Unit Summary 3 - Explorations: New Lenses for the Design World



In the design world is one wiser with or without the green glasses?
(Image of original William Wallace Denslow illustration from "The Wizard of Oz" by L. Frank Baum retrieved from: http://www.indiana.edu/~liblilly/games/links.html)


L. Frank Baum's Emerald City from his Oz stories is an illustrative parallel to the progression of relationship between design of material culture and those who are consumers of it.

Early attempts at design were about a few, elite and influential, designers and patrons setting the standards for how others should organize their surroundings. This is the utopian ideal of an Emerald City where only those with virtue are allowed to go - where there is a dominant figure in the Wizard who rules over the city dictating who is virtuous enough to be included in the elite. Those not in the City wish to be part of it and seek out the Wizard to learn the rules; this includes our heroine Dorothy.

Subsequent generations of architects and designers revisited and often reaffirmed the work of the elite infusing more localized interpretations to the standards. As Dorothy, the Tin Woodman, The Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion are invited into the city, in the original stories, they are given special emerald-colored glasses. These glasses are worn by everyone in the Emerald City so that everyone sees it's beauty. Dorothy and her friends are initially taken in by the spectacle and believe that what the Wizard (the elite who writes the rules) says is beautify and right in the City, is. Fun is had by all.

Our most recent endeavors in design history must be a movement from the elite and educated to the egalitarian. Instead of something just for those with means and those with the credentials and educated by the right people, design after the 19th century has become about those who consume the ideas and material culture at all levels of scale. Dorothy starts to see that the glasses both enhance and obscure the Emerald City's beauty. Though only a stranger in a strange land Dorothy knows what she likes and claims her own voice in saying what the Emerald City should be. She has heard from the Wizard, she has gotten to see the City through the green glasses and now she is asking for a different pair, perhaps rose-colored.

The multiple definitions of modernism can be attributed not only to the education, training and aesthetics of those trained in design but also influenced by others outside the design world in art, music, science, industry and a host of other perspectives - even from those lay-persons who, perhaps, are lacking in much of their own perspective but want to be seen as part of the stylish crowd. Despite the multiple and incredibly variable motivations design has come to the masses through any manner of education.

As I reflect on this last unit I think that design is back to not what is design but WHO is designing, and then what is their motivation, inspiration, education, inclination, etc. Globally, and persistently through history, it has really been about WHO and that is more so true today as it was when the pharaohs of Egypt began building their tombs so that EVERYONE would know WHO they were. Each of us are part of a dance between our own individual wants, needs, desires and perspectives and the wants, needs, desires and perspectives of the collective group - it is the expression of this dance that we can see in the living art that is design.