Taking the pulse of the people

What is America's favorite example of good design? The Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York has been asking that question this autumn by urging people to vote for their favorites in the first People's Design Awards.

So far, the leading contender is the Katrina Cottage emergency housing project that brings a whiff of Wisteria Lane to disaster- struck New Orleans. Designed by Marianne Cusato, it is the same size and price as the government's basic trailers, which are shipped into disaster zones to shelter the homeless. The difference is that the Katrina Cottage is clad Desperate Housewives-style in pastel- colored wooden panels and can be speedily converted into a bigger house whenever the owner wishes.

Supporters of the Katrina Cottage will discover whether its luck has held on Wednesday, when the Cooper-Hewitt announces the winner of the 350-plus nominated projects. Aiming to raise public awareness of design, the People's Design Awards follows similar design polls held this year in Britain and the Netherlands. It coincides with the long-running National Design Awards, in which the Cooper-Hewitt invites prominent designers to honor their peers. "We felt that in the age of Wikipedia we should ask the public to vote too," said Paul Warwick Thompson, director of the Cooper-Hewitt.

What does the response tell us about America's perceptions of design?

For starters, it suggests that design is one of those subjects on which most people have opinions, often strong ones. Public votes and prizes are precarious projects for museums, accustomed to exploring subjects with scholarly subtlety in exhibitions, rather than delivering absolute judgments by naming winners and losers. As the Turner Prize for contemporary art proves year after year at the Tate Britain, awards are remarkably effective at generating media coverage and public debate, and at provoking controversy and accusations of sensationalism.

The People's Design Awards are no exception. Some 80,000 people have visited its Web site, and the Cooper-Hewitt has decided to make the awards an annual event. However, the museum has been criticized for allowing people to nominate whatever they want, regardless of when it was created or its country of origin, and to decide whether it qualifies as design. As a result, the nominees range from computers and buildings to public sculpture. This self-policing policy is true to the spirit of the Internet but has infuriated some in the design industry. "It diminishes design to say that it can mean anything, and that the 'best' can be selected with absolutely zero criteria," said one critic, who declined to be named. And it has led to criticism of the Cooper-Hewitt, as the self-policing policy has enabled companies, notably Jeep, to nominate their own products. Similarly, people criticized the inclusion of a medical prescription system sold by the Target retail group, which sponsors the National Design Awards. (Thompson said that as the nomination came from a member of the public, it would have been unfair to exclude it.) Much of the debate about the awards takes place on the blogs accompanying each nominee. Take the Katrina Cottage. Hailed by its admirers as an inspired solution to a humanitarian crisis, it is panned by one critical blogger as: "Dreadful. I wonder if this is for a design award or for sympathy-driven opportunism." Conversely, cries of favoritism toward Target are outnumbered by blogs praising the clarity of its prescription labels and the provision of colored rings for family members to identify their pill bottles, thereby reducing the risk of taking someone else's medicine.

These personal reflections on how design can improve lives are exactly what the Cooper-Hewitt wanted from the awards and, Thompson believes, justify the decision to make them self-policing. As design is part of everyday life, people tend to feel confident at expressing their opinions, and the blogs give them a medium for doing so.

The same everyday spirit is evident in the choice of nominees, which are mostly contemporary and American, despite the lack of restrictions on nominations. Just as a country's list of best- selling books can offer insights into its collective obsessions whether diets or wealth, sex or depression so, too, can its polls of popular designs.

Both the British and Dutch popular design awards were won by aircraft the supersonic Concorde and Fokker F-27, respectively. Each is an inspiring example of engineering design, an area in which Britain, in particular, has a long tradition. Similarly, technology an industry where America is still a world leader fares well in the People's Design Awards, with nominations for Apple's iMac and iPod, as well as for a $100 laptop for children in developing countries that was designed by fuseproject and MIT Media Laboratory. In contrast, there are few nominees from the car industry, once a source of pride, but now in decline. Other popular sectors reveal a less confident sense of national identity. One is health care, reflecting mounting concern about America's health system. Another, for similarly topical reasons, is disaster relief, illustrated by the inclusion of the Katrina Cottage, the $100 laptop and the PlayPump water system designed by Ronnie Stuiver to enable kids to pump clean water in an enjoyable way.

Some observers suspect that people voted for humanitarian design projects because they thought they should. "The design community is trying to get engaged in problems they think of as useful," observed the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister. Others hope that, whatever the motivation, their inclusion will raise the general level of design debate.

"Americans have big consciences," said Paola Antonelli, curator of design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. "Once confronted with this kind of socially relevant design, people will find it hard to revert to their standard idea of design luxurious, out--of-the- ordinary objects."

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