In The Field with Susan Merritt
“It is about pushing an idea; trying to make it more interesting, stronger, better, more intriguing, and more interesting for the curator.” — Susan Merritt
By Brooke Viegut, March 13, 2023.
For our ongoing series “In The Field”, Brooke Viegut (2022) sat down with fellow alum Susan Merritt (2015) to discuss her latest curatorial projects and the future of design education. Merritt is a design writer, researcher, and curator with over thirty years of experience as a design educator, as well as a driving force behind San Diego Design Week and the upcoming 2024 World Design Capital summit in San Diego-Tijuana. Her exhibition, “Toying with Design: Play Inspires the Everyday” recently closed at the Mingei International Museum.
Brooke Viegut: Could you identify yourself in this current moment?
Susan Merritt: I consider myself a lover of design. A design advocate; that’s probably the best way to put it. Everything that I have been doing in my career, the thread of design has run through everything, whether it was teaching or professional practice, writing, programming, curating, it’s all about design.
BV: I also noticed your email signature identifies you as a “design archaeologist”.
SM: I do really enjoy the research. With research you’ve got to do a lot of digging, and uncovering, and going into places you might not be comfortable or confident with. So that’s the archaeologist part.
BV: Finding the random, interesting things nobody knows!
SM: That’s the thing–getting to the real information, as opposed to so much superficial information. You go on Google, and you start looking at all the links, and you can tell that this information originated [one place] and everybody else is just repeating it, or variations of it. You’ve got to really dig to get to some original source material.
BV: Your recent exhibition, “Toying with Design: Play Inspires the Everyday,” just closed at the Mingei International Museum. Previously you had mentioned to us that your time at DCrit helped to shape this work. Talk to me a little bit about the relationship between your experience with the program, and this project.
SM: I love that [D-Crit] takes a very broad look at design, because design is integrated into pretty much everything. Going back to school and really focusing on design as a researcher and writer gave me confidence, and some credentials to feel confident to go forward. It really was a shift in thinking to how things are designed, why they’re designed, what the intention is, what the purpose is, etc.
My colleague [Toying with Design co-curator] Patricia Cué, who participated in the SVA D-Crit Summer Intensive, wanted to do a design exhibition for San Diego Design Week. So she suggested “What about a toy exhibition?”.
Mingei has a large collection of folk art and toys, so we started by looking at that. I came up with the idea of toying with design, and expanding to look at objects not in their collection, but mass-produced utilitarian objects that were toy-like, or they had been toyed with scale, or toyed with materials in some way. And then we started hunting for the objects.
BV: I can’t help but notice how the program opened up your definition of design and its impact, from the every day to very vital spheres.
SM: Yes, surely. I wanted to be able to look at design differently, and to think about design differently. That was one of my goals [in attending the program], in addition to having some experience with writing, and being around the faculty, and the other students, and seeing what they were doing. Many of the students were not coming directly out of a specific type of design field or a formal design education, so that was exciting to see.
BV: Let’s talk about that–design education. In your career you’ve spent over thirty years in higher education, and continue to work on public projects through your design advocacy. What conversations around how we share design knowledge are you excited about?
SM: Good question. I don’t know if I’m seeing much [change] in institutionalized education, but I am happy to see that there’s a broad range of degrees. Some schools are even offering degrees in a variety of different directions of design, so that’s exciting to see design growing within and becoming more respected within the educational institutions.
BV: What about outside of educational institutions?
SM: Well, San Diego Design Week is really important for us. I’ve lived here for over 40 years, so I have gone through many decades of trying to explain what graphic design is, to working to help people understand, and appreciate, and respect design, to bringing curriculum into the university. There was a lot of work that needed to be done within the institutions themselves, where design often falls under the “art” umbrella. When I say I’m a design advocate, I’ve been fighting for design on many levels for decades.
I think there is a better understanding of design [now], or people understand the word better, or it has seeped into the general vocabulary more. But I get frustrated that there aren’t more design museums, or there aren’t more exhibitions focused on design. I live in a city that has a lot of museums, and there’s not one that is dedicated to design. Over the years we’ve had design exhibitions, like in the San Diego Museum of Art, but they’re so few and far between. I was so happy the Mingei was willing to take on this exhibition “Toying with Design”–they have now even integrated the word “design” into their mission. Progress is being made, but it’s not enough.
That’s why I hope that San Diego-Tijuana World Design Capital 2024 will bring even more awareness, because now we have the governments of both San Diego and Tijuana involved, so they’re talking about design. As far as education is concerned, I think designers who are advocating for design, and being on these committees, finding their way into government and city committees, and then getting back to exhibitions is a wonderful way to talk about design.
It’s not easy. We need design museums. I don’t know how we’re going to make that happen. But you’ve got to have people in the museums that are infiltrating that knowledge, or you’ve got to have leaders in the museums that will reach out to designers to allow them to talk about things from a design perspective.
BV: It seems that design education is ultimately about figuring out a way to create, or force, the conversation. So it trickles down, right? Everything studied in school is what the “experts” say, and the “experts” are presenting their work in institutions that deem them “experts.” We have to get to the root of who’s allowing a conversation to happen.
SM: Exactly. Yes. There’s a real opportunity there, especially through curation and exhibitions.
Design has become a buzzword too, which annoys me because people will talk about design, but it’s not really design, or say they are designers but maybe aren’t really. They’re just using it as a buzzword. As long as people are talking.
BV: Looking at your work from the last several years, it seems like there is a through-line based in the invisibility of everyday design.
SM: I would say so. In my [D-Crit] thesis I had uncovered these embalming accessories that embalmers use to prepare the body for the memory picture that people that people carry with them when the casket is open. The embalming accessories–they’re used to help create this scene, everyday tools that we don’t pay attention to, but if we stop, if we knew more about them, who knows.
BV: Lots of patterns.
SM: Yes! After the exhibition, AIGA San Diego asked me to do this talk. I wanted it to be more meaningful, so I started looking at what objects we had picked. We did a lot of the choosing intuitively or spontaneously; like we knew right off the top that Michael Graves’ whistling bird tea kettle was a good example, and used that [as a benchmark]. After, I went back and I started categorizing and looking at the information in different ways–by dates, or by country, etcetera. It was interesting, because you could see the spikes in like the ‘40s and ‘50s with Eames, and then you can see in the ‘80s we had more pieces, and then more in the ‘90s, and then the early 2000s.
That led me to ask why, and surmise what was going on. I could still dig deeper but you’re right; many of the objects were anonymous. And they were very unique, and specialized, and quirky. They were anonymous in the sense that the story wasn’t really clear, they were simply a tool that did something that helped people with a task.
BV: You’re not the first curator to mention choosing intuitively as part of their process. What does that mean? How do you listen to your intuition as a researcher?
SM: Good question. You have to have some parameters, you have to have a concept to start with. For me, toys from the Mingei collection was not much of a concept, right? So we started thinking about how we could present these toys through the lens of design, by looking at functionality and their categories. That wasn’t enough, so we went from toys, to toy-like to toy-with. I think that was very intuitive in that it just didn’t feel like it’s enough.
It is about pushing an idea; trying to make it more interesting, stronger, better, more intriguing, and more interesting for the curator! That’s part of the design process, which is that intuitive stage, where you are thinking, and questioning, and pushing until you feel comfortable that you’ve got a concept that’s going to yield some interesting results. It was more in the concepting that was intuitive, because once we had some guidelines and some criteria, then I could start looking.
BV: I’m curious about what is making you tick, what is sparking interest in you right now? What is next?
SM: Things are gearing up. We’ve got some meetings that I’ll be zooming in on for AIGA and preparation World Design Capital, so that’s all coming up. And Design Week 2024! I have a project, a research project that’s been underway for a couple of years that I’d like to get back to because soon is the 50th anniversary of the Symbol Signs project. This is the icon system that was developed between the U.S. Department of Transportation and AIGA in 1974, and I’ve been interviewing people and doing research on that for some kind of article. I’d like to do some writing again, and continue writing about these objects [in “Toying with Design”]. That’s what I see in my future.
Susan Merritt is Professor Emerita of the School of Art and Design at San Diego State University. During her 30-year tenure at SDSU’s School of Art + Design, Merritt developed a comprehensive curriculum in Graphic Design and taught a range of graphic design courses, eventually focusing on typography and graphic design history — all the while maintaining a professional practice. She is the co-author of The Web Design WOW! Book (1998), and author of ancillary materials for Meggs’ History of Graphic Design, which include an instructor’s manual and student study guides. Susan is a steering committee and advisory board member of San Diego Design Week, a founding member of AIGA San Diego, and the co-founder of Design Innovation Institute alongside her husband Calvin Woo. She completed postgraduate study in graphic design at the Basel School of Design and earned an MA in Design Research, Writing and Criticism from the School of Visual Arts in New York. More about Susan can be found by visiting her here.
