Design Educators Ponder a Dire Future as “Show Houses” Have Fun
For all the serious talk of “design” these days—design as innovation that makes modern economies competitive—there’s always time to pause for design-for-design’s-sake. Take the springtime activity called the “Decorators’ Show House.”
In many cities, a charitable group will find a mansion and invite top design firms, typically interior designers, to make over the rooms. Then the public is invited to wander through the fantasy interiors, paying a fee and supporting a good cause. The invited design firms, at considerable cost to themselves, show off their latest design thinking. Two of the better known events are underway in San Francisco and Manhattan.
The San Francisco Decorator Showcase, on track since 1977, takes place in a four-story Italian villa-style mansion in hillside Pacific Heights, raising tuition for needy high school students. The designers have filled its 30 rooms with themes ranging from a royal wedding to “The Cookbook Nook,” Art Deco, and a whimsical basement “Studio Craft Room.”
In Manhattan, the Kips Bay youth club is presenting its 39th annual Decorator Show House in a borrowed upper east side neo-federalist mansion with 14 rooms. The building is about to be renovated, but through May 26, it is resplendent with top designer show-house rooms to fire the imagination.
The Show Houses are cropping up everywhere on an annual basis: Washington D.C., Atlanta, Philadelphia, Detroit, Pasadena, Calif., and Greenwich, Conn., not to mention in Wisconsin, Maine, and New Jersey. For the next generation of designers, interior decoration seems as stable a design career as one can find. Design educators, however, are worried that the meaning of “design” is changing rapidly.
“Design is not what it was 10 years ago, and is not now what it will be 10 years hence,” says a new study by the National Association of Schools of Art and Design (NASAD). It reports that a majority of art students today are design majors. They are about 45,000 of the 70,000 art students in independent art schools and college art departments in North America. And while they matriculate, there is an “increasing gap between design practice and design education.” The chasm is widening rapidly: “If this gap is not closed, [art and design] schools and their graduates will not be competitive.”
In short, design thinking is becoming less about producing creative visual things—such as interior design of rooms perhaps—and more about innovating the way that things and people go together. This is often called “systems” thinking. Mastering these systems has a big future. That is why business majors, engineers, and medical students are also poaching on “design thinking” turf, once the exclusive hunting ground of visual artists.
While the new buzz words of systems, collaboration, and innovation often can be vague, the most concrete examples of what is at stake for design practice usually come from the computer world. For instance, IBM reports that it now takes just eight months to design and test new software. Yet art and design students still take four years to earn a degree. The folks around NASAD are saying that mastering a particular software tool is no longer the goal. Understanding the entire digital-and-social network of society certainly is: “Designers have to be mindful of the interaction between physical, social, cultural, technological, and economic factors, in addition to traditional visual concerns.”
Design is a big draw in art education, both here and abroad (with China turning out design students by the bushel full). In America, the career still has a future, with 59 percent of people who studied design ending up in a satisfying design career, according to a survey by the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project.
The new discussions about design can become very abstract, especially since the premise is that the world of “design services,” rather than simply “design products,” is increasingly complex, rapid, and shifting. It seems to be about processes rather than things. That is why the old-fashioned design of the annual Show House can be an occasional tonic (if not necessarily a futuristic career).
Well-designed rooms and buildings will always be a valued product at every level of a community, as recent events in Sheboygan, Wis., suggest. The Sheboygan Police Station was among 11 buildings given awards by the Wisconsin chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AAA). The station's Milwaukee architects were lauded for creating “a secure, yet inviting, sustainable new police station filled with natural light.” This could indeed sound like systems thinking and design services.
All the Wisconsin design projects were noted for innovation, good use of materials, and environmental fit—but with a particular twist to them all. “Many of the projects recognized for design excellence are public projects, which also speaks very well of Wisconsin,” the AAA says.
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