Interview With Alice Twemlow, Design Critic And Chair Of The New MFA In Design Criticism Program At SVA, pt. 2
The elegant Alice Twemlow is a design writer, curator and critic based in New York City. A long-time voice within the graphic design community, she has directed several conferences for the AIGA and is the author of What is Graphic Design For? (Rotovision, 2006) and StyleCity New York (Thames & Hudson, 2005).
As the Chair of Design Criticism (D-Crit), an MFA program she co-founded with Steven Heller, she is at the forefront of design education, a topic that Bruce Nussbaum recently cited as vital to the health of design. Always with her fingers in many pots, Alice is also a doctoral candidate in Graphic Design History at the Royal College of Art/V&A Museum History of Design in London. Base was happy to sneak a few moments of her time this summer to learn more about her work, impressions of the design community at-large and to catch up on life after the inaugural year of one of the world’s first graduate programs in critical design thought.
The following interview was contributed by Amelia Black, a student of Twemlow’s in the D-Crit program at SVA.
Amelia Black: What role does audience play in your writing? Do you write “for” anyone?
Alice Twemlow: I find this a really interesting issue. In my research into the history of design criticism this is something I’m always trying to discover: Did a critic write for a particular audience, and can we tell if their writing had any effect on this audience. To me, the impact or response to design criticism—how its provocations are met, received, and acted upon by their audiences in a kind of critical circuitry—is an indicator of its significance. One way of finding out, historically, is to look at letters pages in magazines. And today of course, we have comments on blogs as a way of determining the extent to which a piece of writing hit home. When I write I definitely think about my readers, and write differently depending on the context—whether it’s for a specialized or a general public.
AB: As a someone using the resource of “letters to the editor” as an academic resource in your work, how do you imagine the re-engineering of blog commentary to become more useful as less the unedited deluge it is today for the generations who will rely on these records for their history?
AT: Well, the unedited deluge is actually an interesting document for the future historian of today’s design culture. It reflects how people are really thinking about all kinds of aspects of design. It’s for the sake of today’s reader that the blog comment format has to improve. Right now it’s such a mess. Insightful comments that respond to what has actually been written get lost amidst the rantings and ravings of virtual hecklers who appear to be lying in wait for the opportunity to air their views, whether or not they relate to the topic at hand. I hope D-Crit students, perhaps working in conjunction with MFA Interaction Design students can come up with a better way to generate meaningful online discussion. In the meantime, I think comments should be edited and kept on topic just as they would be by a moderator at a live event. And also like live conferences, every commenter/questioner needs to step out of the shadow of anonymity and introduce themselves.
AB: You studied English literature in college and came into the world of graphic design studies in your graduate studies. Was there an “aha” moment that made a career in design writing make sense?
AT: Well the aha moment came while I was still at Bristol University studying English. I was also the editor of the university magazine and I began spending more and more time with the art director who was studying graphic design at Bristol Poly. I was fascinated by the decisions that affected the presentation of the content. I began going to lectures in the graphic design department—I remember one in particular by Robert Nakata, who was then a Cranbrook student, in which he deconstructed a ketchup bottle label. I thought it was fascinating! My dad is a graphic designer and illustrator so this wasn’t new stuff for me; it just seemed new because it was in a different context and on my terms. When I found out there was a subject called Design History that I could study and that would combine my love of writing and design, well, I never looked back.
AB: What do you enjoy most about what you do?
AT: I’m ridiculously content with my choice of profession and especially the twist it has taken in the last couple of years. I absolutely love chairing the D-Crit department—thinking of people who’d make great teachers and devising courses with them and introducing the students to the people, ideas, and intellectual tools I think are important to their future careers. Meanwhile I get to learn from and be inspired by the students.
AB: The community of individuals creatively reflecting on design is relatively small. Whose work do you find inspiring? Who would you like to collaborate with?
AT: The critic in my field who has inspired me the most has to be Rick Poynor. I’d love to collaborate with him. Another ideal collaborator would be the author and critic Nicholson Baker. I would love to direct a conference, edit a journal or book, or even direct a degree program with him—any project, really, that would provide a forum for our combined perspectives on literary criticism and design criticism. My favorite piece of his writing is a 1994 essay entitled “Clip Art,” in which he describes in intricate detail the design, production, evolution, marketing, use, and social implications of the 99-cent chrome-plated nail clipper. While not part of the design-writing canon per se, the essay nevertheless functions as a piece of design criticism, and is part of a genre that focuses on objects that are part of everyday life rather than of rarefied and exalted experience. Baker’s interest in the neglected aspects of life is well known and “Clip Art” was written as a riposte to a comment made by the author Stephen King, who had described one of Baker’s books as, “a meaningless little fingernail paring.” Baker takes King’s slight as a challenge and, after his enthusiastic explication of the clippers, he goes on to invoke a stream of literary references to fingernail parings, ranging from Norse myth to Joyce and Nabakov. Like Baker, for me too, the humdrum objects, the overlooked fragments and marginalia of everyday life are more than background distraction; they are the very source and location of meaning.
AB: As a writer, where do you begin your search for “marginalia”?
AT: I suppose like many other creative practitioners of my generation, I don’t really have to search for marginalia; life’s interstitial, forgotten and overlooked moments or artifacts come into foreground for me. Locating, scrutinizing and celebrating these small and quotidian aspects of our everyday life is not sufficient, however. It’s important to use them to address larger issues.
AB: Do you ever hesitate, as someone with such a strong voice in the design community, to publicly acknowledge having favorite designers, studios, and projects? If not, who are your favorites?
AT: The answer is Base, right? Actually, it is, for I have followed the work of Base for many years now. I’ve been blown away by projects such as the punchy lettering on the roof of MoMA QNS, designed to be read in motion from the elevated train as you approached the museum; their identity and ever-evolving promotional materials for the National Museum in Brussels (Bozar); and of course the lovely super-niche market BEople magazine (”a magazine for a certain Belgium”).
I work in the world of design because I’m passionate about it, and always have been. For better or worse, I’m not one of those writers who keeps their critical distance; I’m right there in the middle of things. I admire different designers for different qualities. I’ll just give a few examples. For their formal ability, I am happy to revel in the pure gorgeousness of work by designers such as Hella Jongerius, Birsel + Seck, Yugo Nakamura and M/M. Among the designers I rate for their intellectual and conceptual engagement with their subject matter are COMA, Paul Elliman, MetaHaven, Bless, and Dunne & Raby. Among the projects that have really stuck in my mind from recent years is Vestergaard Frandsen’s LifeStraw. But as soon as you start listing out designers like this it feels silly. I could go on for a very long time. And even though I naturally incline towards the work of some designers, I’m willing to be surprised and delighted by anyone.
AB: What are your “hot button” topics in design culture?
AT: I’m interested in the tension between control and flexibility, elitism and democracy inherent in the open-source paradigm, the migration of designers to the art world, ways in which designed objects and buildings evolve over time and are actually used in real life, and how designers integrate that real-life knowledge into their ongoing work.
I imagine the hardest question facing designers each time they receive a commission or come up with a new idea is whether they should actually make the damn thing. In many cases the most responsible thing would be to persuade the client that the world doesn’t actually need this new hunk of plastic, metal, or configuration of microchips. That’s tough.
AB: Today the terms “design” and “designer” are being pervasively applied to everything under the sun. Does this ever-widening definition make your job as a design critic easier? Or does a lack of specificity make critical writing on the subject more challenging?
AT: Neither easier nor harder. You’re still only going to write about what you think is interesting and important, however far design’s definitional umbrella extends. In any case I think it’s up to the writer to define precisely what they mean by design and designer each time they write.
AB: With everything you’ve got going on, do you ever get tired?
AT: Yes, being the mother of a five-month-old is like being permanently jet-lagged. To relax I play with Otto, swim, do yoga, listen to Radio 4 on the internet, read the New Yorker, and go to yard sales near our cottage in the Catskills. We also travel a lot. Otto is about to get his first taste of this. In the next couple of months we’re off to Colorado, the UK, and Beijing. To recharge intellectually, I go to exhibitions and conferences, talk to people I admire, and read the latest offering on AAAARG.org (a website that collects and distributes theoretical texts).
AB: Your father is a graphic design historian/teacher, your mother had a career as an interior designer and your husband is the design writer, David Womack. Do you ever wonder if Otto might one day carry on this tradition?
AT: Well, now that you mention it, I do think he shows a distinct preference for the German-made wooden teether in primary colors with its multiple coats of natural, water-based, non-toxic lacquers, which I spent 45 minutes in the toyshop picking out for him… So unfortunately, yes, I suppose it is a possibility.
Click here to read part I of this interview.
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