13 March 2006
The Great British Design Quest?
Germaine Greer has a rant about the BBC Culture Show's latest exercise to promote design, a viewer poll to find people's favourite British product of the past 100 years. I'm inclined to agree with her. There's not much real content in a competition that fields, among others, the Doc Marten boot (actually, originally developed in Germany), the road safety cats-eye (probably would have been my winner) and the computer game Tomb Raider (suppose there's a link with the Doc Martens there). Greer's favourite, the UK road sign system developed 50 years ago by Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert, didn't even make it to the competition shortlist. En passant Greer comes close to quoting Beatrice Warde's 1956 essay The Crystal Goblet or Printing Should be Invisible: design (in Warde's case, typography) 'should reveal rather than hide the beautiful thing it was meant to contain.'
Labels:
Design business,
Product design
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