Deyan Sudjic presents us with a nightmare vision of a world drowning in objects. This is not a new perception. William Morris commented: "I have never been in any rich man's house which would not have looked the better for having a bonfire made outside of it of nine-10ths of all that it held." What is new is the scale on which we waste human resources with our addiction to new, shiny objects. We use design not to supply basic needs but to boost our confidence in a society ruled by fashion and celebrity. We are flattered into thinking that piling up our houses with ostentatious objects will make us better people, more lovable and human. What fools we have become.
Sudjic's book is witty, well observed and wide-ranging. I sometimes find his writing on design and architecture a little superficial, but here he is less tentative, as if writing from the heart, drawing on his experience as architecture critic of the Observer and editor of Domus in Milan. He may now be director of the Design Museum in London, but he is admirably honest in admitting his own idiocies in making design choices. In one hilarious passage he describes the choosing of a laptop from a Dixons airport store. This is Sudjic's fifth laptop in eight years. The selection process is slow, secret and complicated, "based on a set of seductions and manipulations" at work within his inner register of taste. Why did he choose the matt-black model rather than the all-white Apple like his last one? Ah, because the black laptop looked so "sleek, technocratic and composed".
As the human attention span for words reduces, so does the human affection span for objects. The relationship between owner and object never happens in the way that it did for, say, the Vietnam war photographer and his battered Nikon. Sudjic's book is about the stealth with which design obsolescence overtook us. "Passion gets spent so quickly" - our love affair with things is over before it has begun.
It was not always so. There was once a time of glorious primitive innocence in which designers directed their creative energies to what they imagined were lasting human needs. Ideals of permanent value, excellence of making and natural materials that matured with age motivated Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement he inspired. These were dreams of things of lasting beauty to be passed on through the generations. Technological advance has changed all that, as whole categories of objects become irrelevant. Your parents' once-prized Olivetti typewriters only survive as collector's items now.
Underpinning modernism was a stern sense of morality. Modern design as we know it started at the Bauhaus, the art and design school in Weimar established in the chaotic aftermath of the first world war. The Bauhaus espoused the belief that functional design and machine production were the keys to widespread improvement of human lives. A touching faith in design as a force for social betterment was still current in Britain after the second world war, with the earnest jollity of the Festival of Britain and the "good design" propaganda of the government-funded Council of Industrial Design. I sat on COID selection committees in the 1960s and they were grave affairs in which the relative merits of British-made teapots and toasters were deliberated. The objects we selected then went out into the world bearing a triangular swing ticket: "Design Centre Approved".
Was there ever an innocent object? Or did even the ostensibly simple Arts and Crafts rush-seated ebonised oak chair have its own design agenda? When Dieter Rams was head of design for Braun, the famous German electronics factory, in the 60s, he aimed to give his products anonymity, comparing Braun's food-mixers and shavers to discreet, efficient, English butlers. But again there was more to it, the clean lines and subdued colours bearing their own message of modern practicality allied with postwar moral responsibility.
"We live in a time when our relationship with our possessions is undergoing a radical transformation," Sudjic writes. He observes that little in our homes now has to do with basic needs. A great deal more (and the sheer volume of input is alarming) results from "the shallow but sharp emotional tug that the manufacture of want exerts on us". This began in the United States back in the 30s as an insidious movement in which designers, formerly purist in their aims of human betterment, became more commercial and cynical.
Designers became magicians, manufacturing desire for objects people did not even know existed. The New York designer Raymond Loewy was the prime example. Loewy's streamlining turned functional cleaners, duplicating machines and pencil sharpeners into the original glossy fetish objects. Sudjic suggests the modern counterpart to Loewy is Philippe Starck, whose Café Costes in Paris, fashionable for five minutes in 1984, "triggered off the plague of designer kettles, hotels, mineral water, pasta, toothbrushes, and all the other useless paraphernalia that now laps around the world".
Starck's best known design is a lemon squeezer on legs, an object so inept it tempts you to take pity on it and acquire it. The Starck lemon squeezer has sold millions. We are children in responding to the quaint and sweet and cutesy, and naive in our craving for sheer size - the very tallest skyscraper, the very largest yacht. Part of Sudjic's nightmare vision of contemporary society is of obese families ensconced on squashy sofas, gazing at ever larger television screens.
Where is the dignity and seriousness of purpose design once had as a profession? We are training more designers than ever, and their energy and talent is obvious from their end-of-year degree shows. But what then? As Sudjic points out, the decline of low-cost manufacturing in the west is a crucial factor in there being fewer possibilities for product designers in this country. Our great designers, from Brunel to Barnes Wallis, famous for the dam-buster bomb, were engineers and inventors, creatively involved with the processes of making. Now designers are at best merely surface decorators, appliers of Botox to manufactured objects.
What role for the designer with a vision of world betterment, when so much creative energy is now expended on dreaming up products for the luxury market? The word "designer" has become so debased that Bulthaup, the German manufacturer of kitchens, now bans it from its ads. The response of real designers to a world in which their talents are devalued has been twofold. There are those who, like Ron Arad, are designing themselves out of the dilemma by producing very small numbers of very expensive precision-made objects. Distinctions between design and art are eroding. Another school of thought, potentially more interesting, questions why we feel the need to keep developing new products. Why not take existing archetypes and just refine them? An Anglepoise lamp, designed in 1932, is functionally perfect as it is.
Towards the end of this impassioned and thought-provoking book, Sudjic suggests that "we might be on the verge of a revulsion against manufacturing desire". How does he arrive at that? From his own deep conviction that the well-designed and well-made functional object is a source of a unique pleasure: "The aesthetic, sculptural quality of a glass or a chair, and the intellectual elegance of a typeface are creative expressions that we can appreciate in themselves."
Is Sudjic right? He is certainly correct about the recent shock of learning how close our profligate habits of consumption have brought us to the limits of the world's resources. And he's surely right in claiming that the greatest form of luxury would be the relief of not living with so much.
Fiona MacCarthy's books include Eric Gill (Faber)
