Critical Critters

Warhol at his very best: truth laid bare.

An idea I touched on briefly in my first post that I have spent the last decade or so turning over and over in my mind like a slowly wilting Caesar salad is that of criticism. More specifically I am talking about the impulse to criticize, the need to prescribe solutions, the expression of a desire for other than what is. Criticism takes many forms but ultimately comes from a mismatch between our projection and our perception; the world we see is not the world we want to see. At heart, critics are dejected romantics. The essence of our inner critic is the two-word opening, "if only..." Deep down we hope for the best, and because of it, we swim in our repeated disappointments. "I wouldn't have done it like that.." "It would have been better if..." "they should have.." "It isn't quite..." and on and on. The critic's mind is never at rest; it is always running and looking and assessing and judging. When the mind is troubled, the critic is busy at work, criticizing. When the mind is at rest, the critic ceases to exist. The Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu wrote in the 4th century BCE,

"

If an expert does not have some problem to vex him, he is unhappy!

If a philosopher's teaching is never attacked, he pines away!

If critics have no one on whom to exercise their spite, they are unhappy.

All such men are prisoners in the world of objects.

"

The world of objects happens to be the playground of the designer. And one might say that the critic is the inner eye of the designer. Therefore we could conclude that the world of objects is, for us designers, both our playground and our prison. Anybody who has trained as a designer will be intimately familiar with this emotional duality—the flash of inspiration and the late-night despair. One might label this dual-faced nature of the designer as critic on one hand and creator on the other. But inside the designer, the critic and the creator are not so much coexistent as mutually exclusive at any given moment. First the critic makes a point, then the creator gets to work in response. Then the critic evaluates the creator's work, and the creator responds again. This is one way to describe the design process, where two contradictory sides of the designer carry out a back-and-forth dialogue that manifests in the changing form of the design object.

But designers know that even this is too neat to describe the true design process, which has many loops and ugly dead-ends and does not match up well to a linear progression. It's closer to animal evolution, where misfits and stragglers appear briefly in the fossil record until a hurried extinction wipes them out, and only the evolutionary success stories adapt and proliferate to one day breathe our 21st century air. Just as we can trace a living animal's evolution neatly up the evolutionary tree to its primordial origin without so much as a passing mention of the millions of oddball branching failures along the way, we publicly expound the success stories of our design process as a simple A-B-C narrative progression. In the end, it's easier to tell a simple lie than a complicated truth, and the design process is a complicated one to try to describe. All this is to say that. within the designer, a very complex process unfolds from the interaction between the critic and the creator. But getting back to Chuang Tzu's comment, if the critic is the other face of the designer, how can one be critical without being a prisoner of our own criticism? Are we doomed to be dissatisfied with the world?

In college we would jokingly refer to the guest critics as critters, perhaps to ease some of the nerves before our crapshoot final reviews. I've always liked the label because it rounds off the sharp edges from the classic image of the critic—thorough, exacting, unyielding, eager to exploit any available weak point toward their rhetorical ends. Critter, meanwhile, conjures associations with forest friends, fluffy animals with quirky habits and strong preferences for certain nuts and seeds. There are designers out there, yours truly among them, that find themselves floating down the street like a sour-faced wraith, criticizing this and that and dreaming up half-baked schemes for how to go about fixing it all piece by piece. This is the critic mindset: never satisfied, ever judging our imperfect world for being the way it is. There are other designers out there (far fewer, I suspect) who observe the world from a gently swaying branch, drawn to create by the pure joy of the act: ever inspired by the possibilities that spring forth as a result of the imperfection of our world. This is the elusive critter, who does not pursue solutions to problems, but simply lives inside the continual metamorphosis of form. For critters, criticism is just part of the unfolding process of living well. Thus my slow journey is underway to transform the bitter inner critic into the joyful critter.