“Is a Designer Now a Luxury Consumer?” A Conversation With Samuel Ross

In the context of a late capitalism in maybe one of its final cycles and the idea of postmodernity becoming a bit more steadfast—I think the physical rhythm of commercial design offers the practitioner more structure to be able to forecast and have a much more intricate strategy on how they can implement a level of storytelling through commercial vehicles. So, to a degree, I'd say yes. I also think within the last decade, the generation who have come out of design school, in particular architecture school and art school, if you look at the curriculum and the prospectus that we were kind of raised on, it's still Superstudio and Lella and Massimo Vignelli—that ilk of radical Italian design which really took the world by chokehold conceptually in the '60s and '70s but possibly didn't have enough of the fiscal backing or equity to be able to take some of those concepts through to proof of concept. Whereas now, open source LLCs and limited companies can be started overnight. This idea of entrepreneurial autonomy meeting trained design and art school practices is almost forming a bit of a hyperbole. And that semblance is giving the artist, to a degree—whether they wear the mask of an architect or a fashion designer or an industrial designer—it's giving the artist far more autonomy and control to be more radical. Because there's a plurality to design culture at the moment. It doesn't matter if it's design with a big D or a small D, it's far more plural.

It is far more democratic than it possibly has been over the past 15 to 10 years. If I think about who design is for, it's brilliant to see a wider lens—a more anamorphic lens—be applied to it to enable more people to be enveloped in good design, thus increasing the quality of life. Is design more diverse today? Well, I actually gave a quote to the British Design Council—they published their findings and report for fiscal year ’23 and annual calendar year 2022—and some of the statistics, in terms of the level of inclusivity and diversity in relation to the populous, were pretty stark and pretty shocking.

There's a lot of work to be done in terms of diversity. It’s not realistic to expect a one-to-one ratio, because that's not how postcolonial countries are built. But there can still be far more brevity and acknowledgement at least in terms of contributing to design that feels more diverse. And I do believe we are going down that pathway. There has been substantial change. Even recently for the Hublot Design Prize, it was near enough impossible to name industrial designers and notable graphic designers of color that have come through the British design or art system over the past 25 to 30 years. So there's still a lot of change to be done, but the internet is assisting with a far more democratic way of achieving diversity in design culture.

This brings forward a load of talks I've had with close peers and friends over the past quarter. And those conversations have been surrounding the designer becoming the consumer—which I find problematic as a reality. I think we are finding that a lot of designers, and I'm speaking honestly here, are actually onboarding themselves, or being onboarded, to become luxury consumers. And then they of course become a proxy for larger conglomerates, and we know how that system works.

But the intentionality of the artist historically—and the designer and the architect—is closer to that of a shaman, where you are supposed to be able to convey a level of depth and truth and expression that lives beyond the point of purchase. So I think there’s a true delineation between the extension of the luxury consumer and the traditional designer. [The luxury consumer] is used almost as a shell company to filter and onboard new demographics. [The traditional designer] operates with parity in what they design, versus having maybe too much heavy pull into consumerism. And we all have our vices. But that has been a huge shift between, “Is a designer a designer? Or is a designer now a luxury consumer?” If we're talking about the next era of fashion and aspiration, we do need to start putting together more of a fixed picture of what's actually happening.

I see creative expression as a liberty. And historically it's a liberty that should've always been a default mode of being and way of seeing. But it hasn't been historically. You just need to flip through Edo period feudal systems, anything pre-French Revolution in Europe—[these historical periods] didn't necessarily afford a level of creative expression, even if we go right back and we start looking at the advent of cellulose birch trees into paper and parchment only being accessible to a particular ilk within Europe to be able to write and express and to learn how to write. I'm not saying that those struggles that have been met historically by forefathers even parallel what it means to have an NDA and to not be able to, let's say, design a chair if you are only paid to, or contractually obliged to, design shoes.

But I think there is something deeply philosophical about looking at what makes a citadel work, and citadels live beyond a financial system, which can typically expire and change. To go back to one of the earlier notes, this idea of making and crafting and engineering—being able to take an intangible thought and materialize that into a physical solution or expression—lives beyond any transactional system. It's intrinsically what makes us human and is part of the human experience. So, liberty and independence are synonymous, and I really couldn't see a way that one could separate the two.

Yes, my commercial work is. My commercial work isn't driven by individualistic desires. I see far more good that can come from decentralizing and sharing opportunity and reach, and consolidating required intentions rather than simply holding laurels. It should be well noted that if you have the opportunity to have some type of commercial success, that there should be a feedback loop to those who co-opted and compounded together to elect you into the position of commercial success. So this takes shape through radical hiring policies, through grant programs, through advisory boards, through building small groups and creative communities, through donations. Sometimes just through time and giving time to people. And through a lot of truth, as well.

You know, sometimes the obligation is simply to tell the truth of what it may take to opt into a system or to onboard or prepare someone to onboard into an industry or into a particular position. It's so transactional. Point one being purchase, and point two being conversion, and point three being scalability—to sever point four, which is a composite of the first three points, just doesn't feel morally correct. That's just my view on it personally. Some people just want to scale, and it's just a business and they want to take, and fine, and that's still OK. Because there's not necessarily a right or wrong, but I do believe in just causes. And maybe that's really poetic and romantic and spiritual, but I do believe in the just cause.

Physical space, liminal space, retail space is what the courtyard was within the Venetian Renaissance to now. That is where all ilks, backgrounds, demographics, and communities coalesce and overlap. And there's an opportunity to find common ground between the populous. There's an opportunity to take the behaviors that brilliant public art and sculpture also carry and apply them into a frequently congregated area with heavy footfall. That proximity can be conveyed and projected through retail design and space. Because it's the oscillations of engagement which happen within physical space. It's the temperature; it's the sound; it's the temperature of the lighting; it's the wind speed; it's the elevation or inset of height; it's the coarseness or juxtaposition of material; it's the reverb of sound. There's a real opportunity for commercial spaces to become shell education centers. And I'm obsessed with that prospect.