Jim Northover

One of the most significant changes in the design world over the last few years has gone largely unremarked. No, it’s not some aspect of technology. It’s words.

Today, designers are required to use the written word to explain, to inform, to narrate, and even to critique. Purely visual interventions are no longer enough. Content and narrative have become vital components in the design mix. The change has been one of stealth, but nonetheless notable.

It’s strange then that the only university in the UK to offer a dedicated postgraduate course in design writing and design criticism is now proposing to write it off, at least in its current form. As one of our leading design institutions, the London College of Communication (whose course I describe) may be suffering a failure of nerve. It seems no longer prepared to risk investment in a pioneering area of study and research, one which anticipates and responds to the growing importance of the written word in design.

Some of those in higher education I’ve spoken to recently see things differently. The big and influential universities, those with international reputations, often take a contrary view of risk. In the face of financial stringency they see the reputational danger in stepping back from the pioneering and the ground-breaking – the things that made them famous in the first place. Arguably, the LCC has been more attuned to the ‘real world’ of design than many of its peers. It has been known internationally for stretching the boundaries of design and responding to change.

Will that reputation survive the long knives?

There’s a famous line from Virginia Woolf, the one that declares: ‘On or about December, 1910, human character changed.’ Those who have studied the text often suggest it refers to the onset of what we know as Modernism, and the drawing to a close of the Edwardian era. Woolf claimed that the nature of human relationships changed around that time, and with the benefit of a hundred years’ perspective, it seems that there is little with which to argue. Political, social and sexual relationships had moved on. The way also opened up for different modes of creative expression – in writing, fine art and architecture.

Is an equivalent shift taking place on or about this December? This year, the year of Wiki-leaks, seems to suggest that the internet is coming of age politically. As no information is now sacred and everything shared, what effect will this have on our lives? I think the debate will continue to polarise opinions between those for whom freedom of information is always justified, and those who want to maintain privacy of information. In this debate, technology wins hands down. Unless the internet is actively suppressed, the flow of information will continue to pour forth. This is the reality of the ‘information age’.

Perhaps we can say in few years’ time: “On or about December, 2010, the meaning of ‘information’ changed.”

Introductory note in First Edition, a publication by graduating students of the London College of Communication MA programme in Design Writing Criticism 2010

Design famously defies definition. It's all around us, impacting our lives on a daily basis, but it's hard to pin down. So maybe we should explore rather than attempt to define, in order that our multiple explorations allow the territory to be mapped out and examined in some detail, and to see what we can discover.

The projects and theses that form the culmination of the course do just that: they explore the boundaries, probe the surface and examine what lies beneath. Culture and commerce, lifestyle and technology, politics and gender, text and image, environment and fashion are scrutinised with forensic intensity. From the virtual world of social networks, video games and hacking to the tangible forms of places, products and the human body, the writers tackle a wide range of topics and emerge with a complex array of takes on design and its contemporary practice.

The evidence shows that design is an expanding universe, that the verities of physicality are being matched by a world in which meaning derives from every form of expression or communication, where systems and networks drive the flow of information and interaction, and where changes in society and the environment provide an ever-present background.

The need for interrogation, for commentary, for critique has never been greater, we would argue. Without an informed debate we risk much, but with understanding and imagination so much can be achieved. The writers graduating from this course can be both advocates and challengers, campaigning for design's positive influence on our lives and warning us of its potential dangers. Perhaps more important than the topics and debates themselves are the sounds of divergent voices. From different backgrounds, cultures and disciplines these voices grow ever stronger and speak more clearly as they move from the shadows of academia into the full light of day.

Completing a post-graduate degree in Design Writing Criticism has taken up most of the summer and beyond. In 2008 I joined the first part-time group on the first course of its kind in Europe. For me it was an experiment and a leap in the dark; after all, 40 years separated my graduating in design from the same institution (then London College of Printing) from my enrolment as a post-grad student in October 2008.

Until then it had been virtually impossible to take the time out to do something that needed such a significant level of commitment. However, 'succession planning' had been underway at Lloyd Northover for some time and, by 2008, we had arrived at a point where it became a realistic option for me to engage in something new, while continuing my role as chairman and consultant for the business.

My motivations were mixed: time for a new perspective, the opportunity to 'back-fill' my practice experience with a more theoretical context, a chance to exercise and enhance writing and critical skills, a different kind of challenge. Two years later it's still too early to reflect deeply on the experience, but I know it has helped me to change gear in my working life and to discover some new avenues. Where these might lead, only time will tell, but that is hardly the point. The course was its own justification.

Review of Eric Gill at the Royal Academy for FAD website

“I have found, as a biographer, that you do not choose your subjects. It is more that they sit in your mind waiting to claim you.” When Fiona MacCarthy wrote this she must have pondered what it was about Eric Gill that made him sit in her mind to start with, now that we know perhaps more than we ever bargained for about some aspects of his life story. With Gill’s work forming part of an upcoming exhibition at the Royal Academy entitled ‘Wild Thing’, and our heightened sensibility through media coverage towards abusive sexual relationships, especially involving children, it seems we are bound to reflect on how artists’ works and lives interact.

From way back artists have been associated with often chaotic and indecorous behaviour. Many of them led complicated sex lives, often less shocking today than they might have been at the time, but with some things we tend to draw the line. For most people even today, and certainly as far legality is concerned, Gill went too far. Just one look at the varied index references in MacCarthy’s biography of Gill provides enough clues. The question is how it affects his work and how we view it.

The curious thing is that the closest most of us ever get to Gill’s work is through the typefaces he designed, ones we see on a daily basis in print, in signing or online. Although not as ubiquitous as a few years ago, Gill Sans is still a common font, even on our computers. A close inspection of the letterforms reveals something that is identifiably modern, but still distinctly classical, referring back to Roman inscriptions from which Gill drew ideas and inspiration. This purity of form is even more pronounced in his Perpetua typeface, the height of good breeding and historic sensitivity. How could a mind so refined and a hand so skilled belong to this other individual?

If we look at Gill’s drawings and prints, or even Gill’s infamous relief re-titled Ecstasy (replacing Gill’s own unambiguous title Fucking) we see, or at least I do, a remarkable sensitivity that is more chaste than consciously erotic. Ecstasy takes the human forms and moulds them in an embrace that is touching and intimate. That the models were Gill’s sister (with whom Gill had an incestuous relationship) and her husband does nothing to change our initial reaction.

Undoubtedly some of his private works were salacious, whilst other commissions were deeply religious in tone. One work explicitly uses sex to make a political point. His carving Votes for Women (purchased by the economist John Maynard Keynes) is described by MacCarthy as showing ‘the act of intercourse with woman ascendant, man semi-recumbent.’ In a curious way the political message here could not have been more modern. As MacCarthy comments ‘it is both very pure and very shocking.’

Though full of ambiguity as Gill’s life was, not just sexually and morally, but riven through his writing, his domestic and working relationships and his spiritual preoccupations, his work as an artist and as a designer still stands out with searing clarity. Something it is difficult to argue with.

*MacCarthy, F. ‘Mad about sex’ (Guardian 17 October) 2009

‘Wild Thing: Epstein, Gaudier-Brzeska, Gill’ at the Royal Academy 24 October 2009-24 January 2010*