The Design Encyclopedia

This is the kind of book that should be sold by weight, not by volume: more significant than the fact that it has 832 pages is that it tops two-and-a-half kilos. To be fair, that’s largely because it’s solidly bound in rather nice paper, as you can explain to your chiropractor.

Despite the all-encompassing title, The Design Encyclopedia is specifically an encyclopedia of 20th Century industrial design. Compiler Mel Byars, whose CV is one of those rich stews of internecine accolades beloved of American commentator-critics, began work on the book in 1989, and Laurence King released the first edition in 1994. It’s now been revamped in conjunction with the New York Museum of Modern Art, with 700 new colour pictures mostly from its library, none of which appears larger than a matchbox. Byars himself is credited with the book’s design, which comprises a double column of tiny Helvetica set a fraction too tight.

The cover is also forgettable, but does at least succeed in giving a false impression of cheeriness. Apparently this edition is intended to be ‘lighter and easier to read’ than the original, which must have been truly impenetrable. Entries are terse at best, with few of the asides and insights that might have made it rewarding to dip into. There are reasonably frequent attempts to sketch connections between individuals and schools or trends, but a lot more space is devoted to trivial listings of dates and job titles.

It would be facile to spot who’s in and who isn’t, but let’s do it anyway It would be facile to indulge in spotting who’s in and who isn’t, but let’s do it anyway. Most of the obvious rising stars seem to have been added, with the new-found prominence of France and the Netherlands represented by Matali Crasset and the Bouroullec brothers, Droog Design and Hella Jongerius. Shin and Tomoko Azumi get their own entries next door to each other, luckier than the admittedly unmarried Richard Seymour and Dick Powell, who are cruelly separated by the latter’s churlish omission.

That’s not to say all the fashionable names are in: there’s no Matthias Bengtsson, Tord Boontje or Lena Bergstrom, to mention only the Bs. Jonathan Ive gets a brief and uninformative piece, and although there’s a scattering of Apple references among other bios there’s no entry for the company itself.

Sticking to industrial design is a tricky business. Mere graphic designers are only allowed in if they’ve printed something onto a teatowel. So you get MM, the fairly obscure Italian outdoor equipment design collective, but not M/M, the highly influential Parisian graphic designers. Jan Tschichold doesn’t merit a mention, but Eric Gill does, apparently because his stonemasonry is judged functional. Minimalist sculptor Donald Judd squeaks in on the basis of his ‘so-called furniture’, ahead of, say, Henry Moore or Anthony Caro. Kandinsky, not known for his chairs or washing machines, gets two-thirds of a column on the strength of his theoretical influence, while Johannes Itten, alchemist of the Bauhaus, has an entry presumably justified by the impact of his form and colour handbooks on every field of design for three-quarters of the 20th Century, but not actually mentioning it.

We couldn’t spot any mention of training shoes or mobile telephones This is not to carp, more to acknowledge the difficulty of the task Byars and his publisher have set themselves. All right, maybe a little bit of carping. Jewellery designers, included in the first edition, have been chucked out, an odd decision for the publisher in the midst of a British crafts revival but perhaps a predictable one for a sniffy New York arts institution. Fashion is also largely ignored: Paco Rabanne makes it, but not more recent technical innovators like Issey Miyake (whose supplier Eiji Miyamoto does squeeze a quarter-column). We couldn’t spot any mention of training shoes or mobile telephones, which we’ve noticed have some quite interesting designs these days to appeal to the young folk.

The introduction notes that ‘significant automobile designers’ have been added, but BMW design head Chris Bangle, probably the most hated man in the field at the moment and for that reason alone a worthy entry, is absent. Architects are patchy: there are practical justifications for omitting newcomers like Future Systems, who’ve only risen to A-list status during the final stages of the book’s production, but where’s Archigram? Why Norman Foster and not Richard Rogers (or his collaborator Renzo Piano), Hadid and not Libeskind?

An obvious comparison is with Charlotte and Peter Fiell’s Industrial Design A-Z (Taschen, 2000), if only because its cover is the same colour. The Taschen book is less than half the size but more than twice the fun. Sadly, it doesn’t seem to be in print at the moment. If you do feel the need for a Design Encyclopedia, put this one on the shelf, not the coffee-table, and remember to dust it once a year.

First published in MacUser, 15 October 2004

Tagged as: Books, Design, MacUser, Reviews