Blog Reviews

Designboom - CUT 'N' PASTE




Designboom is an internationally recognized website that looks at exposing issues of design to both designers and the wider community. Though the site deals with all disciplines of design, it shows particular interest in the field of industrial design.

Equipped with anything and everything to do with designs, from interviews, histories of designs, pictures, instructions on methods of designing even its own gift shop. Seemingly with every base covered, Designboom.com also comes with its own blog or web-log.

This blog is upheld by a group of designers who are sanction by Designboom to post. Entitled: CUT ‘N’ PASTE the blog does exactly that, in that it is a collection of short blog posts which expose audiences to pieces of design from all over the world. These posts are means by which readers can be entertained and or informed at once with some blogs addressing important issues and others admittedly “throwaways.” According to to Amy Gahran, founder of http://www.contentious.com/, there are seven basic formats in which bloggers can blog. Cut ‘n’ Paste’s best falls under the brief remark category which stipulates short posts of “1-3 paragraphs long” about anything and everything. In this particular blog’s case, the remark is often referencing the picture/s it is coupled with.

Furthering the use of Gahran’s proposed formats as a means of analyzing Cut ‘n’ Paste, the posts on this particular website, while chronologically displayed are also sorted and able to be found under different “categories”. This puts Cut ‘n’ Paste in line with Gahran’s Series Posting style – a collection of blog postings that are linked together to “form a greater whole”.

With such short intermitted pieces of writing, it is hard for such a blog go beyond the early stages of King and Kitchener’s Reflective Judgment Model. At this stage, critics criticize without questioning the veracity of the sources or with a “level of assumed correctness.”
“Wheelchair Car” posted 27.06.2006 by andy b demonstrates this clearly by briefly explaining the operations of a newly design car for disabled drivers. From here the author jumps straight into the assumption that this is a “great advance for disable drivers” as it removes the need to hoist themselves into conventional cars. Without questioning the sources of his post, and establishing the perspective from which they are writing, andy b is limited in his ability to reach and go beyond the Quasi Reflective stage of Kitchener and King’s model.

While Cut ‘n’ Paste seems to fall short of being an effective piece of criticism by King and Kitchener’s standards, it fulfils William Attoe’s notion of “descriptive criticism” in that, “it aims not at judging nor at interpreting but at helping people to see what is there."

What is largely positive for Cut ‘n’ Paste is that it definitely fits the mould in Rick Poynor’s search for design writing and design criticism to be written not just for the academically elite but for anyone who cares to read it. As Poynor aptly puts, “critical journalism for a broad, smart, demanding readership that might include academics, but was open to anybody who shared the writers’ perspectives, passions and tastes.”

I would like to echo the thoughts of Attoe and Poynor in saying that design criticism should not be aimed and any group of elites or be for the purpose of insulting and intimidating for this will limit its effectiveness and popularity not only among designers but in the public arena. The way in which Cut ‘n’ Paste exposes the public to design and prompts personal judgment rather than providing it, not only avoids polarising the reader but also engages the reader, in the process of criticism regardless of who they are and whether they choose to publicise they’re judgments - A step which will ensure that criticism remains an important part of design in the years to come.