Dizaina Studija. Telpa Forma Laiks

A good question. Both one and the other, but perhaps there’s a third or a fourth factor. Design is many-sided; it has many different faces: there’s elite and exclusive design, and there’s rational design, where design is a means for the creation and accumulation of material values, discussed using economic terminology and measured in terms of economic statistics. And there are the concerned kinds of design, those that consider problems, such as global warming, the consumption of resources, ecology and environmental quality. Each of these has its legitimate place in design. The user most commonly associates design with brands, perceiving only the luxury and fashionable side of design, which is its most conspicuous face. There’s a part of society that’s in direct contact with contemporary design: they’re familiar with it and use it like any other product of culture, along with its lasting and transient qualities. There’s no denying that we live in an age of design cult. However, most people, particularly in Latvia, do not have the possibility of identifying themselves with such a lifestyle, and do not consider that design applies to them in any way at all. In actual fact, there’s a lack of appreciation that this glamorous part of design is proportionally much, much smaller than that which is intended for service to society and the individual, regardless of age, social and health status, ethnic affiliation or political convictions. It shouldn’t be that people feel better just from using beautiful objects. Rather, they should live a better everyday life.

Design is cunning. For more than half a century, it has served as an instrument for that indivisible trinity of the business, economics and technology. In the affluent countries, product design has already reached an unusual kind of impasse, since such a great volume of product is being manufactured and consumed that a kind of stagnation has ensued, where the economy ceases to move forward. Affluent societies, including us, no longer purchase things because we need them, but rather in order to personify themselves with an image – something they’ve either seen or imagined. However, this apparently provides insufficient motivation to move the market forward.

In such a situation, design is becoming even more cunning – it is gaining the ability to forecast. The first step away from the proliferation of object design is the “design” of services – a witty move to draw people into a new kind of “dependence”, in order to provide a service not in terms of property, but to seek ways to create a new form of non-material comfort. Nowadays there’s a lot of talk about non-material expressions of design: experience design and strategy design, in order to serve the participant in the consumer society – the consumer – in even more refined ways. The designer still works in a team, but now in a much broader way, together with sociologists, psychologists, philosophers and professionals in other fields, in order to forecast jointly what society will yearn for in the future. Alongside the new digital technologies, there are relationship technologies, psychological technologies and technologies for studying the consumer’s desires. In such varied combinations, a new science is emerging: new scenarios and strategies about how not only to serve society, but also about how to entertain it, for example in the tourist and games industry. At the same time, a great number of design theoreticians and researchers are turning to the question of responsibility for what’s happening in the world. As society develops, production and consumption has reached such a level that people are appealing to the responsibility not only of the manufacturers, but also of the designers, if the products they have created cannot be recycled, for example, or if resources are being over-exploited. Thus, socially oriented and democratic thinking has encompassed the whole of the Nordic region.

In this regard, we in Latvia are in a similar position to design in the developed countries, since we’re freely able to enjoy the intellectual and material benefits from other countries by purchasing and using them. The dilemma lies in us. One possibility is to leave the matter alone and do nothing. We might admit that we have only a poor knowledge of the things that would make us special in global competition. Another approach would be to try to establish how Latvia could be useful in the international context. We should think seriously about the particular fields and the particular forms of innovation where a small nation is likely to be successful. A third possibility is to turn to non-material design: the creation of services and experiences. This kind of design could fill public and private coffers, since a change in the character of design is being discussed not only at design conferences, but is also forecast as heralding a change in the path of development in economically successful countries.

For us as a newly-developed country, this could represent a good challenge: to design not material, but non-material values. For example, a design niche for Latvia could be the design of scenarios for psychological healing of society. In this way, design will grow increasingly remote from its traditional and accustomed place as a branch of the arts, moving closer to industry and economics, and, in an age when any new product comes into being at the crossroads of interdisciplinary capabilities, this is not a bad thing, but rather something to be made use of. I can imagine that in looking at design in this manner, it becomes boring, overly global and coldly calculating to a certain section of people. But nothing could be further from the truth, since, alongside the global economy, there’s room enough for identity and uniqueness. At a moment when the world is opening up and becoming so broad, affiliation to a particular culture is part of individual pride. Skilful application of design would also help us more quickly bring about awareness of Latvia’s image.

In Latvia, a demand for design or design education has not emerged because of ignorance and the loss of the culture of invention, which has been replaced by a culture of selling and buying. While, at our particular stage of development of design, we’re striving to convince the public and creating groups of designers who share similar approaches, elsewhere in the world design is already moving on, and it would be hard to name any fields where it has no part or is not utilised. We’re not suddenly going to turn into generators of great ideas: it’s not easy for a newly-established consumer society to also be a creative society. However clichéd it may sound, education and self-education, from elementary school to the minister’s desk, might gradually contribute to an understanding of design.

More and more often in recent years, I’ve had the chance to work with people who’ve woken up to the significance of design. People from the industrial and business community, as well as economists and the staff of ministries and other institutions. New design media have come into existence. It looks hopeful: provided that the individual efforts in the field of design can be brought together in a frame that might be described as design policy (something that the Ministry of Culture has already begun to take in hand), then things could start to take off. A design renaissance has occurred. We’ve woken up, and we’ve learned from others, but we still can’t get away from the conviction that we’ll be able to do it on our own. We might consider an analogy with Latvia’s most popular sport – hockey: each player is good on their own, they’re technically proficient, but we can’t achieve a result, because we don’t have what they call a team game, and this applies not only to hockey or design. Design is a team game: collective, strategic, endlessly creative, communicative and lasting. “Teamwork” is a keyword for the process of development, and in this regard there’s still not enough progress: we’re only warming up. That’s my feeling at this particular moment about what could happen with design in Latvia.

Material prepared by Ilze Martinsone