System in Decline

I saw this thing on the news over the weekend about how the internet is changing our memories. It got me thinking about the things which add to those unreliable recollections to help us build a picture of our lives - the little bits of stuff that are a record of a life lived - and the effect the internet - and, more broadly, the democratisation of publishing - has had on those things.

I really love ephemera. The whole concept of it is liberating - we waste so much energy trying to forget that everything in life is transient, but ephemera luxuriates in that knowledge like a lady smoking a cigar in the bath. It's a celebration of insignificance, a glorious eulogy to the dead efforts that mark our passing.

The picture at the top of this article (courtesy of Kindra Murphy) is of some weekly bus passes produced by a regional transport company's in-house design department in the days before desktop publishing. Whoever was responsible for these came up with a new way of presenting exactly the same information EVERY WEEK. Amazing! And, while the executions set these apart, the concept wasn't unusual at the time - the widespread adoption of systems in graphic design - and the inherent restriction that imposes on creativity - didn't really arise until the tools existed to easily impose those templates.

Now have a think, if you would, about the last piece of collateral you got while on public transport, and what it looked like. Unless it's a train ticket, I bet you can't remember. If design is everywhere then, in the modern age, so is mediocrity, and as a culture we're becoming increasingly inured to it -the idea that someone would carefully craft something as unimportant as a bus pass seems like a ridiculous indulgence when a middle manager with a Dell Inspiron can do it. It's not just that we're not looking at modern design through the rose-tinted prism of legislated nostalgia - it's objectively crap. It's kerned badly, there are spelling mistakes, photos aren't graded.

Computers and the internet have formed the basis of almost my entire career. But sometimes I hate them and the solutions to which they lead us; cheap electronics have given a billion monkeys a billion typewriters and, far from writing Shakespeare, they're using them to knock out cheap mis-spelled limericks which don't scan. The concept of craft is slowly dying in the stampede towards expedient, 'cost-effective' solutions.

In 2082, nobody will look back fondly on the things that got made today. Nobody will look back at all, because nobody will have been able to summon up the enthusiasm to keep hold of them, because they're nearly all boring. Nice things are still made - it's just that giving more people the ability to make them has, weirdly, restricted their production to the point where something which would have looked cheap in the 30s wins awards now (I'm not criticising that piece of work - I genuinely think it's amazing). Is that a problem? Is it just that the role of design in society has changed? Other crafts have passed without mourning - hot-metal printing, real-life 3D modelling, you don't see those any more. Is design going the same way?

On the plus side, though, nobody really seems to mind.