Re-Imagining Value

The recent scandal by the minions of Murdoch had me thinking about the value of honesty and if in fact, that was even a value to media moguls. We certainly know it was not important to the banking system, which still honest dutiful citizens are paying the price of. But now in the midst of seeing another industry fall fray to the question of honest work, more and more it seems a pervasive distrust in all of the bigger systems that run our world is warranted. Only now when Murdoch’s $12 billion takeover of British Sky Broadcasting is threatened do we see people act.

The NYTimes described New Corp as “once seen as such a powerful force that politicians and police officers walked in fear of it, fearing its disclosures and courting its support.” Frightening! It’s no surprise that this is the case with much of the corporations that dictate our economic system. Should any system be designed in such a way that civil leaders out of fear, fail to mitigate the greed and vanity of a few? The problem stems from systems put into place based on the assumptions (not truth) that: limitless growth is praise-worthy, consequences do not exist, and business leaders are immortal. It should not take rocket science to figure out that in an ever-changing world of complexity, effectiveness and efficiency are going to take more than relying on assumptions from a bygone era.

I do not think all of the onus should fall onto Design to “change the world!”, but I certainly think that specific methodologies can be learned from Design that can help to re-shape and reverse the fallacies of larger systems dependent on big-business industries. ‘Design thinking’ might be thought of as a sort of tactic for a bottom-up approach to demanding the creation of new-types of value, perhaps even honesty. Can we not think of honesty as a preferred mode of acting and use tools such as ‘prototyping’ to try to think of systems that act in this very way? Can we, as John Thackara points to, push the thousands of grassroots projects around the world to create a restorative economy? It is happening on the micro- level, but I wonder what type of systems thinking will be needed to push these initiatives to the macro-level. We need interventions on all levels of a system. No paradigm shift can occur from a single source. With all of the effort from the various bottom-up projects across the world, consultancies that are charmed by the idea of ‘design thinking’ could put it to use by not making better business for their clients, but better our world. Transformation is going to take a lot of re-imagining where we place value; and values change systems.

Design and Sustainability

The meaning of Sustainability has bended and stretched in such an inclusive way that we are not sure how to even talk about it. We know it matters, but what is its relationship to Design and how will it be possible to create a political project around it? Is ‘sustainment’, as Tony Fry calls it, design’s specific project? It is a complex question that is impossible to tackle without first having an understanding of the capabilities of Design and to know what Sustainability is for the twenty-first century.

I tend to think that major system changes must occur to make sustainability a performative reality, but after listening to some of the ideas put forth by Cameron Tonkinwise, I’ve now begun to think about how we can reverse our values within the system. To root solutions back into our relationships with objects and each other. Objects have a pull on us, a powerful one, which tends to decide the concepts we value and the infrastructure of our culture. Think of the pull of ‘car culture’, the design of the car eventually deciding the infrastructure of our cities and therefore the behaviour of our culture. We are pulled into the objects we design. But many of us are not aware of this, we are in some ways inept in understanding human relations and our relations with things. If we want to change our culture into one that is considerate of the environment, of living well with one another, in many ways it will have to be through a change of social decisions. For example, giving more value and meaning to ‘borrowing’, ‘sharing’, or ‘lending’ of objects over the high valued notion of ‘brand new’. Part of the pull of objects is the momentum of the practices that are integrated into our everyday life. These practices are also built upon assumptions, including that humans are much more sustainable than we actually are.

If policy is slow to change, in the meantime Design can make a project of its own to create a critical consciousness, which will make a critical consumer,  ultimately changing policy. Could it be possible for the consumer to demand sustainment? It is not just a simple choice of buying organic at the supermarket or recycling your milk cartons, but making the choice to support sustainability, to support the policies that put it into place and to make a life choice to value sustainability. It is about questioning the social values that capitalism itself put into place: Is comfort really what we think it is? Are we really all that pleasure driven as we believe? Do we really prefer the private over the collective? These are the types of questions that begins to drive sustainability as a politics.

Sustainability for the twenty-first century needs to be about redirecting our value flows, to re-root them in the social and not in the abstract world of the economy. Design can help this process by reconfiguring our everyday practices. For example the idea of Zipcar for my professor made him realize his behavior towards the car. It made him aware of perhaps how little or how much you need a car. It can make something often thought of as a given, such as “I need a car,” feel like a luxury.  Or businesses, like Snapgoods, which allow consumers to borrow something that they might only need for a temporary amount of time, rather than buying a new one.

In many ways Design can be the change agent we need for sustainability. Instead of lobbying for the status quo, it should begin to ask why we place value on certain things. To not just put things in the world, but understand its sequence and growth in the world. It should begin to break down the quantifying systems that dictate our values and behaviors, which in essence mean it must be political. Sustainability is not going to just happen all of a sudden, it will have to be learned. We will have to learn a new way of making and doing that is sustainable.

Conversations at DCRIT Conference

Some really interesting propositions at the “Present Tense: The 2011 D-Crit Conference” happening TODAY! I suggest going to check out not only all the interesting thesis presentations by the DCrit students, but the Rob Walker’s talk on “Imaginary Objects and Fictional Critiques” could be interesting. Some of his thoughts seem right up my ally, especially when he says, “Objects tell stories, and we all tell stories about our objects. But not all stories are equal, and not all stories are true. What role, then, might imagination, speculation, and outright fiction play in understanding, critiquing, and even influencing, our very real material culture? The answer is that these strategies are not merely useful, but vital.” Yes, I would have to agree. The imagination engages and like the art of the novel, fiction can reveal to us new ways of being. More about the conference here: http://dcrit.sva.edu/conference2011/#item_4740

The Art of Post-Its

Never thought I’d use so many post-it notes when studying design….

Master’s Exam in 16 days!!

Design and Change

What is the role of Change in Design or Design in Change?

Like ‘Synergy’ and the notion of ‘Sustainability’, ‘Design Thinking’ has fast become a new buzzword term. Unfortunately, with the market’s attraction to the potential money-value of these terms it has paralyzed ‘Design Thinking’ itself in becoming a viable force for change in our existing system. But, what is the actual change we are seeking? Within academia there is a general consensus, that our economy and politics, indeed even our dominant lifestyle needs revision if we our to sustain not only our population, but the fecundity of our Earth. Beyond imbuing change with such loaded requirements (not that I don’t think they are needed), I find the term ‘change’ itself interesting. My dictionary defines ‘change’ as:  to make the form, nature, content, future course, etc., of (something) different from what it is or from what it would be if left alone. The process of ‘what it is’ to ‘what it would be’ is, I believe key. Here we see that change is not inherent in any one thing, it is the multiple forces that energize a difference in the essence of a thing.

If we consider then  ‘change’ to be the working of multiple knowledge and action forces on a thing, we must consider how it might actually be possible to bring together these different forces towards an idea of betterment. I believe that we have to break out of our habitual modes of thinking and strive to think in a more active, plural, multi-layered way. Our modern sensibility, passed down from the Enlightenment, has engrained the need for outcomes and linearity, however, we are seeing in contemporary culture these systems don’t always hold up effectively. How can we make creative, multidimensional, global thought truly change the way we lead our lives and where we place value? I believe we can start by awakening our consciousness into understanding the structures and restricted domains of knowledge that press against us. This might be possible if we foreground ‘process’ over ‘outcome’, ask the question how over what, and consider other disciplines (the possible role of science in humanities). When we return the agency to people and things and away from the forces driving us (ones usually empathetic to capitalism), a change is fruitful. Drawing from the proposal of co-authorship by John Wood, the dualism between our Brain-Body network by William Connolly, and Tony Fry’s emphatic call for design as a politics, I see that there is an overall tendency to utilize creative modes of thinking in seeking larger paradigm changes. I created mind-maps in order to better understand the arguments posed by Connolly and Fry and my friend Jacquie made one for Wood below:

Connolly Brain-Body Network

Tony Fry Chapter 3

Synergy and Sympoieses

The reason I find it productive to look at these readings together is because all of them express a dissatisfaction in common perception, dense cultural processes not open to external influences, and structural boundaries drawn by institutions not open to complexity. If we consider: Connelly’s suggestion that  biology has an influence on the act of thinking and vise versa, as recent neuroscience and cultural theory has attempted to do, Fry’s total re-thinking of democracy as stated in his contemporary manifesto, and Wood’s proposal for partnerships and the mixing of specialized skills in creating a design proposal, we might gain a wider perspective by taking into consideration multiple insights. These unacknowledged influencescan be active in imagining change, and it is precisely the opening-up of imagination and the various articulations of change that makes the change.

Design and Ethics

Some important questions come about when thinking about Design and Ethics. Are they two separate things? Would a Design ethic be different from the ethic between human interactions? Is Design inherently good? (As many designers are fast to claim that it is not, which brings up the interesting difference in perspective of what design is capable of doing from a practitioners point of view). First, I think it is important to understand what ethics really are in the contemporary age we live in. Modern ethics are less concerned with codified morals and more concerned with the immanent relationships, which are highly situational in our globalized world. Or according to Zigmunt Bauman, ethics are learning how to be uncertain; learning how to be in our complex world and learning how to act well. When considering ethics in this way, we must also consider sustainability and a revision of our economy to one based on ecology, as the utmost considerations to integrate into the way we are.

What is Design’s role in this? If Design wants to be valued the way our culture values for example, Knowledge, then according to Peter Miller it needs to step up to the plate. Design can be the translation or meditative force working between knowledge and its various outcomes, however, if it only does ‘design thinking’ it does not become a viable methodology for preferred situations. Design can play a didactic role in informing the way we are with one another and more importantly the way we treat the world we are creating, but it needs to change the conversations that are happening into reflexive ones. As Clive Dilnot suggests, an ethic can come out of this. Design, when it acts ethically makes its users critical through the objects they use. Not simply by being critical, but through the affirmation of the critical, which can facilitate a new kind of ethics, and which is imperative in leading sustainability. On the other side of this, an ethics for design might be about not just giving people ‘stuff’, but developing people’s capabilities with already existing ‘stuff’. Methods such as ‘retro-fitting’ or re-use of long lasting materials might teach us to be a more conservative people. How can designers maximize the capabilities of objects already in existence, as well as the capabilities of the human, becomes critical when thinking about the metabolic structure of our economy now. In order to push the sustainability project this might be even more important.

I think in order for Design to be a type of ethic in itself, we have to recognize the contextual nature of design, the larger systems it is a part of, and to think about it as a cultural construct, then I think its ethics will become more obvious. Crucial to this, will be reclaiming Design back into the social sphere and away from the dominating market sphere as it is in today. Several start-up companies have begun to do this be inverting the system, so that social values and relations dictate flows of capital rather than vice-versa. Some good examples are Snapgoods, Quirky, and crowd sourcing sites such as Kickstarter. Though we do not know where businesses like these might lead us, they do offer a proposition, which is a definite start. We will only achieve a change through the courage of this type of trial and error.

Thinking Philosophy for Design

I have started ‘mapping’ thoughts from philosophy for design. In what way does Philosophy inform design, tell us about design, and also not tell us about design? When is philosophy not intelligent about design? An essential question for me is: why we are drawn to philosophy when we seek to explain Design? I started investigating insights from as early as Plato/Aristotle, moved to Kant, and continued on to reading some contemporary sociology and philosophy by Vattimo, Herbert Simon, among others. I tried to approach such dense questions, in a strategic way, so that I could connect reoccurring ideas and play around with the evolution of theories. A very messy timeline ensued.

The Work of the Blog

I cannot deny the irony in posting this bit of writing on a blog, though I am somewhat critical of the blogosphere I am also inclined to think positively towards its power in redefining our thinking in the 21C. This essay was based on an assignment that asked us to emulate Barthes as he tackles material culture in Mythologies. This is about the blog’s incredible hold on twenty-first century imagination. Consider this as almost a curious ode to a powerful artifact of our time.

The Work of the Blog

A form of communication, the blog is a believed symbol of free public space. As an oscillating combination of text, images, and media it functions as interactive commentary within an external network. It gives a political voice to the individual user, constituted by the desire to reveal experience. Belonging to a horizon not yet fully known, it hovers in a fetishized space, one that is part of the mystical fiction of pure uncontested democracy. A fiction held true by the powerful schizophrenic nature of a web of digitalized information deemed ‘accessible’ to all. The ideology of constant and open communication has us praising it as the apogee of the First Amendment, for we believe we are granted emancipation in the discursive space of the web.

No longer confined to the inert materials of everyday scenes, political voice is amplified through active virtual space. The form of this supposed democratic platform is absent of defined walls. It is imagined to grow simultaneously, while remaining contained within the hardware of a computer; systematically pumped with verbiage. Through a screen, its visible interface adopts numerous looks from the fading material world: a journal, photo album, book. The exact locale of its expression is unknown, lost in a labyrinth of code and displaced origins amongst a sea of reveries; however, its location in some imagined space is of no immediate interest. For the blog tantalizes us by inviting acts of democracy formerly felt restricted.

An abstract depository for the mind; the blog provides storage and access of data. The political economy extends itself to a remote database server, belonging to a shared network called ‘the web’, which transmutes our experience for us. Finally, the private interior space becomes a network open to the public. Coming closer to our eventual transformation to cyborgs, our psychological interiority is displaced by the psychology of open connected networks. Consequently, the inner is indiscriminately made outer unfettered by those debilitating human emotions. In this evolutionary unfolding the human mind is an accessible cross-fertilization of global ideas, with expression no longer limited by the sober decorum of social contracts. Globally synchronized networks mimic the combinatorial possibilities of the atom and the electron. At any desired time, the user produces narrative, tracks her readers, links to friends’ blogs, invites comments, all by the external commands of clicking and typing. Manipulation of discourse, now accepted, grants the ability to self-imagine and reconfigure society against the sovereign of History. Playing puppeteer with one’s own life has never been more desired; with the death of the Author the human regains power to bring into being the ideal self, however fictional.

Further contributing to the ‘desacrilization of the Author’, the blog transfigures authors out of the Author. In vain the blog writer believes herself transformed into Author as she partakes in self-making, yet merely is filling an empty role. Hands incessantly press down on the keyboard in an act of performance. In the century of the Image the blog writer wishes to create, but is in fact only translating signs drawn from a library of images. Signs, which are no longer read with an Enlightenment sentiment, are clouded with an immense sense of cultural and ideological mixing in a diasporic public realm, produce multiple translations. Faced with the complicated images of our world, the blog writer desperately seeks to identify herself, yet in the blog space she is never truly Author only reader. As she ‘cuts’, ‘crops’, and ‘pastes’ she is not creating anything new, but using the functions of a computer to read herself in the present.

Modernity requires instant gratification in its transitory moments. The attraction to the blog is its ability to validate a thing through an instantaneous state of presence in the present. Computer computation retrieves clusters of content from a serving database, in a matter of seconds. Identification of the self is then contingent on the materialization of this content through a reflecting screen. Though sincere in what she claims to do, the blogger gives no thought onto the present configuration. What sudden panic besets us when our wired saviors ‘crash’ and turn mute. We are confident the desired freedom prize is floating in this alternate dreamy world, yet it is kept distant from us and only visible through a designed screen. The debauching hardware and systems required for its use, belies the claim to freedom. The computer screen becomes the window into a fantastical world strictly kept leveled, intertwined among moderating systems.

Cultural institutions have helped to ensure the free-for-all myth. Conveying an image of decentralization, chaos, bottom-up creativity is in fact, however still bound by its Domain Name Servers and IP Addresses, which are run by the centralized mechanisms of corporations. Without any necessary understanding of its devices, the ‘cloud’ tantalizes us with its impalpability in delivering a service. Institutions maintain its dynamics made possible by thousands of hidden fiber optic cables running across the world. Keeping information flowing across wide expanses of area does in fact, require tangible transfers. Still, its physicality is of minimal concern in comparison to the chimerical world of its merit. The more beautiful the world imagined by the encouraged human has produced an ambiguous world kept in check by powers of systems and hardware. The play of self-imagining, an extended voice, and value of shared ideas though liberating, are never independent of a network and its chargers.

Food for Thought from Adorno

I absolutely love the poetic writing of Adorno, which seems nearly impossible to emulate. His insights offer some interesting propositions for rethinking the conditions of the twenty-first century. We can choose to blindly go on with our everyday lives or choose to be more cognizant of our ability to reconfigure that which is set before us. Consider this passage “Do Not Knock” from Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life

Technology is making gestures precise and brutal and with them men. It expels from movements all hesitation, deliberation, civility. It subjects them to the implacable, as it were ahistorical demands of objects. Thus the ability is lost, for example to close a door quietly and discreetly, yet firmly. Those of cars and refrigerators have to be slammed, others have the tendency to snap shut by themselves, imposing on those entering the bad manners of not looking behind them, not shielding the interior of the house which receives them. The new human type cannot be properly understood without awareness of what he is continuously exposed to from the world of things about him, even in his most secret innervations. What does it mean for the subject that there are no more casement windows to open, but only sliding frames to shove, no gentle latches but turnable handles, no forecourt, no doorstep before the street, no wall around the garden? And which driver is not tempted, merely by the power of his engine, to wipe out the vermin of the street, pedestrians, children and cyclists? The movements machines demand of their users already have the violent, hard-hitting, unresting jerkiness of Fascist maltreatment. Not least to blame for the withering of experience is the fact that things, under the law of pure functionality, assume a form that limits contact with them to mere operation, and tolerates no surplus, either in freedom of conduct or in autonomy of things, which would survive as the core of experience, because it is not  consumed by the moment of action.

What are Objects?

If we are to really understand Design culture, should we not spend some time thinking about what objects mean to us in our everyday life? Seemingly a simple question with a simple answer: we use objects, they are helpful, perhaps we derive pleasure from them, they can be gifts, and so on. But this is not all that they do, objects tell us much more about ourselves as humans than perhaps we do with one another. Even the earliest philosophy has dealt with objects, giving it a proper place within society. Plato in The Republic viewed objects as representations of knowledge. An object was a representation of what it actually was but never was the thing itself. As early as 375 BC when Plato presumably began writing The Republic, there is a distinction made between the world known through sensuous experience versus the ultimate reality of the world that is only known through enlightenment (the cave simile). Since Plato, philosophy has bracketed objects as representations. Though they may speak to being, serve as modes in knowing the real, or in their making tell us about the world, they are always reduced to representations as felt by our senses.

I would venture to say that in the twenty-first century as many critics have claimed, modern man’s most profound interactions are not between men but with objects (just think of the social meaning of the IPhone or Blackberry). As Elaine Scarry describes in The Body in Pain, creating objects first arises from the imagination, the human interior works on the object, then follows a projection of the live body into the matter, thus the object must be self-aware. Take this passage that it in itself is enough inspiration to call for a reconsideration of objects:

A lightbulb transforms the human being from a creature who would spend approximately a third of each day groping in the dark, to one who sees simply by wanting to see: its impossibly fragile , upright-then-folding filament of wire is the materialization of neither retina, nor pupil, nor day-seeing, nor night-seeing; it is the materialization of a counterfactual perception about the dependence of human sight on the rhythm of the earth’s rotation; no wonder it is in its form so beautiful. (Scarry 1985).

Its design must anticipate how it will be used and be aware of what it is relieving. In this sense, objects are not just representations, but are much more exalted. They are in fact being. They are our own self-being mirrored back to us. So while the human creating includes the creating of the object, the object is also creating the human being. It may have been at one time that objects were easily understood as never crossing the line of representation, but when the individual begins to create narrative and define identity using the objects in the everyday environment, in some sense these objects are absorbed in the very meaning of what it is to be human. In a type of evolutionary unfolding, objects not only give us a human world but they indeed help shape us. They simultaneously recognize our sentient desires and intimate needs, while also projecting a concrete reality for our experience.

Still there is more clarification and criticism needed in how we live with objects. For considering all of the “junk” produced today, certainly not all objects are things as Martin Heidegger suggest in The Thing. There is as he suggests, a phenomenological aspect of perceiving objects from things, from the nearness which is a thing thinging. What does it mean for our being when indiscriminately objects are mass-produced and put out into the world? What happens when objects are disposable and no longer cherished? Of course to say that the human being equates his being from objects that are themselves not only projections of our interiority, but are things self-aware so therefore mirroring back to us being means that we must be more careful in what we produce and allow to dictate our everyday life. As a civilization that includes objects, if we don’t care about the objects essentially we are saying we don’t care about civilization. If we can ask an ethics for persons, Design can ask an ethics of its objects.