Beware the Backlash: a Rising Tide of Disaffection Towards Design

There's a storm brewing in designland.

A backlash is gathering momentum, and what's more, some of its chief dissidents are design's leading lights.

Philippe Starck sheepishly peered out of the cover of December's Icon magazine, under the "I killed design" banner.

In an Observer article a few months earlier Stephen Bailey, the fiery British design critic, exclaimed "When I hear the word 'designer', I reach for my chainsaw."

This rising tide of disaffection tends to share two themes: a distaste for the superficiality of design's media-celebrity nexus; and a growing discomfort with design's role in generating 'useless stuff'.

These two complementary critiques could be abbreviated as Anti-fluff and Anti-stuff.