Critical Perspectives and Dialogues About Design and Sustainability

Share this book and dialogues about design sustainability Critical perspectives This is a critical time in design. Concepts and practices of design are changing in response to historical developments in the modes of industrial design production and consumption. Indeed, the imperative of more sustainable development requires profound reconsideration of design today. Theoretical foundations and professional definitions are at stake, with consequences for institutions such as museums and universities as well as for future practitioners. This is ‘critical’ on many levels, from the urgent need to address societal and environmental issues to the reflexivity required to think and do design differently. This book traces the consequences of sustainability for concepts and practices of design. Our basic questions concern whether fundamental concepts that have become institutionalized in design may (or may not) be adequate for addressing contemporary challenges. The book is composed of three main, authored sections, which present different trajectories through a shared inquiry into notions of ‘form’ and ‘critical practice’ in design. In each section, there is a dialogue between text and image–theory and practice, argument and experiment–in which photographic, graphic, facsimile, or other materials act not as illustrations but as arguments in another (designed) form. Each argument interweaves theoretical, historical and practical perspectives that, cumulatively, critique and reconfigure design as we see it. ISBN 978-91-86883-14-0 Critical perspectives and dialogues about design and sustainability Ramia Mazé, Lisa Olausson, Matilda Plöjel, Johan Redström, Christina Zetterlund 7891869 883140 Share this book Critical perspectives and dialogues about design and sustainability Ramia Mazé, Lisa Olausson, Matilda Plöjel, Johan Redström, Christina Zetterlund Axl Books 2013 Acknowledgements This book has been produced under the project Forms of Sustainability, funded by the Swedish Research Council (project number 2008-2257). The authors would like to thank the following for their invaluable contributions to the project and the book: Apokalyps Labotek, Sara Backlund, Mahmoud Keshavarz, Pontus Lindvall, Agneta Linton, Cilla Robach, Benedict Singleton, Björn Tillman, Gustavsbergs Konsthall, Röhsska Museum of Fashion, Design and Decorative Arts, and the Swedish Museum of Architecture. For collaboration on the DESIGN ACT project and book, excerpts of which are reprinted here, we would like to thank laspis (the Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s International Programme for Visual Arts) and Sternberg Press, Magnus Ericson, Johanna Lewengard, Sara Teleman, the New Beauty Council, the Anti-Advertising Agency, m7red, and the atelier d’architecture autogérée. Introductions 5 Formulating critique; Form and sustainability; Conceptual cores; Beyond institutionalized practice; Political dimensions; Dialogues; About this book; Biographies Ramia Mazé, Johan Redström, Christina Zetterlund Form-Acts: A critique of conceptual cores 17 Time; Form; Timeless; Other forms; Form-Acts; Image as definition; Consequences; Images of the Energy Curtain Johan Redström Beyond institutionalized practice: Exhibition as a way of understanding craft and design 49 Institutionalized practice—The Röhsska Museum’s Design History: From 1851 to the Present Day; Questioning institutionalized practice; Staging critical practice—Tumult; The Werkbund Archive—Museum of Things: A plurality of dialogues; Beyond visuality: Conversation in, about, and with a Sofa; Communicative situations Lisa Olausson (design), Christina Zetterlund (text) Who is sustainable? Querying the politics of sustainable design practices 83 Environmental sustainability as a political matter; The political and (sustainable) design; Design and the politics of (sustainable) consumption; Social norms—and forms; Design as (de)constructing norms of consumption; Design and politics of (sustainable) communities; Forms of life; Design as ordering (non)human communities; Politically engaged design; DESIGN ACT Reflection by Magnus Ericson and Ramia Mazé Ramia Mazé Concluding dialogue 125 This book has questioned institutionalized practice from different perspectives. What do we think motivates this?; We have collected our research and questions in a book. How do we think about experimenting with the format and design of the book? Ramia Mazé, Johan Redström, Christina Zetterlund, Matilda Plöjel Extended colophon (or Why share this book) 129 Matilda Plöjel Interim pages 15, 47, 81, 123 Rent this book; Lend this book; Swap this book; Sell this book Lisa Olausson, Matilda Plöjel 3 Introductions Ramia Mazé, Johan Redström, Christina Zetterlund This book stems from a need for critical reflection on the foundations of design in the light of current societal challenges. It emanates from a discussion of how sustainability is formulated in relation to design and how fundamental concepts in understanding design may (or may not) help us to address such challenges. We inquire into the basic concept of ‘form’ in design—and the limitations it places on redefining design today. Since such concepts are deeply rooted in institutionalized definitions of the field, we explore alternative notions of the design object and query roles for design in sustainable development. This story is not told as a history, nor does it propound a new theory or a formula for practice. Instead, in this book, it unfolds as an interweaving of theoretical, historical, and practical perspectives that, cumulatively, critique and reconfigure the field of design as we see it. Throughout its history, design has been contested. Arguments and counterarguments have been made on the basis of taste, quality, making, function, consumption, production, politics, and more. Today, sustainability entails profound reconsideration. The contestability of design prompts those of us who study and do design to consider how we define—and change—the field. One way of examining the evolution of the field is to look at art history, which has traditionally described a sequence of stylistic periods succeeding one another that cumulatively add up to a history. Following this dialectic logic of evolution, every artistic practice and its associated worldview is, at some point, challenged and replaced by something new and different, like in the movement of a pendulum swinging back and forth over time. However, in this view, what is new still depends on the old—history becomes a prerequisite for understanding the most recent addition. Accordingly, what is added must be understood in relation to what existed before, and history becomes necessary for understanding the new as design, as belonging to the same story. Sometimes, however, there arises a need to critically reflect on the foundations upon which such narratives are built—to look not just at the positions of the pendulum but at the pendulum itself. In design, changes in means and modes of production and consumption have inspired significant investigations of basic perspectives and concepts. While design styles certainly change over time, forms of production and consumption tend to remain more stable. The historical relation of design to industry implies that the field is itself deeply embedded in prevalent modes of production and consumption. However, from time to time, this foundation also changes. Consider the emergence of particular economic, technical, and cultural conditions during the Industrial 5 Revolution, for example, and the call for a new aesthetic and ethic from which ‘industrial design’ emerged. Today, contemporary global challenges such as sustainable development present a set of new conditions. Reflecting on its industrial heritage and associated logics of mass production, consumer culture and (unsustainable) material and resource consumption, industrial design advances critiques and raises questions about what comes next. This is a critical time in design practice and its future—‘critical’ both in the sense of a heartfelt imperative to address societal and environmental crisis and in a reflexivity about the foundations and definitions of the field. Formulating critique ‘Critique’ is, of course, a broad, elusive concept. One obvious reference is to ‘critical theory’. In Traditional and Critical Theory, Max Horkheimer stresses the relation of the subject and the object and the historicity of this relation.1 Critical theory entails, as Moishe Postone notes, “an immanent analysis of capitalism’s intrinsic contradictions, thereby uncovering the growing discrepancy between what is and what could be”.2 It is a critique directed towards a given order in the process of formulating an alternative. Critique could be, as expressed by Michel Foucault in ‘What is Critique?’, a process of desubjugation toward the autonomy of the subject.3 Introducing the element of risk in her response to Foucault, Judith Butler defines critique as going beyond given systems, norms that form a subject, which has a potentially destabilizing effect in relation to the subject. By exceeding “the forms that are already more or less in operation and underway”, critique is a “disobedience to the principles by which one is formed, then virtue becomes the practice by which the self forms itself in desubjugation, which is to say that it risks its deformation as a subject”.4 In our view, design can be part of a process of critique, for example, the way this book analyses and questions institutionalized concepts and practices of design. Such critique positions design differently

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