have now. You see the impact that open-source intelligence has had on Russia’s war against Ukraine. The number of claims and counterclaims that the Ukrainians were able to verify because they did have CCTV footage of what actually happened, or people had recorded it, or snapped it on their phones, has been very moving. It’s been absolutely essential in Gaza, from which international journalists were expelled at a very early part of the conflict, especially as both sides release information that’s immediately contested and contradicted by the other.

BM: Your book Design as an Attitude explores design as an agent of social, political, and ecological change. The title comes from Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s 1947 book Vision in Motion. How has he been important to your thinking?

AR: I’ve always found Moholy-Nagy to be this really thrilling, charismatic, dynamic figure, constantly committed to experimentation and intellectual inquiry, very open and generous. And also, his first wife, Lucia Moholy, I find her fascinating too. She was, of course, a highly influential photographer. He was responsible for many great feats, not least the championing of film and new approaches to photography—and also the development of an early cultural critique about them.

He saw them as having a huge influence over cultural change in years to come, and that was something he worked on with Lucia Moholy very closely. He reconceptualized design by identifying a relevant and productive role that liberated it from the constraints of the industrial age.

BM: Lucia Moholy’s photographs from the 1920s have influenced how the Bauhaus school in Dessau has been seen and understood.

AR: She’s a fascinating example of the old-school relationship of design and photography, demonstrating how a photographer who is really passionate about a particular city at a particular time, or a particular movement, or another phenomenon, can produce work that’s so powerful and so compelling that it goes on to dominate—not in a negative sense but in a very positive sense, an enlivening sense—public perceptions of that phenomenon. You could also think of people like Julius Shulman on midcentury modernist architecture in the Los Angeles area, and Berenice Abbott on modernism in early twentieth-century New York.

Lucia Moholy cataloged the daily life of the Bauhaus. She also pioneered what became the dominant typology for industrial-design photography for the twentieth century, because MoholyNagy really championed the industrialization of product design. They are beautifully composed. They are very fetishized. They are in black and white. There are no shadows. And industrial objects have been photographed in the same fetishistic, generally no-shadows manner ever since.

BM: The work of the designer Alessandro Mendini and Superstudio from the 1970s are similarly characterized by photography—for example, when Mendini designed the Lassu chair and then set fire to it with a photographer capturing the event. Another example is Superstudio’s photo collages of unbuildable buildings and scenes that imagined utopian futures or poked fun at the status quo. The ideas are kept alive through documentation.

AR: You are absolutely right. Many of Superstudio’s projects were wholly unrealized and became increasingly unrealizable and fantastical, which is very appealing but also very sad.

BM: A completely different but related point is Wolfgang Tillmans’s interest in photographing man-made objects and structures. I went to see him interview Rem Koolhaas a few years ago and Tillmans asked him, “You’ve designed so many buildings, yet still, I’ll go to your public buildings and the queue for the women’s loos is a mile long, and there’s no queue for the men’s loos. Why haven’t you just started designing your buildings with twice the number of loos for women?”

AR: Wow. Full marks to Tillmans for asking such an incisive question, which doesn’t surprise me at all. There are a number of artists over the years who have interrogated design in a particularly intelligent and imaginative way. Richard Hamilton would be another example, and Tillmans is undoubtedly among them. One of the things I really love about his work is the way that he investigates the materiality of daily life.

My favorite of all these projects was a series of photographs he made of car headlights, which have been a minor obsession of mine for a really long time. Over the last ten years, there’s been an explosion of technological development in car lighting. As a result, automotive designers have become ever more theatrical, flamboyant, and sophisticated in their treatment of them. It’s a very jugular interpretation of industrial design that I’ve found really interesting—and it certainly enlivened nighttime drives around London. So I was thrilled to discover that Tillmans is a fellow obsessive.

BM: What projects are on your desk right now?

AR: I have just started work on a new book, Design and Identity, which, as the title suggests, will explore the diverse ways in which we have designed identities of diverse types—personal, political, institutional, national, local, and so on— in different geographies at different times and with different objectives. And Paola Antonelli and I are preparing for the fifth year of Design Emergency, which feels unreal. When we launched it, neither of us would have dreamt that it would be thriving after so long.

Billie Muraben is a design writer and independent curator based in London. She was the assistant curator of the 5th Istanbul Design Biennial in 2021.