Gerlof's blog

The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum began the National Design Awards in 2000 to honor the best in American design. In the museum’s words, the program “celebrates design in various disciplines as a vital humanistic tool in shaping the world, and seeks to increase national awareness of design by educating the public and promoting excellence, innovation, and lasting achievement.”

If design has an Oscar, the National Design Award is it. The honor is taken seriously. Nominations are solicited from advisors in every state of the union. The submissions of entrants are reviewed with great care over a two-day period by a panel of judges (which included me this year). Three individuals or firms are announced as finalists in each of six categories: architecture, landscape architecture, interior design, product design, fashion design, and communication design. Finally, the winners in those categories are announced, along with special awards that include honors for “Design Mind” and Lifetime Achievement.

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Print advertisement for Polaroid. Copy by William Casey, photograph by Bert Stern, art direction by Helmut Krone, Doyle Dane Bernbach, 1958

A strange gulf exists today between the worlds of design and advertising. That makes it easy to forget that one of the greatest designers that ever lived was an advertising art director: Doyle Dane Bernbach’s Helmut Krone.

Long before branding became a buzzword, Krone intuitively understood how graphic design could define an institution’s personality. “The page, ” he once said, “ought to be a package for the product. It should look like the product, smell like the product…Every company, every product, needs its own package.” Without ever designing a logo — often without even using a logo — he created corporate images that endure to this day. How many companies can be said to “own” a typeface the way that Volkswagen does Futura Bold? They have Helmut Krone to thank for that.

Designing anything synthetic is driven by the opposing desires to replicate and transcend reality. On one hand, the virtual is compelling only in so far as it connects to real experience. On the other hand, there are plenty of things about real life that most people would rather leave behind. This paradox has been with us since the days of Mary Shelley, but these opposing forces have always yearned for some sort of integration or synthesis.

Edward Castronova’s recent book Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games reveals how pressing this issue will be in the coming decades. Synthetic Worlds is the first comprehensive study of inhabitable online spaces like MMORPGs (Massively Multi-player Online Role-Playing Games). It is filled with staggering statistics: over 10 million people currently spend over 25 hours a week in a synthetic world; the number of synthetic worlds is doubling every two years; and by 2030 the population of synthetic worlds will reach 100 million. If you had the opportunity to design an entire world for 100 million people, with no physical or material limitations, what would you keep?