Alice Rawsthorn  I’ve always loved writing, reading, stories and narratives of all types ever since I was a child. Writing and talking has always been my way of expressing myself and reading the writing of others is a great joy for me. I also had a fairly scrappy formal education, so writing and reading were ways of educating myself. I went to Cambridge University and began by studying law. In the 1970s, clever girls were told to study either medicine or law so they could have a formal career, which was ridiculous because both sectors were intensely misogynistic at the time. All my female friends who became doctors or lawyers had a really tough time. I wanted to be a human rights lawyer, but realized that studying law in order to train to become a professional lawyer wasn’t giving me the kind of intellectual stimulus I felt I’d lacked at school and desperately wanted from university. So luckily at Cambridge, you can do two part degrees. And so for the second part, I read art and architectural history.

The course was incredibly old-fashioned. This was the late 1970s, the punk era. But the Cambridge art history course was very much stuck in the 19th century, or so it seemed to me. There was no possibility of studying modern or contemporary art at all. But it did give me a wonderful introduction to art history and it had an amazing library full of art, design, architectural books from all over the world. Among the subscriptions were Italian magazines such as Domus and Abitare. At the time, Domus was edited by Alessandro Mendini, and Ettore Sottsass was the art director. It was a particularly dynamic time for the magazine when postmodernism was really exploding in architecture, and Mendini was an extraordinary editor, very intellectually nimble and agile. This was my introduction to design, which was not a phenomenon much discussed in Britain in the 1970s, certainly not in cultural terms as this medium inextricably linked to and immersed in all the things I was completely obsessed about at the time – film, literature, politics, psychology, style culture, music, social sciences. And that’s how I’ve thought of it ever since, as this immersive discipline that’s engaged with every aspect of our lives, a ubiquitous force that influences everything we do in every possible context.

AR  When I left Cambridge, I got a place on the graduate training scheme run by the company that owned the Times Newspaper group. It was a very old-fashioned, but very pragmatic and very effective introduction to journalistic practice. I then worked for the Financial Times for nearly twenty years, writing about economics, politics, and corporate affairs. I worked as a foreign correspondent in Paris, and when I returned to London in the mid-1990s, I wrote about the creative industries. They were really exploding in Britain at the time, becoming an increasingly important economic force. They’d never really been taken seriously until then, so it was a great opportunity for me to pioneer a new area of coverage for the FT that was very much aligned with my own passions. Throughout this time, I sustained my interest in the visual arts, architecture, and design that I’d discovered in Cambridge. I’ve been fascinated by it ever since. So I read all the design books that were available, and spent a week on a design history research programme at the National Art Library. And after nearly twenty years at the FT, I had an opportunity to reinvent my relationship with the paper and become design and architecture critic. In 2006, I joined the New York Times – or what was then the International Herald Tribune, the international edition of the paper – and worked there for twelve years as design critic. I wrote a weekly design column, which was a fantastic opportunity because the IHT had never had a design critic before, and they were completely open to me writing about it as I wished. I wasn’t constrained by the usual clichés of design writing, predominantly focusing on interior design, product design, or furniture design. I could write about them if I wanted to, but I could write about my broader vision of design as a social, political, and ecological tool as well. I made it clear from the start that I would need to be free to be critical of design. At the time, most design writing tended to focus on good design, and on championing design, which was understandable because it was a very marginalised discipline. However, I believed that if we were to have a really robust critical discussion about design, it needed to address the negatives as well. And the paper was completely happy to allow me to do that.

I’ve always felt that I’ve treated my role as a design critic as being a foreign correspondent, where you have to analyse anything and everything that can happen at any given moment. One of the things I love about design is that you have to dive in and out of so many different fields. It’s a constant solace for your curiosity and a constant education, and the practice and possibilities of design are continually reinvented. Your thinking can never be static; you always have to reassess it, which is very exciting.