Why Democratic Design is Important
My Ode to the Billy Bookcase
The famous quote from William Gibson says that “the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” Whether he actually said it or not is up for debate, but like most famous quotes, the reason it’s still around is because there’s a fair amount of truth in it.
More truth: The future doesn’t just arrive, it’s designed. And, sadly, a large amount of what is being designed with real care and attention is unaffordable to the average person. This is true whether you consider the average person to be a true average (worldwide median income is around US$1,400 per year), or if you reflexively think of average in Western-Industrial terms (with around $25,000 of income). What this means is that we’re designing a future that is less democratic, and less equitable because what passes for innovative, future-focused design too often aimed at too few, and frankly, this is everyone’s loss.
If you believe that design can actually help people and genuinely improve the world then there is very little point in creating inherently wasteful or luxurious design, wherein only a pitifully small slice of the population are able benefit from it. The effete, the urbane, the cultural and commercial elite, the vanguard, the Noguchi-coffee-table set may be living lives ‘designed’, but what’s there for the rest of us?
The rest of us, here in the West, live in a modern consumer society. Unlike the Victorians, we don’t buy furniture to last generations. And unlike the post-war modernists, we don’t, by and large, want governments to engage in grand, centrally-planned urban design schemes. And unlike the elite, our aesthetic and functional horizons are tightly constrained by what constitutes good value for money. Instead,we consume individually: quickly, easily and compulsively. For the most part, design doesn’t present a future vision of how we would aspire to live — it’s a momentary choice between gloss or matte, chrome or plastic. Design’s grand aspirations are lost amongst the day-to-day churn of mass production and consumption. The future arrives, piecemeal, in an Amazon box on the doorstep.
So, what does designing for the future look like? That depends on how we envisage the future. If the preferred future is a tiny minority of privileged aesthetes acting and reacting to the latest trends then pick up a copy of Wallpaper magazine and lo, the future has arrived. But if your vision of the future is more egalitarian, more democratic, less Gibson-esque, then the future needs to be simple, functional, sustainable and crucially, attainable. And if you want to experience that future then I’d suggest going out to where you’d least expect it, toward that giant, labyrinthine, blue barn on the suburban outskirts of the city: your nearest IKEA.
When too much of what is passing for innovative design is merely highly-desirable, wasteful affectation with an irreducibly inflated price tag attached, its a blessed relief that there is, and will always be, the Billy Bookshelf. After 30 years the Billy Bookshelf has come to embody the IKEA ethos. Everything about its design is ruthlessly efficient. Slabs of particle board coated in plastic, flat packed. There’s something elegant in its brutal refinement, its starkness, its extreme simplicity. £20 and it’s yours.
IKEA are committed to an ideal of Democratic Design, which is, at its heart, is a simple commitment to keeping their prices low enough that they can be afforded by the masses, by the average Joe. The kind of person for whom a £2,500 table is not an option. You could also admire the push toward sustainable materials and manufacturing, supply chain innovation and, of course, the stuff we pile into our trolley to take home and use: highly functional products, ranging on the aesthetic scale from ‘tastefully neutral’ to ‘decently attractive,’ that will last a reasonable amount of time.
For me, though, the design of the physical form (the couches, the lamps, the cabinets, the bathrooms, the entire houses) has become IKEA’s secondary innovation. The real innovation, the real genius and the overtly political gesture, is IKEA’s affordability.They are valuing the needs of the many over the needs of the few. And that is the really futuristic idea.
