Designed For Confusion
As befits a program with a ridiculously wide remit as The Culture Show, its quest for best of British design seemingly thrives of category error. How exactly can we compare and contrast Grand Theft Auto with the Mini? Except in as much as it would be nice if there was a mini in Grand Theft Auto (note the Italian Job is not part of the this grand design top ten). What is design It is a question this list seems happy to ignore, in much the same way that craft and art happily ignore their artificial boundaries.
Is the phone box as much architecture as design? The catseye invention? The world wide web some sort of infrastructure rather than something designed per se. It strikes me that the main definition of design here is “whatever designers do”. Which is I guess as good a definition as any, but ones which soon flounder when you get to knocked out entrants like the Sgt Pepper Album Cover (where does design end and the artist kick in?). Still you can vote anyway, and happily ignore the semantic issues at the base. It is a back slap after-all, don’t we design well in the UK. We just don’t know what designing is.
(And it is nice to see the two computer game sin there, just to see how many kidZors are watching the culcha show.)
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