Writing

In a recent article for Design Week, critic Rick Poynor pointed to the blog as being partially responsible for a crisis in design criticism saying, "the democratisation of opinion in the age of the blog has undercut the critic’s authority." I disagree with this assumption and Poynor is not the first, nor will he be the last to hold blogging accountable for what he believes is design criticism still struggling to find its voice.

This is a familiar argument and there's no doubt the Web has changed the course of criticism and nudged a few critics egos onto the endangered list. But I can't help thinking blogs are being used as a scapegoat for design criticism’s own internal mechanisms failing.

Five years ago, American art historian and critic James Elkins asked 'what happened to art criticism?' At the time of writing, Elkins described the field as "dissolving into the background clutter of ephemeral cultural criticism" and most tellingly, "as outstripping its readers [until] there is more of it around than anyone can read".

This diagnosis could equally well apply to the current state of design criticism; in a field as diffuse as design it is difficult to pin down the edges but edges are useful things to have. Edges can help define a discourse and offer steady ground to stand on for debates, but when so much of everyday life is 'designed', it is difficult (or indeed impossible) to pin down boundaries.

This is what makes design so thrilling and why designers are able to move freely across disciplines – as an inter-disciplinary playground, design is inherently open-source. Just as the Internet decentralised information by weaving a web of simultaneous conversations, design embedded the cultural landscape so completely that the critique is now everywhere, but it's ubiquitous form makes tracking the terms of criticism a difficult task.

As design writing continues disseminating itself to distraction perhaps we should be asking 'where are the edges?' Design historians offer one clearly defined pathway of historically informed critique, and Rick Poynor recommends finding "independent critics who are not practitioners" in a bid to obtain critical distance. It is not through lack of trying that design writing still flounders on the critical periphery.

And there is certainly no shortage of voices, particularly on the Web where the open-source mindset encourages flattened hierarchies resting on a shared authority. With the critic's power under digital threat it's no wonder blogging suffers as the poster-child for 'the death of the critic'. Decentralisation in any form is a noisy and messy affair – blogging is no different, with so much talking going on it's difficult to focus on what's really being said.

Yet what remains most pertinent to the ongoing struggles of design criticism is not the scuffle for authority between blogger and critic, nor the disorientating volume of competing voices, rather it is the omnipresent edgelessness of design itself that dodges the critical eye.