Is the death of American design greatly exaggerated?  

Very interesting article....
I lost interest in modern new designers when the Memphis stuff came out in the 1980's. I thought that much of it was derivative and the brighter colored wood treatments were not appealing to me.
At about that time, the mid-century revival was in full swing and my tastes went instead to Nelson, Eames, Flo. Knoll, McCobb, Aalto, Kjaerholm, and others.
About the only really original and satisfying revolutionary designs in the last 20 years (for me) is the Stumpf/Chadwick Equa and Aeron chairs. I have two Equas chairs and one Aeron chair in my house (I'm sitting on the Aeron right now). They fit in fine with mid-century stuff.

Modernist design contributed to the commoditization of furniture...
by developing international form and materials languages. This has lead to most furnishings becoming mass producible and to designs that differentiate by superficial variations applied to basic forms. There is no need for a design auteur in many cases, because past design auteur's principles are widely, if inauthentically, disseminated through out furnishings.
My analogy for all this would be from computer programming, where the early brilliant programmers developed elegant routines for many computing activities; then over time, these elegant routines were turned into programming objects that could be cut and pasted. The problem of course is that as the cutting and pasting occurs, there once elegant routines become sub-routines in a large routine that gets increasingly complex and inelegant in its operation and out put. Programmers begin to start including many lines of extraneous programming in the programming object to get perhaps just one small portion of the object's function. In computing, the increasing CPU speeds and data storage media and reading componentry speeds make up for the vast, ungainly software that is being created by object oriented programming. And this accretion of junk code and cumbersomeness seems, so far, to have no upper limit, so long as the hardware can accelerate its rate of processing.
How shall I put this? It is good not to reinvent the wheel all the time, but it is also good to invent what is needed, not just include a bunch of steadily accreting junk information.

cont.
Some paradigms in programming and in design have long lives. Accretion based on them is a feasible thing and so continues, for better or for worse. Computing is doing adequately without a lot of the great early geniuses of programming--the programmers who could and did do a lot with a little. I suppose one could say the same for design. When one sits on a particle board chair from Ikea descended from the modernist legacy, but designed by an engineer in Denmark and built in Taiwan, it is sufficient in some ways, even if it is not a tour de force example of design by Hans Wegner. But at some point, one has the hunch that a new paradigm, or perhaps as the neo functionalists out their seem to be doing, a deeper legacy will have to be resorted to get rid of a lot of the accreting junk information in programming (and by analogy in design).
But we ought to learn from the glaring mistake of the moderns (who did soooooo many other things so well). We have to be careful what we throw out. Things are always sensitively dependent on what we start out assuming is crucial. The moderns assumed that form was crucial and the thing in need of purification. In so doing, they sewed the seeds of throwing out the functionalist legacy and reducing much design to a closed loop exploration of form that ultimately lead not to the democracy of space that they hoped for, but to the dictatorship of form--with all its mass and weight and afunctionality--the very afunctionality that modernity sought to escape in the first place.
To elaborate a bit further and more deeply, again, to avoid the modern's mistake of focusing to simplistically on one aspect of design needing redesign (i.e., form), let us explore the programming metaphor through nature's own programming language--genetic information.
The DNA molecule was for quite some time after its discovery by Crick and Watson understood to contain about 80 percent junk information in its helix. But nearly half a century after the discovery, science is beginning to recognize that the 20 percent useful information and 80 percent junk information was gross oversimplification. Increasingly, the junk portion is beginning to be understood as three things: a) some [perhaps a lot of]useful information for functions not previously understood; b) a reservoir of legacy genetic information enabling genetic diversity through random mutations; and c) a reservoir of legacy genetic information enabling human re-engineering of living things [experiments show we can do everything from change the genes in current use for rate of ripening in an avocado, to changing the genes no longer in use for making a chicken grow a tail].

cont.
When DAers turn up their noses at recent contemporary design, and turn instead to great designs of the past, they are in effect saying there has gotten to be too much accrued junk in the design program of too much stuff today. They are saying that so long as they can afford to turn to the past; that is, so long as there are good old designs left to be bought and utilized, they are going to do so. This invariably dikes the design river, if you can bear another metaphor, in a direction slightly back toward the great old designs. This is what neo-modern and modernist revival is all about. It is a half-step towards the original modernist icons. But he reason it is not fulfilling is that it bears within it much of the accrued junk information of recent design. It is not really a product of the same sensibility and design constraints as the orginal products and so it is not really as fulfilling.
This is why neo functionalism, much as I am an advocate of it, will have quite as much struggle down the road as neo-modern has today. Neo functionalism bears within it much junk information, even something so finely designed/architected/engineered as Renzo Piano's CalAcad in San Francisco.
At some point, some designers are going to have to reach very deep, and very far back, and with foundation to cap stone rethinking of certain problems to show that their is a deep legacy to tie into, a legacy that is embedded in the present and operating almost without our awareness. A deep legacy that actually solves some real and nagging problems in our environment, in our income asymmetries, and provides us with the great utilities of beauty and function.
It is for this reason that I am so excited by Koen's work in ceramics.
It is for the same reason that I am so interested in Piano's engineered functionalism.
Their works look like not only what they are made of, but how they are made.
And they not only produce things that meet the immediate needs of the consumer of the widgets, but they meet the needs of the environment and society, whether or not global warming is real, or a misperception; whether or not oil is scarce and formed by biomass, or plentiful and formed abiotically; whether or not carbon footprint is necessary to avert a climate catastrophy, or just a ruse to initiate the first global tax apparatus necessary to begin funding a nascent global government.

cont.
I refer to Koen and to Piano as examples, not ends. I refer to them as path finders of a design with a much broader and more elegant fit of feasibility, not as gifted men who can turn out a good pot, or build a pretty building.
There are no doubt many out there progressing in anonymity toward this next great phase/paradigm of design--a stage of an order of magnitude greater fit of feasibility--than what I know of presently.
But there are a great many, regardless of where they hail from, who are to design what water bugs are to a pond. They are just living off the surface tension. There is nothing morally wrong with this, but no one should waste even a second on such designers thinking that these are types of designers that can hew the path to the next phase of design. They are entertainers making good livings, while the next phase is being born.
Likewise, one cannot seriously expect the next phase to emerge soley from the loins of the modern, or even soley from the loins of the functionalist. Those traditions lit the path, but they could not create it; that work is slowly happening now. It could easily be still born, or short-lived, just as functionalist and modernist phases now appear to have been. But profound mutations offering deep fit and a long life of accretions do come along from time to time. And for the first time since the modern, I see designers like Koen and Piano intentionally reaching very deeply, deeper than the moderns reaching back to Greek antiquity. We are seeing contemporary designers begin to look as far back as they can look with the most contemporary of lenses they can muster. Out of such searching great transformation occur.
American design is no more dead than any other.
And it is just as alive.
It is, rather, caught up in a slowly emergent and rather globalist paradigm shift.
It will manifest its regionalists just as the Italian and French subsidized design industries have for awhile now manifested what will in time be understood to be regionalist entertainments during the paradigm shift of globalist design, too.
But the bigger and more suspenseful and interesting pictures is bound to be the globalist paradigm that emerges from the deepest explorations of what can design can be going on right now in our midst.

Thanks M_Andersen for...
...posting the Metropolis article. There are a number of aspects of the article that I like but they are few and far in between. Some anecdotal evidence seems pertinent, but most of it is just that, anecdotal. What I would pay most attention to and read most carefully, if I was a young designer?and not just young by hearth, that is, would be the growing possibilities of low investment and thus low risk production. It is a very promising challenge, open to all of us, to be given the possibility to produce a large number of products with relatively small means, in which subcontractors may or may not participate in the initial investment. I see in these low tooling cost technologies a way of re-establishing the dialogue with a consumer tired of being abused by advertising rather than being listened to. For many, too many years designers have convinced consumers that they were not educated enough to properly appreciate the qualities of design and modern design in particular. Tired of that discourse, marketers took over and invented pseudo-tools to measure the consumer?s interest and approval. Focus groups are probably the most blatant form of that abuse. Finally, acknowledging that they could not figure out the users and their expectations, they learned to manipulate the user?s expectations by introducing stereotype role models in advertising. Role models that became so un-realistic and so stereotyped that we now need reality shows and become "the biggest losers" to get back to the reality of our daily lives. I am writing this not as a statement but as a confession. I have been part of those who believed in educating the consumers and the manufacturers that tried to serve them. I wrote articles, gave interviews, prepared one, two and three day conferences and talked to Rotary, Optimist and Lions club gatherings, met with schools at all levels and with anyone else who wanted to put up with my unfounded prejudice regarding their presumed ignorance about design. What else could I do, faced on one hand with the success of those products I designed without conviction and the spectacular lack of success of those designs I was proud of. The same products that became part of museum collections, including the MoMA, that were rewarded with peer attention and awards of the most demanding competitions, were often ignored by the very people I had made them for, the users. So I left the world of manufacturing and made one step closer to the users by working in distribution. I learned about and used focus groups, I saw how companies known for being very innovative, actually lived on that part of their product assortment that was well established. Hard figures on how brands maintain their images with lost leaders and rely on old work horses to take care of the bottom line, crossed my desk and I started to realize to what extend we were losing touch with those we want to serve.

cont.
I finally decided to try to practice design in such a way that I could, as often as possible, look the users in the eyes and see there, either disillusion or satisfaction, by myself. It has been a very rewarding experience, and part of that experience is possible thanks to new manufacturing and communication technologies. I have always pretended that the art of ceramics is the oldest profession because it existed at a time when the lack of moral prejudice made prostitution unknown, so one could think that I am exercising an ancient art. The small scale could be seen as a confirmation that it is indeed a "primitive" operation and yet, I would not be able to operate it without the help of electronics, modern work organisation techniques and certainly not without state of the art communication. I am therefore pleased to read in this article an encouragement to young designers to skip the different stages we have had since WWII and jump ahead of older designers like myself and look the users straight in the eyes again! Yes, put all the users of your products on Facebook!
This is just the first part of my contribution on this subject. Afraid to irritate because of my crippled English, I can?t allow myself to write as extensively as DCWilson

When a brilliant mind finally admits total ignorance...
it almost inevitably makes its most profound break throughs; not the break throughs he might want,not the break throughs the world might want, but the only break throughs that are possible.
I post this verse of T. S. Eliot's again and again to any who might read it, rather than just look at the words.
"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always -
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are infolded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one."
--T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding, The Four Quartets

You guys
kinda lost me. Are we still on topic?

Definition of American can be problematic but here goes...
I've grabbed some from my memory banks and some from Googling some from DAs index.
Ceramics: Koen during his North American stage. Canada's military is now under USA's NORTHCOM and Canada and USA plan to form the North American Unions, so I am going to claim him.
Furnishings: New Yorker Todd Bracher, who works in Europe, because that seems to be where many of the jobs are for persons who want to work for producers preferring to produce minimalist neo-modern.
Cars-European--Wisconsinite Chris Bangle, who designed many of the most exciting and daring car designs of the last ten years, only to have his work undermined by BMW's unfortunate struggle with integrating electronics in "ultimate driving machines." By the time buyers were catching up with the Bangle look, and the other car companies were aping his side treatments and head light treatements, the still bungled electronics made the cars unpleasant to own. BMW, being an engineering driven company, dug in its heals about the lousy electronics and basically let Bangle take the fall by promoting him up to Director of Design for all things BMW and letting his assistant, Andrew van Hooeydonk (sp?), take over cars and tone it down into the recent BMW revival style. 20 years from now Bangle BMW's will stand out like rare abalone amidst a before and after stream of schnitzel a la holstein.

cont.
Cars--Japanese: Michelle Christensen got hired by Acura based on some drawings for an Acura cross over SUV. Basically they told her to finish the drawings and Acura supposedly for the first time ever just built what a newbie drew. Considering that cross over SUVs are basically old SUVs that car makers put some new zoomy, less utilitarian skins on, to try to lengthen the shelf life and profitability of an existing platform, what she has done for this bastardization of the automobile is nothing short of exciting and fresh. This young woman took a bunch of really homely down the road graphics Acura designers have been trying to find a way to integrate and she did in one drawing what all their other designers in house and out of house could not do...and she did it in a cross over SUV. This woman might well redefine auto styling as much as Bangle did in the previous decade.
Electronics: Steve Jobs, then Steve Jobs, oh, and then Steve Jobs, who has been smart enough to emmulate Braun's wonder designer, Dieter Rams. One might be tempted to call Jobs and his designers rip-off artists. They did afterall rip of the Apple OS's GUI and mouse from Xerox Parc word processors. But here's the thing: Apples PC's were better than Xerox's word processors in look and in function. And Apple's Macs (post his stupid candy colored transluscent period), iPods, Nanos, iPhones, do everything in digital electronics as well as, or better than anything Dieter ever did in household electronics. Look at this link comparing Dieter's designs with Apple's designs. The link is trying to say that poor Dieter was ripped off. But the fact is that as I look at each product, while I can see that they are hugely emulating Dieter's ten principles of design, they are frankly doing it as well or better than he did. Dieter arrived firstest, but Jobs and Apple product designers arrived with mostest. When you do it better, you don't have to apologize for copying. Ask Picasso, when he ripped off Matisse. Not saying Apple's product designers are the equal of Dieter, who is obviously a great pioneer/trail blazer, just saying they studied him an figured out how to do certain digital products what he does in home products.

cont.
Office Chairs: Don Chadwick's Aeron and Chadwick chairs get loved (even though he doesn't), because the guy just took mercy on office workers of the world and gave them the most comfortable chair he could think of, after they had been sitting in a lot of supposedly ergonomically correct shit racks for several decades. But if you move beyond that simple humanitarian accomplishment of Chadwick and his chairs, what you see is an American doing in chairs what Renzo Piano is doing in buildings. He is doing engineered functionalism and doing it waaaay better than most everyone else. His chairs not only look like what they are made of, they look like how they are made. This is the great gift a small subculture of designers have been offering the world, since sometime around the late 80s. It remains to be seen whether the world is ever going to wake up and recognize the gift, or just refer to it illiterately as high tech.
Ceiling Fans: Ron Rezak's Ball Fan ceiling fan is good heavy modern (as opposed to engineered functionalism), but the rest of his stuff is a more awkward perseveration on formalist thinking. Still, the Ball Fan is the Ball Fan.
Furniture: Vladimir Kagan's work annoys me, but one cannot look at his stuff without seeing formalist ideas being worked out beginning to end. Is formalism, especially heavy modernism, hopelessly and inappropriately superficial? Yes. Is it EVER going to admit it is a language doomed to be left behind by technology's relentless march? Is formalism, especially today's heavy modern iteration, heavy handed? Yes. Has almost everything contemporary and hyped in a popular design magazine like Dwell today been heavy handed and caught in the throes of the late heavy modern (the tyranny of surfaces and masses) since Dwell was born? Yes. Do I think heavy modern formalism is a populist cheapening of modernism and a dead end? Yes. But Kagan, even as an aging player, is still pushing out stuff that matters in the cul de sac of heavy modern, gauche as some of it is.

cont.
Furniture/Manufactured Housing: Christopher C. Deam, unfortunately, got seduced by the chimera of manufactured housing that entraps so many good designers with maverick streaks just under the surface. But his furniture, what little there is of it, suggests a formidable mind. If he can one day escape moribund formalism's often vice like grip on even the best minds, he could do some truly terrific stuff. I consider him part of the current American ferment in design. Deam, an obvious prisoner of the formalist legacy aka a The Design Matrix, could at any moment admit his total ignorance of design (despite his many accomplishments and awards) the same way Renzo Piano and Koen eventually had to do (despite their many accomplishments and awards), and, as Jim Morrison once sang, "break on through to the other side." It will take an agonizing crisis and a lonely sojourn off the path of adulation and acceptance for a time, but Deam could bring an enormous stimulus to design, if he ever were to experience the triumph of ignorance; i.e., if he ever does begin to know that he doesn't know what he doesn't know. The career peril of formalism is that it assumes waaaaaay too much and so reduces a designer, especially a great one, to a fabulously skilled illusionist, rather than a designer of tools to do things with.

cont.
Architecture/furniture: Frank Gehry, an often great architect, appears to be in a losing battle with formalism. He is rather like Patrick McGooan's secret agent in the impossibly great old UK TV series "The Prisoner." He knows the village of formalism he has helped construct and yet rebelled against is a prison. He knows he must escape. He tries and tries to bend and deform and break the formalism he was born into, just as McGoohan tries again and again to escape the prison village of cold war intrigue and paranoia that he was born into. But just as every time McGoohan nears escape he is caught up in an inexplicable, abstract sphere that engulfs him, Gehry is caught up in his own increasingly bizarre effort to transcend formalism with formalism.
Hey, I could go on and on here citing more and more examples of American designers who are slugging it out with some significance in the ferment. I could go on and on here citing the ferment in America involving moribund formalism and the vital, emerging but still nascent engineered functionalism--a ferment that is going on, it appears, in most of the G20 societies. So what's the point of going on? The answer to the question is no. American design is not dead. And it is not only not dead, it appears to be in one of its great fermentation phases. A period when one legacy is popular but in inexorable eclipse, and another is barely on the rise, and when unforeseen events might well likely conspire with the ferment in process to surprise us with something entirely different than each of the two poles described. Two great wars conspired in the 20th Century to tip America away from the dominant aesthetic movements of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Similarly large events could alter the course of design in this century as well.