TAXI Could you tell us who and what were your earliest influences? What led you to the appreciation of Design and how were you led to start Design Writing and Criticism?

Rick Poynor My earliest influences, when I was still at school, were writers and artists. They opened my eyes and changed my life. I admired writers such as Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Camus and J.G. Ballard – I was a typical high school existentialist – and art movements such as Dada and Surrealism. All this was deeply exciting and I wanted to be part of that world in some way. To find out more about these poems, novels and paintings I started reading criticism.

I couldn’t decide whether I was a words person or a visual person – I’m both – and whether I should study English or fine art. I resolved this by studying art history and after a spell writing short stories – none of them published! – the path eventually led to design.

Around 1980 I worked at a book production company and became interested in typography because of my love of books. Record covers had always fascinated me and so did the new 1980s style magazines such as The Face, designed by Neville Brody, who is the same generation as me. I got hold of Philip Meggs’ A History of Graphic Design when it came out in 1983 – this was probably quite unusual then for someone who wasn’t a designer.

I became a journalist and by the late 1980s, at Blueprint magazine, I was in a position to write about anything that interested me: architecture, interior design, furniture design and graphic design, as well as art. In 1990, Blueprint’s publisher gave the go-ahead to Eye, with me as editor, and allowed me complete freedom to put whatever I wanted in the magazine, which was pretty extraordinary in retrospect. From that point, as editor and writer, I concentrated increasingly on visual communication and began to develop my ideas about what forms the criticism of the subject should take.

TAXI Being one of the most well-known and respected Design Critics in the industry today. In your opinion, how would you define a Design Critic? What do you mean by Criticism?

Rick Poynor A critic is someone who takes nothing for granted, thinks carefully about a subject and forms his or her own conclusions. Anyone can have an opinion, of course. But for criticism to have value, for it to be useful to other people and make a contribution to the area of activity it covers, it needs to come from close study and deep knowledge. Critical writing should reveal an individual sensibility and a strong and consistent personal point of view, though you would also expect to see an evolution in the critic’s ideas over time. Even if you disagree with what the critic says, you should feel that the criticism is considered and coherent and, in that sense, reliable.

Critics must be specialists in whatever area is being discussed, while also possessing a wide knowledge of neighbouring fields so they can place their subject in a broader context to understand it better. A design critic who didn’t know much about art or photography, for instance, would be severely limited. A critic must be prepared to take a stand when necessary and go against prevailing opinion. If all the “critic” does is to reinforce the general view within a discipline and prop up the status quo, then that isn’t really criticism. Genuine criticism will provoke strong reactions and people on the receiving end of adverse criticism will probably hate it. That shouldn’t stop the critic.

TAXI We need more Design Critics and exposure to intellectually penetrating criticism. Why do you think that there is little motivation to produce oppositional Design Criticism? We would expect design professionals and practitioners to be the fiercest critics, but progress is slow.

Rick Poynor Yes, progress is slow and we can’t have a mature design criticism without a lot more design critics. There are plenty of design journalists, but very few can accurately be called critics. You are absolutely right that there is hardly any oppositional design criticism. The most obvious reason is that most design publications are trade journals. They exist to serve the design community and they depend on sales and advertising to survive. Their publishers and editors are reluctant to bite the hand that feeds them, so over time very few of these publications have tried to develop a culture of criticism, though occasionally an article with a bit more bite makes it into their pages. Unfortunately, readers in search of criticism often overlook these pieces because they are so unexpected. It’s ironic because on occasions when you hear designers discussing other designers’ work – at a design school crit or on a design awards jury – they can be really sharp critics. My conclusion is that designers would accept and appreciate much more critical writing about the subject than publishing chooses to give them.

A truly oppositional criticism is more problematic. One of the recent critical debates within design has focused on the way that design is now perceived, and even taught, primarily in terms of commerce. Whether you think this is a good thing or not, it does mean that most designers are completely locked into the prevailing commercial mentality. They believe that they have to be to survive and, little by little, the oppositional tendencies we used to find within design practice are disappearing. Design can be seen as a visual symptom of our economic and political situation and it’s very hard to establish a critical position outside of design’s day-to-day, pragmatic assumptions. When this kind of criticism is made – the First Things First 2000 manifesto is an example – many designers are infuriated and refuse to accept that it has any validity at all.

We might ask whether it is even possible now to be a full-time oppositional design critic. Meanwhile, mainstream media sees design in the most simplistic terms, concentrating mainly on design as an aspect of consumerism and lifestyle, and this presents even fewer opportunities for more questioning, critical and oppositional forms of design writing.

TAXI You founded Eye magazine and were its editor. The designer-as-author role is quite prevalent especially in Design magazine culture, a successful example being Tibor Kalman. Do you think there is a general devaluation of our expertise in today’s culture?

Rick Poynor The devaluation comes from the idea that graphic design’s primary or even sole purpose is to sell things, and that it’s about packaging, promotion and constructing an identity or image that will persuade people to part with their money. In this way of thinking, graphic design becomes indistinguishable from advertising – it all blurs together as part of the same basic activity. When design is reduced to a purely instrumental role, it’s hardly surprising that it has been taken over by marketing people whose primary goal is to sell as many CDs or bottles of shower gel as possible, not to facilitate the unconstrained creative design that designers still dream of being free to produce. The number of units shifted becomes the ultimate indicator of the design’s success and any aspect of the design that might reduce the volume of sales has to be eliminated. The process gets dubbed “branding”, designers start to call themselves branding consultants, and the branding virus spreads just about everywhere with profound consequences for design, even in the once reliably free and open cultural area. By participating in this process in great numbers at the expense of other approaches to design, designers have contributed to the public devaluation of their profession.

Some designers have certainly resisted these trends and Tibor Kalman was one of them. He was one of the most inspirational designers I have met and it is people like Kalman who kept me interested in design over the years. It’s still just about possible to break free from the uncritical commercial norm, but it’s getting harder all the time.

TAXI Design critic Bruce Nussbaum recently caused an uproar in the Design industry when he published his article, ‘Designers are the enemy of Design’. What would your reaction to this statement be, in the words of Tim Brown from IDEO, ‘Design Journalism Sucks’?

Rick Poynor I agree with Brown that the mainstream media coverage of design is much too preoccupied with seductive surfaces at the expense of deeper thinking, but there is plenty of level-headed, responsible design journalism in I.D., Print, Metropolis, Blueprint, Eye, Icon and Domus, to name just a few. We probably want the same thing – greater seriousness – but are coming from different directions. The visual expression of ideas, meanings, emotions and values is a fundamental part of being human and it is misguided to deny design’s visual and aesthetic side. We just have to write about it more intelligently for a wider public. At this point we need more criticism, not more journalism.

TAXI I read your article, ‘The Time for Being Against’ written some time back and you brought up one very valid point that got me considering, ‘Why are you writing? What, ultimately, is the point?’ What would your stand on this be now?

Rick Poynor Good question. Once I would simply have said: for the pleasure of writing. These days, having done a lot of writing, other factors are just as important. I enjoy being part of evolving debates and arguing for a particular point of view. Design is very revealing of our attitudes and talking about design is a way of talking about the contemporary world. I admire what designers have achieved in the past century and some of my writing takes a more historical view of design. But I’m also concerned about what design and our society are becoming, so I find ways to write about that.

TAXIWhat is the WORD, which you think would reside and reverberate in the design world for the next 10 years?

Rick Poynor Wouldn’t it be nice to think that the word could be “criticism”?