The myth of the Design Saviour Design and Philosophy Society Journal 01 Term 01 2020 Royal College of Art
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T S Y E D&PD 01 INTRO POEM The Myth of the Design Saviour VALESKA NOEMI
02 On the Persuasive Power of Objects FANN XU
03 Crafting Sustainable Futures WOOJIN JOO
EUPHEMIA FRANKLIN AND 04 Graphic Designers Won’t Save the Day RIONA MENEZES
05 Design Cripistemologies Remix KAIYA WAEREA
06 Comic HANNAH BRINKMANN
07 Human, Sexuality & Design, our daily menu BENEDETTA LOCATELLI
08 Utopian Objects IRINA STARKOVA
09 The role of the design saviour & our cities KRISTOF VAN DER FLUIT
10 Author(ity) for trust and transparency JOÃO ALVES MARRUCHO
VALESKA NOEMI 11 Responsibilities & Opportunities of Design in the Economy MANGEL
12 Design can save us, but not through ‘problem solving’ LAURA DUDEK
13 The Importance of Boredom for the Design Saviour VIVIEN REINERT 14 Disclaimer, Acknowledgements and Sponsorship 01
the fetish of the doom hanging above their heads the ultimate drug in a rush to live a rebellion of a lust to last
what’s not imaginable is not real the truth is outsourced to less promised lands The while they’re still dreaming it is all in their minds
and elsewhere their dreams won’t sprout hours keep on turning darker their thoughts shall bring the light Myth like the last moth sunbathing in their deserts recalling their own gods carving bright ideas into their history undoing the world, made in 7 days – for decades or erasing their mistakes before dawn? of the bibles full of Futuras and Universes heads in the clouds being closest to the crowns of creation fighting to put their hypermaterials to death again
but they hear their heavy breaths, read their broken, beating hearts Design listen to their moans and prayers starting to see nuances of their pain
hope on their shoulders, wandering on their drafts for constant recovery whispering a word of modesty Saviour into the ears of their patrons VALESKA NOEMI no-one wants to hear how no-one knows whomever speaks a different tongue holds the power to reread their doom and the glory of their eye on beauty
may lay a taint of harmony on coming sunrises 02 During my MFA I had a peer who proudly proclaimed that we as designers played the most important role in society. Designers, she said, can do anything! Unfortunately I did not share her sentiment. The idea sounded both preposterous and self-righteous! On the Yes, we as designers can do many things, we are trained to identify and solve problems, ideate and project future scenarios, we make beautiful and practical things, Persuasive we connect people. But to proclaim that we had a more important role to play than say, doctors, teachers, maintenance workers, or cleaners? I didn’t think so. Was I being too harsh on my self-proclaimed profession?
Power This year’s covid-19 pandemic has been a humbling and eye-opening experience in many ways. Comforts and truths we had previously taken for granted in our every- day lives have suddenly been violently The list of essential workers Boris and his uphieved and vigorously challenged. A per- boys prepared consisted of those roles haps unforeseen consequence of this global that were crucial to keeping the country of Objects pandemic has been the ongoing conversa- running, ranging from NHS workers and tion concerning who can be regarded as an postal service employees, to national se- FANN XU essential worker. These brave and impor- curity staff, and child care professionals. tant human beings who play such crucial 2 Yet nowhere on this comprehensive list roles in our societal fabric that they need to with over 90 entries could I find them men- continue working, need to leave the safety tioning Product Designers, Art Directors, or No, this is how it works of their homes to face the unknown even UX Specialists. Still here I am, paying good in the face of a global pandemic. Everyone money to pursue yet another design degree. You peer inside yourself else is asked to stay at home to save lives, Am I completely uninterested in providing a so that these people can go to work and ac- constructive contribution to the world that I You take the things you like tually save lives. live in? Why am I still so interested in work- And try to love the things you took1 ing with and through things, when that role seems superfluous? – Regina Spektor “On the Radio” 1 Regina Spektor, writer, “On the Radio,” in Begin 2 https://www.gov.uk/guidance/coronavirus-cov- to Hope, 2006, CD. id-19-getting-tested#list-of-essential-work- ers-and-those-prioritised-for testing-england-only In 2011 a 17 year old boy in Eastern China sold his right kidney on the black market to To make things is a natural and integral finance his purchase of new apple products part of our human condition. To engage in (an iPhone 4 and iPad 2). 3 Earlier last year, the material world, to leave our mark on it the now 25 year old man became bedrid- seems to be essential to our nature. We don’t den and now relied on dialysis following only make things to become who we are, we complications from the organ transplant. also become who we are through the things The original story received its fair share we make, own, and care for. Donald Norman of foreign media coverage at the time. To examines the issue of how we create bonds which degree the details of the story were to objects with emotional and sentimental honestly and accurately reported is of less- significance in his book Emotional Design. er importance for my argument than the fact that the story so eloquently fed to our While it has since long become apparent We don’t only interact with objects on a insecurities. The guilt we feel for the screen that it is our anthropocentric stance that functional level, he claims, but rather be- time we allow ourselves and our children has made this world an unlivable place come emotionally involved with them. (especially in this new Zoom-age), our fixa- for so many of the non-humans we share “Everytime we encounter an object, our re- tion on objects and the sense of belonging this planet with, we still continue making action is determined not only by how well it they provide us with, is enough fuel to forge new things using more natural resources. works, but by how good it looks to us, and this kind of narrative into our truth. Anthropologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi by the self-image, loyalty and even nostalgia astutely described this behaviour as an in- it evokes in us.” 5 The things we surround ourselves with help paint a picture of who What is it in these objects that make us fall nate part of our human condition, stating we are. so headlessly, recklessly in love with them? “Man is not only homo sapiens, or homo What is it in us that makes us attracted to ludens, he is also homo faber, the maker Against the above mentioned backdrop, it something that can not love us back? Many and user of objects” 4. As a consequence becomes apparent that the role of the de- of these objects tha we value so highly do to this statement, making things, engaging signer is particularly precarious and com- not provide us with a usefulness that is pro- with material becomes an integral part of plex. It is this entangled landscape between portional to the price we are willing to pay our human identity. If we accept this state- maker, user, object, subject, human and to attain them (monetary or corporeal). Is ment and work with this as our reality, there non-human which frames their context. there a reason behind this longing, some- may emerge a new role for the designer to Rather than pretending that we are not af- thing innate in us which feeds our attraction fill. The traditional role becoming obsolete fected by the things around us, or that we to things that are not vital for our survival? at best, dangerous at worst. We can not es- are above or autonomous from them, we (Or are we simply living in a material world, cape our own materiality, nor our need to must reinstate objects into their rightful as material girls and boys?) engage with the material world. Instead, the place, as peers. We understand ourselves task at hand is to find new ways and meth- and become ourselves in relation to oth- We live, think and design in a world already ods to combine these contradicting senti- ers, both the animate and inanimate bod- burdened by an excess of things, yet we ments. If we have to design new things, how ies around us. Only through understanding keep creating new objects to add to the nev- can we do so responsibly? the persuasive power of things can we be- er ending pile. We design objects that will gin to create them with care and intention. outlive us, create materials that will outlast Only then can we begin to understand how their intended use. Why do we carry such someone may be willing to sacrifice a limb an irrational urge to make and create, to or an organ for something that would make have and to hold materials? them feel more complete than those body parts ever could.
3 https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/ 5 Daniel Miller, The Comfort of Things, 2015, p.6 man-25-who-sold-kidney-13837982 4 Csikszentmihalyi, The Meaning of Things 2012, p.1 03 The 2016 Paris Agreement sets out a global aim to avoid a ‘point of no return’ climate change by stopping global temperatures from rising more than two degrees Celsius. However, as the UN secretary general Antonio Guterres points out, ‘the point of no return is in sight and hurtling towards us,’1 we are facing an impending deadline to make sweeping changes in our way of life to save our planet. However, just a few decades ago, these Crafting environmental issues were not on the agendas of almost any businesses or governments. Until recently, the general pub- lic was unaware of the correlation between consumerist cul- ture, capitalist economies, and the environment. It is only recently, that the popular media and global consciousness woke up to the fact that the current economic systems of trade sustainable and production are the direct cause of the impending global catastrophe. We are beginning to grasp that what once seemed like vast, unlimited resources are actually running scarce. That all our valuable materials, now considered as waste, are pil- ing up in third world countries and the ocean, and that there will be soon no business as usual. The monolithic multinational futures brands and policy makers are beginning to respond to the de- mands of the awakened public asking for change. Yet many still feel powerless in the giant flow of the material economy, when the efforts we make seem miniscule to the ongoing damage of WOOJIN JOO the environment. Responding to this ongoing environmental catastrophe, this piece of writing is set out to explore the role of craftsman, makers, and designers in driving change for a more sustainable relationship with our environment and materials, envisioning how craft and making could help to promote sustainable economic models like localism, and circularity, in the coming years. In the writing, I will be attempting to answer questions such as, what is the correlation between craft and sustainability? How could craft help promote a new, sustainable relationship with materials around us? How could craft be integrated with future economic models for sustainability? However, before trying to answers these questions, I would first like to discuss brief history of Industrial Revolution, and how we got to today’s environmental crisis in the first place.
1 António Guterres, UN Chief At UN Climate Change Conference (Madrid: United Nations, 2019). The Industrial Revolution, as explained in Encyclopedia Britannica, is ‘the pro- ever less aware of the entire cycle of the product. The global supply chain made cess of change from agrarian and handicraft economy to one dominated by in- it impossible to trace what every product was made of, and all these questions dustry and machine manufacturing’,2 which began in Europe in the eighteenth were overlooked at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, which all seemed century and then spread to America. Steam engines, electricity, artificial light, too promising of humanity’s progress and advancement. The newly constructed factories, and specialisation of labour brought to us convenient, attractive, and urban landscapes and bountiful natural resources seemed to promise that this affordable commodities that were barely obtainable before. growth was flawless and everlasting.
However, this process of rapid development was not that of an organized progress, This is a briefest outline of how we got to today’s linear, practical, profit-led, but that of an amalgam of desires, politics, and powers of individuals, capitalists, fast-paced world today. As much comfort and a sense of security the modern and organizations. As Michael Braungart and William McDonough explains, society provides us, there has been part of humanity that was left behind. An ‘in fact, The Industrial Revolution as a whole was not really designed. It took shape important part of us that did not manage to adapt to change. As Freya Mathews gradually, as industrialists, engineers, and designers tried to solve problems explains, ‘In pre-materialist societies there was a depth of meaning and a feel- and to take immediate advantage of what they considered to be opportunities ing for the profound mystery and poetry of human existence that tends to be in an unprecedented period of massive and rapid change.’3 The Industrial lacking in materialist societies’.7 Or as Zygmunt Bauman describes, the ‘dis-en- Revolution was driven by a motif of growth and progress, and it swept away chanted world’ of modern society, where the world was made docile, and left to nature, culture, diversity, and heterogeneity that was in its way. This is not itself had no meaning.8 Yet, there is an opportunity to change the relationship belittling any of the fact that the Industrial Revolution also brought to us the between us and nature, material, products, and society. If the unplanned, hodge- expanded transport network, telecommunication, raised hygiene standards, podge industrial revolution is what got us to the environmental catastrophe we and convenience of an urban lifestyle. However, it is important to understand at are facing today, could a better planned and coordinated development get us what cost we got these comforts in order to not make the same mistakes again to a more sustainable place in the coming years? Then what lessons could be in planning the future. gleaned from our history, and especially history of craft and hand making, to guide us in this better planned future? The Industrial Revolution has primarily led to an unprecedented relationship between people and society, and between people and commodities. As eco- Craft, as defined by the Harper Collins dictionary, refers to ‘an activity such nomical and convenient products were pumped out from factories, people filled as weaving, carving, or pottery that involves making things skillfully with your their surroundings with the new affordable luxuries. The factories at the same hands’, or ‘any activity or job that involves doing something skillfully’.9 Expand- time, provided workers with the spending power, and transformed them into ing on this, craftsmanship refers to ‘the skill that someone uses when they make consumers. As Henry Ford famously explains about his remarkable pay rise to beautiful things with their hands’, or ‘the quality that something has when it is five dollars from the average two dollars and thirty-four cents a day in 1914, “We beautiful and has been very carefully made’.10 This notion of beauty, aesthetic, increased the buying power of our own people, and they increased the buying refinement, care, and hand skill is closely tied to the idea of craft in the modern power of other people, and so on and on. It is this thought of enlarging buy- world. Today, we have this common romanticized idea of craft and craftsman- ing power by paying high wages and selling at low prices which is behind the ship, valuing beauty and aesthetics to the highest degree. This, for the case of prosperity of this country.’4 In a materialized, Post-Industrial Revolution society, the United Kingdom, is often tribute to the Arts and Crafts movement in the late people also became a means to an end to achieve progress as a society. nineteenth century, protesting against the industrial revolution that felt imper- sonal, mechanical, and undecorated. As David Pye explains in his book, The With increased consumption and rise of consumerism, people’s relationship Nature and Art of Workmanship, “Now the current idea of handicraft and the with commodities also started shifting to that of an unusual one. On one hand, hand made has been deeply colored by the Arts and Crafts movement; and that people became increasingly attached to the excessive purchasable products, became a movement of protest against the workmanship and aesthetics of the and their identity amalgamated with what they possessed. The abundance gave Industrial Revolution, which it contrasted with handicraft.”11 people experience of choice never like before, and what they purchase became closely related to who they are. As Steven Miles explains, ‘the symbolic value of Expanding further on this, David Pye considered craft’s name too misunder- consumer goods was endowed with an increased social significance’5, or as stood, and thus ascribed a meaning of craftsmanship as ‘simply workmanship Barbara Kruger famously phrases, ‘I shop therefore I am’.6 On the other hand, using any kind of technique or apparatus, in which the quality of the result is ironically, these easily acquired, superfluous products were simultaneously not predetermined, but depends on the judgement, dexterity and care which handily disposable and replaceable. It became more economical and logical to the maker exercises as he works.’ Based on this idea of the outcome’s quality buy a new product than to fix an existing one, and urban city’s waste manage- being ‘continually at risk’, Pye named craftsmanship as ‘workmanship of risk’, ment system swiftly removed any unwanted, end-of-use, or out-of fashion prod- which is contrasted by ‘workmanship of certainty, always to be found in quanti- ucts from our sight. No one knew anymore where, or how the commodities were ty production, and found in its pure state in full automation’, representing indus- manufactured, and where it went at the end of its cycle. The consumers grew trial production.12 This attempt of Pye in renaming craftsmanship does helps
2 Matt Stefon, “Industrial Revolution | Definition, 3 William McDonough and Michael Braungart, Cradle 5 Steven Miles, Consumerism (London: Sage Handbook of Design for Sustainability (London: Facts, & Summary”, Encyclopedia Britannica, To Cradle (London: Vintage Books, 2009), pp. 18-19. Publications, 2006), pp. 6-8. Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), pp. 28-30 2020
E.F. Schumacher in his book Small is Beautiful, explains, ‘an attitude to life which In discussing regenerative farming, I would like to talk about the holistic man- seeks fulfilment in the single-minded pursuit of wealth - in short, materialism - agement approach developed by Allan Savory as an example. After decades of does not fit into this world, because it contains within itself no limiting principle, his devotion to farming and regenerating the land, Savory has come up with a while the environment in which it is placed is strictly limited.’ 17 In a globalized way of using livestock to mimic wild herds as a way of stopping the desertifica- economy, the relationship between the geographical unboundedness and size tion of the land and enriching the soil. Today, many of the grasslands and open of a business is closely interlinked, as the growth of a company means the need lands are facing serious desertification, soil erosion, and land degradation due for a bigger market, bigger supplier, and a bigger labour, and this tendency of to climate change and direct human influences. Desertification is an issue that growth is ever so prevalent across the world. As Schumacher describes, ‘today. impacts all of us, with 75% of the world’s land already identified as degraded,
9 “Craft Definition and Meaning”, 10 “Craftsmanship Definition And Meaning”, 11 David Pye, The Nature And Art Of 13 Glenn Adamson, The Craft Reader (London: Collins English Dicstionary Collins English Dictionary Workmanship, 2nd edn (London: The Herbert Berg Publishers, 2009). pp. 2
17 E. F Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful (New 20 Schumacher. p.21 news/2018-06-world-atlas-desertification-un- Wall Making Plastic Precious Again was a project that began out of an attempt to ques- tion the lost value of plastic. When plastic was first invented, it was much more of a valuable material than the take-and-dispose type of material we know it as today. However, due to its quality of it being durable, flexible, water resistant, and at the same time being affordable, it quickly replaced other materials that were harder or expensive to manufacture. Approaching this project, I visited different beaches across the UK and collected various plastics as my material (figure 1 and 2). The reclaimed plastics are often not even recycled because of their conditions and inconsistency, and are usually incinerated. These plastics are at the bottom end of the linear product life, and are difficult to be considered as a useful material in most cases. However, having decided that this is the material I want to work with, the process of actually engaging with the reclaimed plastics was rather enjoya- Figure 1. Making Plastic Precious ble. The more I engaged with them, I found the bleached colours of the plastics Again project. Photograph of beautiful and unique. The process of discovering how the individual shapes of the found plastics at Ramsgate, Kent. broken off plastics could fit in with the body was even rewarding. Through this Photographed myself. process, I realized first hand that there truly is no bad material to work with. As David Pye explains, ‘Material in the raw is nothing much. Only worked material has quality, and pieces of worked material are made to show their quality by men, or put together so that together they show a quality which singly they had not. “Good material” is a myth.’29 All materials, even the ones considered as waste, have the potential to be transformed into an object of a value. There is no good or bad in the nature of a material. If the maker sees good in them, the material has the potential to be repurposed again and again, not having to end up as waste. 25 Sennett. p. 20. 27 Sennett. p. 8. 28 Matthew B Crawford, The Case For Working 26 Schumacher. p. 70. With Your Hands, Or, Why Office Work Is Bad For Us And Fixing Things Feels Good (London: Viking, 2009), p. 17. 29 Pye. p. 18. WOOJIN JOO – The myth of the design saviour – Design and Philosophy 29 Pye. p. 18. Figure 2. Making Plastic Precious Again project. Photograph of collected beach clean plastics. Photographed myself. In the process of actual making with these plastics, another lesson I gleaned from material’s full potential; like the way we extract and discard plastic polymers after craft was the ability to learn through making, and to think with your hands, as a single use when it could last for centuries in nature. Crawford explains this Sennett addresses, ‘the craftsman focuses on the intimate connection between weakened relationship with our materials in terms of our lost connection with the hand and head. Every good craftsman conducts a dialogue between concrete actual making of goods, ‘a decline in tool use would seem to betoken a shift in practices and thinking; this dialogue evolves into sustaining habits, and these our relationship to our own stuff: more passive and more dependent.’31 Crawford habits establish a rhythm between problem solving and problem finding.’30 These states that in the consumerist society, we want ‘our things not to disturb us’,32 to reclaimed plastics all had their distinctive shapes, and as I did not want to alter be docile and mend according to our will. Yet, we are so dependent on industrial its original form by melting and remolding it, I had to respond individually to its production, and things always conveniently working for us, because we lost the unique conditions. This opened up a new learning opportunity for me, as I had need to make things with our own hands. We cannot begin to comprehend the to think within the limits of the material and not force a design I wanted from my head. In my pre- vious experiences as a printed textiles designer, I often had the power, or the control, to decide how I want to alter the material at hand, and what designs I want to apply. Thus, working with a material with its own restricting qualities was challenging. Yet, it was also a liberating experience, as part of the decision-making process has already been decid- ed – colours, forms, and availa- bility of the material – and I just had to focus on the things I could do to bring out the potentials of what was in front of me (figures 3,4, and 5). The dialogue with our medium is often missing in today’s in- dustrial production and design, because again we see materials and objects only as something to dominate and to serve us. We grow ever less aware of the Figure 3 & 4. Making Plastic Precious Again project sample photographs. This example though, also raises a question on the scalability of using craft as a solution to global environmental problems. Not everyone could be beach cleaning and crafting with their own hands to think critically about our material culture, nor would it be efficient in making any meaningful change. This example was to show how the actual engagement with craft could shift people’s perspec- tive and be more critical towards the current way of life, if they do choose to do so. It is this new relationship between us and our materials that is needed to bring us closer to a more Circular Economy. A relationship that does not see ma- terial as waste, but as a resource. A relationship that does not abuse the material because we think we are in control. This is the role I see craft playing in promot- ing the transition from a linear economy to a Circular Economy; borrowing the words of Adamson, ‘craft affords an opportunity to ‘think otherwise’, a frame- work for reflection and critique.’34 This writing was set out to explore the roles of craft in promoting future sustain- able economic models such as localism, and Circular Economy. It seems that our long history of craft before the Industrial Revolution has a lot to offer us in moving forward to a more sustainable future. This is not simply backward-look- ing idealism, but based on a thorough research of how craft and these future economic models share similar values. This strong correlation between craft and sustainability makes me wonder if the pursuit of craft could aid us better in achieving a more fair and equitable relationship with our nature. As John Kay states in his book Obliquity, if our goals are better achieved indirectly, 35 we might do our environment more just by trying to revive our rich culture of craft, then trying to find direct solutions to all the various environmental catastrophes we are facing. As Kay elaborates further, ‘the environment – social, commercial, natural – in which we operate changes over time and as we interact with it. Our knowledge of that complex environment is necessarily piecemeal and imper- fect. And so objectives are generally best accomplished obliquely rather than directly.’36 Our understanding of the on-going damages we are causing to the nature, and its complex system will never be complete, because as Kay wrote, all these factors are in constant change. Thus, finding solutions to the constantly transforming problem might never come to an end. If such is the case, we might achieve a more sustainable future obliquely by bringing craft back into our education, subsidizing craftsmen, and celebrating the diversity of craft culture instead of single mindedly pursuing growth. Figure 5. Making Plastic Precious Again project sample photograph. 34 Adamson. p. 136. 35 John Kay, Obliquity (London: Profile Books, 2011), p. 8. 36 Ibid., p. 2. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? 04 It’s a graphic designer! All too often graphic designers are elevated to the heroic status of superheroes, swooping in to save the day and bring about change. As practicing graphic designers ourselves, we know that this is not the reality. We’ve been there and know what it’s like. Graphic You do a project that has a clear aim to make a positive change. Maybe you want to strengthen a community through a design intervention, spread the word on a pressing issue or create a ‘tool’ to solve a problem Designers for someone else. But this is all good, right? In this article we want to break down our thinking and shed light on why design for social change without critical self-reflection can backfire. These are some of the thoughts that Won’ t have helped us understand where our powers lie as graphic designers. Save What is a design saviour? We think of a design saviour as someone who has become disillusioned with their role as designer and thinks of their work as the sole or predominant catalyst for social change. In the context of this article, a designer is a person who has studied, the Day formally trained or is working professionally in the discipline of design. An activist is someone who is campaigning to change policies that are standing in the way of social, political or environment change. A protestor is someone who publicly demonstrates their disagreements with such policies. An activist is likely a protester. But a protestor is EUPHEMIA FRANKLIN not always an activist (though they may grow into one). AND RIONA MENEZES How do we become design saviours? Another example is getting works of protest confused with the work There are so many ways this might happen. As graphic designers, of activists. Here the designer feels a strong sense of disagreement we might feel like we don’t know how to help or that we have little with the current regime and uses design to stage a protest. A growing else to offer than our skills. Having likely studied and practiced trend on Instagram is the simplification of political issues in a trendy design, we feel confident in our design abilities and want to create font with polite typesetting. This is not without its uses. It serves work with a positive impact. After we’ve established a repertoire of its purpose of making news understandable and digestible. design skills, we begin to think of ways to apply those skills to work However, we must be careful not to oversimplify or sugarcoat the with a ‘positive impact’. This type of work gives us a rush, making problem to make ourselves feel more comfortable. Even more, we us feel like we’ve saved the day and made the world a better place. should be careful not to become sympathetic spectators of other With this rush of excitement and potential recognition, it is people’s problems. understandable that designers feel the desire to do this again and again. Consequently, at some point along the line, we confuse Being decent is not a superpower. One movement on the rise in the our design skills as superpowers. design world is the growth of young designers wanting to create social change and turning up their noses at those who don’t. This might start innocently by wanting to help activists by spreading But we have to remember, at its core graphic design is all about the word. Look at it like this: we (the designers) are bridges. On one communication. And communication is not always politically side of the bridge are the people responsible for making the change motivated. That said, there are good examples of where designers happen, i.e. activists, or action people. On the other side is the target and activists have worked together successfully to bring about audience. The bridge (designer) helps get word from one side to the change or raise awareness. other in the most effective way. Of course, this does have the positive effect of getting their ideas and actions publicity and garnering Success vs sensitivity more support for the action people. Over time, however, we conflate our roles as communicators with those of the activists. Designers Type into Google image search words such as ‘protest’ or ‘activism’ become design saviours when they feel a disproportionate sense and the result will be a mass of images containing examples of of impact as a result of these conflated roles. graphic design. This might be a poster, a hand painted banner or a bold t-shirt. Graphic design, as a mode of visual communication, How do we become design saviours? is embedded within social and political movements. These examples range in success and sensitivity. We might think of success in graphic design as clear and engaging visual communication, and sensitivity as careful consideration of both subject matter and audience. In theory, the two should be interchangeable; successful design should always be sensitive, and vice versa. Sadly this is all too often not the case. We believe in the design process, graphic designers have a responsibility to consider their audience and who they are consulting, especially when working on projects concerning a social or political cause. Instagram posts by (clockwise left to right) Thistle Topics, Ashlee Donahue, Grace Campbell, The Female Activists, Anna Bodney Design and Voices of Gen-Z. In his talk, Ron Fuchs II asked, who was this for? Ultimately, he explained, these designs were “by white people, for white people” and ironically Wedgewood continued to produce sugar bowls Anti-abolition ceramics and pottery alongside explicitly anti-slavery products. Let’s not forget that sugar entered Britain through the brutal exploitation of plantation workers in the Caribbean. The design saviour complex is deeply embedded in our culture, and looking at anti-slavery ceramic design, we might ask who does this really serve? Despite the Slavery Abolition Act, racism was—and still is—deeply embedded in British culture. It would be grossly disproportionate to suggest that the graphic design on these ceramics changed race relations between Britain and its colonies. While abolitionist ceramics played a pivotal role in sparking conversations on the slave trade, it failed to consult the enslaved people it supposedly represented. The Tampon Book Visually striking design without sensitivity can cause more harm than good. Recently the English Ceramic Circle hosted a talk on abolitionist ceramics, looking at the ways in which anti-slavery images and texts were incorporated into ceramics. This was both in the campaign for abolition and the celebration of Britain’s Slavery Abolition Act (1833). English ceramics manufacturer Josiah Wedgewood—supporter of the anti-slavery cause himself —produced ceramics which bore the seal of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. A medallion produced c.1787 shows a kneeling slave, still in chains, with the text “Am I not a man But before we get too disheartened, there are examples of graphic and a brother?” arched over the figure. While we can view this design that have taken a collaborative approach and helped facilitate medallion as a heart wrenching appeal to end a cruel and positive change. A rare example is the Tampon Book. Delivered damnable industry, another more critical reading might be that by German ad agency Scholz and Friends for the feminine hygiene showing a slave, still constricted by chains, in such a vulnerable product manufacturers The Female Company, the book inspired a position nods to Britain’s retained sense of superiority. change in German law, dramatically lowering the taxes on tampons. Anti-slavery Medallion, Wedgewood, c. 1787 (England). The Tampon Book, The Female Company and Scholz and Image via: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/abolition/ Friends, 2019, Germany. Image via: https://adage.com/crea- africans_in_art_gallery_02.shtml tivity/work/female-company-tampon-book/2179671 Research showed that books were taxed at 7%, while tampons were Euphemia Franklin is a graphic designer and taxed at 19%, coming under the label of ‘luxury product’. By concealing producer working between Japan and the UK. tampons within the packaging of a book, tampons were effectively Currently she is a freelance assistant producer sold at the same tax rate as books. The combined work of graphic for the National Maritime Museum’s learning designers and experts (in this case The Female Company) presented a department and is undertaking a masters in persuasive argument, producing remarkable results. Although Scholz History of Design at the V&A and RCA. and Friends have been praised by global audiences and awarded www.euphemiafranklin.com / @euphemia.work by D&AD, we need to be careful not to give them all the credit, as it was not solely the designer instigating this change in law. Riona Menezes is a graphic designer working in the areas of education, diversity and inclusion. She is also a member of the advisory board for Possibilities and limitations Square Circle, a start-up focused on dismantling Graphic design can have an impact for positive change, but a critical bias in the workplace using reverse mentoring. www.rionamenezes.com / @riona.menezes assessment of the designer’s objectives, methods and output is essential. We’ve looked very briefly at two examples which demonstrate how graphic design can spark conversations and at best aid a campaign for change. While anti-slavery ceramics provoked conversations, it perpetuated negative stereotypes. On the other hand, the Tampon Book displays both success and sensitivity through its collaborative approach. Without such considerations, graphic designers can fall into the dangerous trap of being insensitive, reductive and, at the very worst, harmful. Where does this leave us? It’s not about feeling like you’ve done something wrong, it’s just that the feeling of wanting to help and then wanting to claim credit for the work done can merge into one. We need to be mindful of the motivations, approaches and delivery of our work. It’s a slippery slope. Graphic designers are often confused but don’t know they’re confused, because they believe they are saving the day. It’s about constantly asking ourselves questions: Who am I doing this for? How well do I know them? Do I have their consent? These discussions need to be had, criticism needs to continue and it needs to be rigorous and unrelenting. KAIYA WAEREA – Design Cripistemologies Remix – Design and Philosophy 05 1. A slight. Twist. I stepped out of the GP’s in Whitechapel, it was overcast, bright, everything bright, I was on the phone, I don’t remember the conversation, just that my eyes were floating above my body, my body like an annexe, a clumsy extension, once clear, Design now foggy, now undeniably present. 2. What follows is a series of excerpts from an unpublished text Cripistemologies called Design Cripistemologies. These think through the embodied experience of illness, to unravel the myth of the design Remix: saviour and its accomplices. 3. I am trying to build epistemologies that can be materialised through design, to expand our notion of accessibility within design practise, The Design to consider how crip can be taken on not as ‘topic’ or ‘theme’ for design, but as attitude, and as methodology. In doing this, I am proposing an attitude toward design that directly undermines the design saviour as one of the many prongs of western capitalist patriarchy; as such, this text does not propose Saviour a series of additions and amendments to already designed things to improve accessibility––as vital as these types of changes are. Instead, it is the beginning of outlining a design methodology that and its centres accessibility. 4. Accomplices Design both constructs and construes the systems around us, and if we are to approach the abstractness of the ideologies that act violently upon us, we need to operate with tools to take on such abstraction: love, sensuality, and generosity. Design is nothing if not optimistic, even in its most dangerous of forms. With this optimism KAIYA WAEREA needs to come deep listening, and maintaining a relationship with the actual materiality of what we are working through. KAIYA WAEREA – Design Cripistemologies Remix – Design and Philosophy 5. 8. Design Cripistemologies takes Crip, from Crip Theory, most notably Design Cripistemologies operates using the political/relational unpacked in Robert McRuer’s book of the same name, in which model of disability, after Alison Kafer. This model builds on Donna he looks at how Queer theory and Disability studies mutually inform Haraway’s situated knowledges to understand how disability each other. Crip is a term that operates as an umbrella term reflects specific political contexts. Disability is not an inherent for those who are disabled under the political/relational model of wrong in ones body, as the Medical model would describe it, disability. It works for the disabled community much like Queer but instead the result of situated politics acting upon ones body, does for the LGBT+ community, in its overarching rejection of bodily rendering one disabled. To be clear, this position is not against normativity. If you don’t identify as Crip, the word should only be medical intervention or assistance, but rather, against a compulsory used in relation to the theory. able-body/mindedness. Thus, when I talk about disabled people, I am including those with physical or mental impairments, long term and chronic illness, mental distress, and neurodiversities. This text is a beginning, an outlining of what Design Cripistemologies could mean, and through it I am operating through my position, in a cis gendered, 6. white body, with a chronic illness. It takes epistemology as a branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge, its production, methodology, distribution, validity. 9. Against a historical silence, my body has found a voice that I can no longer ignore in the face of the demands of what is normative. Pain 7. is the articulation of a kind of resistance. Fatigue says that’s By Design, I specifically mean Critical Speculative Design (CSD) enough, shuts me down, and keeps me there. I am tired, I am tired, practise. This is of particular concern to cripistomologies, for now listen. But this is not a kind of knowledge we are supposed its priority of stretching the imaginary, and it’s critique of capitalist to consider, the streets aren’t paved for it. descriptions of participating in society. When I talk about designers then, I am talking about the community of people who engage in this practise. Designers are not people who are able to solve problems, as is commonly the narrative of what designers can ‘do’ for disability, but instead, practitioners concerned with our societal imaginary, and how we might meaningfully engage in the systems 10. around us. Design practise is thus understood as research in its own right, as attempts to understand and engage with the world The plastic edges of Nature draw a circle around what is fact, what and the ideologies entrenched in our material surroundings. is knowable. Because of this, theories of knowledge need to be closely concerned with Nature and how it is applied as a category of being. The use of Nature to normalise certain bodies and relationships is fundamental to ablism. It enforces what is a deviation, defect, it justifies sterilisation, who needs treatment, who needs to be cured, and constructs an image of what is considered unchangeable in our society. This is also temporal – what is understood as Natural changes through time. Instagram posts by (clockwise left to right) Thistle Topics, Ashlee Donahue, Grace Campbell, The Female Activists, Anna Bodney Design and Voices of Gen-Z. KAIYA WAEREA – Design Cripistemologies Remix – Design and Philosophy 11. 13. Throughout the 17th & 18th Centuries, medical science took over from Timothy Morton’s Queer Ecology (2010) is useful for describing Religion as one of the most powerful enforcers of sexist ideology in how our understanding of Nature can be dismantled, through our culture (Ehrenreich & English, 1971). God is replaced with Nature, troubling what we might describe as western-traditional forms as the infrastructure that resides over truth and bodily narrative. of knowledge production. Morton develops Judith Butlers unsettling Whilst the Bible organises the subordination of women around the guilt of inside-outside distinctions, to articulate the violence and of Eve, during these centuries, with the rise of industry, this was exclusion of thinking through closed systems. “The inside-outside reorganised into two, class specific narratives; “Affluent women were manifold is fundamental for thinking the environment as a meta- seen as inherently sick, too weak and delicate for anything but the physical, closed system – Nature.” (Morton, 2010, p274). Thinking mildest past times,” (p16) whilst working-class women were seen as closed systems to think Nature is the zoomed out version of “congenitally dirty and possibly contagious.” (p18) thinking closed narratives to think bodies. But the body casts its shadow across these outlines, and “… just isn’t an impermeable, These narratives rest on a seemingly objective understanding of biology, closed form” (ibid). sanitation, and Nature, that underlies contemporary medical practise. On closer expectation, what seemed to be a sturdy bed appears Dismantling this distinction also means dismantling how White slippery in its bias. Medicine shapes its objects through practise Capitalist Patriarchy, “(how may we name this scandalous Thing?)” (Mol, 2002). Thus, it is as embedded with bias as any practise, and (Haraway, 1991, p197), has Naturalised systems and expectations in experiencing this bias, the normal explanatory systems we use in our society that resonate violence across scales, from the start to dismantle themselves. cells in our body, to the Amazon rainforests, to the futures we are able to imagine. 12. Design practise is the next step in this lineage of oppression. 14. Design as we know it came out of the same industrial age that has given There is a stark parallel between how medical practise carries a us the dominant contemporary definition of illness and disability notion of total objectivity, and the figure of the designer and design that are entangled in capitalist metrics of being able or unable to work. education. Through affirmative design practise, creating original Disability benefits estr in the hands of private service solution designer objects, through entering the communities of others companies, and the support one receives is based on ones ability or to solve their problems, through sitting in our studio knowing lack thereof to contribute to capital production. Understanding bodies what-to-do, we enforce what is expected of a body in the world. through binary lenses of able-to-work/not-able-to-work roots our understanding of health, care, and Nature in capitalist terms. Design’s service for capitalism is implicit in this model of disability, and its sticky relationship with segregation and eugenics from its emergence. 15. Sometimes these expectations are literally in print – architectural guidelines for the widths of door ways, how many people can fit in a room, in other words, how much space a body is supposed to occupy. 1 “Critical Design uses speculative design an attitude than anything else, a position rather than Naming it Critical Design is simply a useful way Its opposite is affirmative design: design that proposals to challenge narrow assumptions, a method. There are many people doing this who of making this activity more visible and subject reinforces the status quo.” (Dunne & Raby) preconceptions and givens about the role have never heard of the term critical design and who to discussion and debate. products play in everyday life. It is more of have their own way of describing what they do. KAIYA WAEREA – Design Cripistemologies Remix – Design and Philosophy 16. 19. In Critical Speculative Design practise, ablism vibrates instead through The popular illness narrative goes something like this: cause, the production and dissemination of knowledge, through pedagogical symptoms, treatment, recovery or death. Chronic illness breaks practise, often thinking that our architectural/industrial/graphic designer down this narrative arc. Its cause is often unknown, or linked friends have done the work for us when it comes to “accessibility.” I am to complex, non-linear experiences like trauma or grief. talking to the question of not only of who is imagining futures, but how The symptoms themselves come in flare ups and waves, often the spaces we create dictate what futures are imagined, and how we unpredictable, and treatments are poorly researched, or prioritise certain imaginaries over others; those that don’t put us at too non-existent. Recovery is off the table. Thus, to have a chronic much risk with our relationship with the present. illness is to constantly be up against what is societally expected of sick and impaired people. 17. To address this takes not only disclosing our own position within our research and practise, but actively decentering ourselves through 20. our processes. To do so, we need to develop pedagogical methods and Within the I-don’t-know-why-this-is-happening-to-me is the feeling structures that allow for the emergence of a plurality of knowledges that this is my responsibility – this guilt is familiar, the guilt of that come from everyone present, instead of disseminating a singular not submitting to a narrative form that is just easy, and in your knowledge onto a group. Simultaneously, we also need to acknowledge insistence that I will get better all I can hear is that you can’t stand the particularities of everyone’s experiences, that only they are the way I exist, and I cannot keep mitigating your feelings. the expert in. 21. 18. In The Wounded Storyteller (1997), Arthur Frank describes three Imagine this: you say something and someone else believes it. kinds of illness narrative; the restitution narrative, the quest The inside folds out effortlessly, it costs you nothing. I dread narrative, and the chaos narrative. The first two are linear, and the telling, followed by a looking or not looking. recovery focused – they position the experience of illness as a journey, the pain of which worthwhile for some greater learning. They position the ‘patient’ as ‘warrior’. While this is a real and valid experience, these narratives can not be used to describe chronic illnesses, in which symptoms are ongoing and have no resolution. The warrior narrative also puts the onus on the individual to fight and find cure, raising doubts that the individual is really trying hard enough and exhausting all the possibilities available. 1. Anthony Dunne & Fiona Raby describe Design that allows things to carry on as they are, affirmative design as “design that reinforces but slightly easier, or more comfortably. the status quo.” KAIYA WAEREA – Design Cripistemologies Remix – Design and Philosophy 22. 25. Applying this to disabled people becomes what is known as The narrative of the designer inhibits those who do not meet normative ‘inspiration porn’, the fetishising of ‘courageous’, disabled people bodily expectations from practising design. Design practise, like ‘soldiering on’, perceivably ‘despite the odds’. In Sad Girl Theory, most creative practises, has been infiltrated by neoliberal ideology, Aurdey Wooley tries to dismantle this image of the warrior, convoluting ‘good practise’. We expect each other to exhaust by arguing that “the sadness of girls should be witnessed and ourselves, to pull deadline all-nighters, to live and breathe our work, re-historicized as an act of resistance, of political protest. feeding into a just-in-time economy that leaves bodies behind. This is Basically, girls being sad has been categorised as this act inherent in the notion of the project, something we need to be weary of passivity,”…“Girls’ sadness isn’t quiet, weak, shameful, or dumb: of, as it runs parallel to the warrior illness narrative, describing a It is active, autonomous, and articulate” (2015). This acts as a refreshing great individual battling with the world. Simultaneously, everything provocation in the face of a culture of compulsory positivity, we make, material or immaterial, vibrates with expectation. which is part and parcel of compulsory able body/mindedness. These expectations outline a normative experience, and we need to purposefully create methodologies that disintegrate centralised production of possibility. 23. Frank on chaos narrative, which he describes as that without a plot, without getting better, and that which describes chronic illness, 26. says that “the anxiety these stories provoke inhibits listening.” Now and then (all the time) I try to remember when exactly the (1997, p98)… “Hearing is difficult not only because listeners have before became after, but I am learning that cause and effect trouble facing what is being said as a possibility or a reality operate in layered granularities, building up a haze of being. With in their own lives. Hearing is also difficult because the chaos damp hands you try and pack this loose sand into a recognisable narrative is probably the most embodied form of story. If chaos shape. Sometimes I try and help, sifting through carefully, thinking stories are told on the edges of a wound, they are also told on of stories from my childhood of nails hidden in sand dunes and the edges of speech” (p101). To work past the normative narrative bleeding feed. Despite our best efforts, all we can offer each other arc of illness requires time and repetition, which can be both are occasional lumps of coloured glass, lumps that haven’t exhausting and dangerous for the body doing the telling. shattered yet, to be pocketed and fingered preciously. 24. 27. Chaos narrative presents a provocation to reflect on the narrative To epistemologically take on chaos narratives, we must think about of the designer, and the narratives that we design. The anti-structure how to rectify the exclusions of kinds of knowledge that don’t of chronic illness comes up against design twofold; firstly, the fit so neatly into the story arcs we have become accustom to narrative of the designer, and secondly, how we construct narrative thinking through. To be willing to listen to truths that pierce our through design. understanding of the world, and to take on pluralities of knowing. KAIYA WAEREA – Design Cripistemologies Remix – Design and Philosophy 28. 31. In illness we also take on metaphors of war; these reflect Design Cripistemologies require a shift in tense. Instead of patriarchal, violent stories. My body is battling, my immune system is philosophising, poeticising, designing to reach an answer, attacking itself, I am fighting – and I think its worth questioning this. a truth, we need to understand philosophy as a working though Maybe it isn’t battling, maybe it’s coping, negotiating, readjusting, learn- knowledges of experience, knowledges of being. To take this ing. This need to re-language also rubs up against a struggle further, “we need to immerse ourselves, to stay with the trouble” with speech. Rebecca Solnit gives a poignant case in her essay as Haraway puts it (2016). A Brief History of Silence (2017), in how the silencing of women vibrates through patriarchal culture. Similarly, Mary Beard remarks, Politically this is about shifting from freedom, to what Elizabeth in Woman and Power, that with the silencing of Penelope in Homer’s Grosz describe as free acts (2015). This shift of tense refocuses Odyssey, the silencing of women is found right where written ones state of being from consistent and objective, to in-flux, evidence of the beginning of Western Culture starts (2017). and continually re-situated, therefore speaking directly to the political/relational model of disability. Just as we are disabled through acts, we are free through acts; there is nothing inherent about these things. The partiality of being is what gives space for its richness, and within our image of emancipation we need to leave space for witnessing each others fumbling and flailing. 29. Then, emancipation is not only about more rights and recognition When we develop discourse through design, we need to search for (although this is urgent and vital), but about “more making and opportunities of language that go beyond what we are against; language doing, more difference” (Grosz, 2015, p154). that is more than just the opposite dichotomy of the present. We need to be aware of when what we understand as deviant is still operating on white, able, male terms. Thus, we need to build into our methods spaces for making legible completely new discourse, for testing and playing with language, and treating the words we use with generosity and patience. With this too, we need to take on the ridiculous, the fictitious, the absurd, taking a leap of faith to find new ways of producing language. 32. To get a grip on the greasy handle of objectivity, we need to expose our location, and remember that with porousness comes 30. a shocking absorbency. To show and not tell presumes legibility, and this is not legible to you. Moments of listening are undone by the noise of the rest of the world, and we are continually starting anew. 06 “In a recent poll only three percent of Germans believe that their ancestorshad approved of the Hitler-regime. 30 percent on the other hand believe, that their families had been in opposition to the Nazi-regime. The historical reality looks very different.“ When I open a documentary on the website of the German speaking cultural channel 3Sat about the last witnesses of the holocaust, at the bottom of the page 3Sat suggests that “Herrliche Rezepte mit Handkäse“ (marvellousrecipes with German hand cheese) could also interest me. Meanwhile Giselle Cycowicz, born in 1927 in Chust (Ucraine), survivor of the KZ Auschwitz-Birkenau and psychotherapist in Israel; Manfred Rosenbaum, born in 1924 in Berlin (Germany), survivor of the KZ Bergen-Belsen, who today lives in Palestine; Mosche Frumin, born in 1939 in Rovno (Poland), who fled with his mother to Usbekistan and is an artist in Kiriat Bialik, Palestine, today; Arik Bauer, born in 1929 in Vienna (Austria), who hid in a garden plot during the last days of the war, and is today a painter in Ein Hod, Israel and Vienna; and Malwina Braun, born in 1928 in Krakau (Poland), survivor of the KZ Paszow and Auschwitz, who lives in Berlin with her family, are some of the last Comic by people alive today to remember the terror that was the Nazi-regime. Hannah Arendt talks in “The banality of the Evil” about a people HANNAH BRINKMANN constituted off spineless “Mitläufer” (followers). The German public however talks about their ancestors as a people in opposition. Ms. Cycowicz, Mr. Rosenbaum, Mr. Frumin, Mr. Bauer and Ms. Braun know that that is in fact not the truth. When a Holocaust survivor talked in the German Parlament, the “Bundestag“, members of the AfD-Party stayed in their seats, would not clap and afterwards called the event an “instrumentalisation” and “hypocritical”. The AfD (Alternative for Germany), a German right wing party, who now holds a considerable amount of seats in the “Bundestag”, is full of Holocaust Deniers. Delegates of this party have called the Holocaust a myth, and a “Propaganda-Steamroller” of the “Jewish Truth”, trivialised the felony of Holocaust Denial as an “opinion-tort”, denied that the Concentration Camps existed or claimed that they were in fact built by the Allied Forces (not the Germans) and abominably stated that not a single Jew had been killed in the gas chambers. I do not want to imagine a future where we all forget. On the other hand we already arrived in a present where everyone bends the truth so far that it becomes a lie. We live in a present where the past is plastered with lies, myths and conspiracies and thus arrived in a present that holds no truth — a present where everyone is practicing deliberate forgetting. What would we be, without our sexuality? 07 What will we be without our inclinations, our pleasures and our secrets? Human, Basically, nothing. Sexuality is one of the means of maximum expression and personal growth of the ego. It is endemic, it is biological and it is an animalic hence a natural instinct. It has always been like that; our natural habit is to be exposed to our bodies as well as apes do when staring at each other’s butts. Actually, a woman’s breast is what for apes Sexuality has been the butt. Along with the development of the socialization and civilization processes, this natural instinct started to change. Throughout history, however, this factual and natural reality has not always been accepted and developed the same way, for centuries the sphere of sexuality has been demonized and suffocated. The why needs more to be explored, but the what made this possible is tangible. Back to the ancient times, in the days of the Greek acropolis or Roman theaters, when and Design, philosophy and knowledge were the pillars of the social fabric, the sphere of sexuality was more accepted and, in some aspects, made sacred as such. It is when the history of the West was split in two, in conjunction with the advent and the widespread dif- fusion of Christianity, that the perception of sexuality was transformed. It became a sinful shame, everything that brought pleasure and well-being to the man has been relegated to a circle of hell and man has lost a fundamental part of the expression of being. Modern history and the gradual secularization of society are key to recover the conception of sexuality as something natural and as one of the ways of self-knowl- our daily edge. The social earthquake of the 1968’s youth revolution, the sharp ethical detach- ment from the morality of the fathers, the journeys to the East on Goa’s route in order to discover different and distant cultures to look at them as equals and not as inferior, the ideological ferment, the gradual but constant emotional independence from false myths and the denial of a morality as false as rooted, led to the re-appropriation of that part of human psychology that was mystified ever since. The change of the west- ern mindset of an entire generation, and consequently of all those to come, brought menu. by a new need that even the market had to satisfy. That was the moment when the first steps of the proliferation of the film industry of pornography started to take place, BENEDETTA LOCATELLI immediately followed by the development of what we now call the Sex Tech industry. Photo: The history of vibrators, Photo: The history of vibrators, Photo: The history of vibrators, Dorian Electra. Dorian Electra. Dorian Electra. Photo: The history of vibrators, Photo: The history of vibrators, Dorian Electra. Dorian Electra. Photo: The history of vibrators, Photo: The history of vibrators, Dorian Electra. Dorian Electra. Photo: The history of vibrators, Photo: The history of vibrators, Dorian Electra. Dorian Electra. In the 1970s, a handful of visionaries and innovators began to change the language It’s true that nowadays the relationship between sexuality and society is wider than it of sex, transferring it from sinful to natural. Precisely it was those people, gathered was in the last decades but its different socio-cultural aspects can still lead to some in events that were real expressions of a new inner life like the historic Woodstock restrictions which are an obstacle for our personal discovery of sexuality. Those re- concert, that made the now proverbial motto ‘make love and not war’ the synthesis strictions can be positively twisted by different interventions, from product to commu- of the philosophy of that time. Exactly in that sentence lays the secret of the bridge nication design we have a wide range of interventions. that connects sexuality to society: the love for pleasure, the ecstasy of the senses, the physical well-being that inevitably leads to social well-being, the desire to be in So, which kind of relation is there between society and sexuality nowadays? harmony with others and not in conflict. From those guys of the 70’s who preached What is our attitude towards sex and what will it be like in the future? free love, in these 50 years the sector has grown, has crept into everyday life, until What role does design play in all this? becoming one of the pillars of the Millennials’ culture. Sexuality is like an infinite recipe to write, we are the writers, and design can provide But have we ever thought of the enablers of these changes? us with our cooking tools. When writing our own recipe, there are surely some ingre- dients that each one of us must choose by themselves, but some others remain fixed The rising of Sex Tech industry together with many other factors helped us to see dif- and what we can do is just calibrate the doses for the success of this meal. Context, ferent aspects of sex and our personal sexuality, encouraging us to accept its nature pleasure, courage, openness, freedom, are just a few of them. and giving us the freedom to discover it, improving our individual and relational life. Believe it or not, it is a matter of fact that a healthy and genuine sexuality leads the Products, as well as visuals, can help us with this recipe. Who creates these individual to a more harmonious relationship with himself, with his partner and with artefacts? Who is responsible for delivering these interactions? the entire social fabric. In order to naturally develop our sexuality and what it brings by, many steps have already been taken, but there are still many others to take. We, designers, are the first ones. Therefore, dear colleagues, please bear in mind our power. ‘There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a few. The In fact, what we have in disposal, from pornography industry to Sex Tech develop- only important thing about design is how it relates to people. Design, if it is to be eco- ments, is often still linked to an idea of sexuality that doesn’t match and portrait the logically responsible and socially responsive, must be revolutionary and radical.’ (Victor reality; there is still a clear discrepancy between reality and the portrait of sex. Papanek – Design for the Real World) So, what is real? What is fantasy? We need to keep in mind our power and design ‘for good’, ethically exploiting the pos- itive aspects of products whilst limiting the ‘negative’ impacts that those can provide. Surely, today’s explosion to versions, shapes, colors, performance and imagination, That’s why, when it comes to Sex Tech, its outcomes must be addressed to the growth are designated to grow more and more and will lead to change our individual and re- of both personal and social empathy. When it comes to products, and their power to lational sexuality even more but this needs to be improved and aligned to reality. And drastically change people’s life, pros and cons are on its side. Think about a long-dis- it’s exactly here that design plays its significant role: its willingness of broadcasting tance relationship, wouldn’t we agree Sex Tech has improved its maintenance? Surely thoughts of freedom, the courage to discover, accept and expose them are key fac- yes. Now, think about a human, who relies his/her pleasure on a robot, replacing tors. Design is in Sex-Tech what a chef is in the gastronomic culture: both try to create humans and trying to fulfil both physical and emotional needs. the perfect recipe able to generate an even more intense pleasure of the individual, a conceptual satisfaction of the most basic yet most important needs of psychology: Do we agree it is destroying our ability to interact hence denying acceptance of the ego, sociality and discovering of pleasures. our social fabric? If we see sexuality as food, we could say it is like a recipe of your special meal, you It’s our duty to fight against this dehumanization of society and design can be our choose your own ingredients but you still have to find out the right amount of each magic wand. It has already marked our generations of sexual preferences; it has yet one trying to balance them with several attempts. The context we live in is one of boosted our imagination even further than we could imagine and it will continue on those, and it might be the responsible of the success or non-success of the meal (we doing it. The results still have to be written, as if they were new recipes. The ingredi- are all aware of the difficulties for some contexts to accept yet encourage people to ents of these recipes are a lot, and we, as designers, can make the difference, let’s freely live their sexuality hence negatively impacting its inner nature). discover the right ones. 1 V. Papanek, Design for the Real World. THE TASTING OF THE BODY · (take a look at what you have and explore) Ingredients: curiosity, sex education school programs, extroversion (if in doubt, ask your parents) SAMPLINGS OF IDENTIFICATION · (compare what you have with what others have) Ingredients: courage, gender-recognition and identification, comparison, sex education school programs, extroversion (if in doubt, ask your parents) childhood PLATTER OF REPRODUCTION · (find out how you were born) Ingredients: curiosity, extroversion, conversation with parents, science, sex education school programs, extroversion (if in doubt, ask your parents) DESIGN&SEXUALITY DESIGN&SEXUALITY ROASTED PLEASURE PRINCIPLES · (discover the way you gain pleasure) Ingredients: natural touch and masturbation, watching real sex porn scenes, (rely on real porn THE MENÚ OF SEXUALITY without trying to replicate it – remember it’s a movie!), Sex Tech interventions at your necessary (avoid embarrassment/take your time and compare with your friends) teenage MIXED FRIED SHARED PLEASURE PRINCIPLES · (discover the way you can give and receive pleasure) - min. 2 people Ingredients: attraction, curiosity, intimacy, trust, good communication, good inspiration, Sex Tech interventions at your necessary (don’t be afraid of asking and telling what you like) SWEET ROUTINE · (maintain pleasure desires active) Ingredients: curiosity, self-esteem, partner/partners, good conversations, good life inspirations Sex Tech interventions, porn inspirations I would like to give the reader my personal interpretation of what a menu of CARAMELISED FANTASIES · (remember to spice things up) sexuality would look like. It is composed of some dishes each one related age adult Ingredients: proactiveness, Sex Tech interventions, consent, never-ending curiosity, porn inspirations to a different stage of our life. What you can find in the menu are just some personal hints to help discover what everyone’s dish may look like. 57 08 At the heart of every invention and innovation, means, ‘no-place.’ The incongruous etymol- be it medicine, computer science or outer ogy of the word points to the intangibility of space exploration, there is an underlying the imagination. The qualia of the physical desire to bring about a transformation of our manifestation of a dream is never identical totality and promote a vision that something to the dream itself. The realm of our imagina- could be completely different even though, tion can never be reconciled with the realm today, it is still under the guise of daydream. of substance or thing. The first mission into outer space was widely held as a truly utopian event, in part because In this light, technological miracles are a chi- Utopian only decades before it appeared to be a mera. There is no logic to fantasy, and the radically impossible dream and belonged idea that a series of individual accomplish- to the realm of science fiction. Like space ments taken together as a whole will bring flight once was a collective utopian project, about utopia. It screams more Frankenstein’s medical utopia in the form of radical monster than the Garden of Eden. But utopia life extension presents itself as the next by its very nature is a mercurial and fecund insurmountable hurdle. concept. It could be a place and equally it could be a point in time. Objects The elimination of death could be construed as a common goal in the field of medical Despite the difficulty in seeing how various science. After all, it is difficult to separate technological advances could transform current strands of intense medical research the status quo, it is undeniable that there is (finding a cure for cancer, dementia, eradicat- something within us, a naïve optimism which ing diseases, gene editing and embedding strives for something better and can reim- technology into the body to regulate every agine our current world, even though what organ) from the desire to extend our lives in- the content of that world would be remains definitely. It appears that medical innovation hidden and illusive. and research is striving for the impossible dream of immortality. Utopia, the Daydream Ernst Bloch’s interpretation of utopia, as However, the obliteration of death, the re- something that is “not yet in the sense of a moval of that thing which brings agony to the possibility; that it could be there, if we could world, strikes us as a nightmare in itself. But only do something for it”, offers up utopia as perhaps the nightmare isn’t so much the fact a point we have to travel towards, and a noo- that we will function like zombies, but rather spheric enterprise where human agency is that our lives will become monotonous and the essential requisite of progress. boring if we eliminate death completely. It appears that the desire to bring about per- One utopian narrative which possesses the fection through technological innovation has right mix of fantasy and exuberance is cos- the unwanted consequence of undermining mism, a social and medical utopia put for- the very project that it set out to do, namely ward by Nikolai Fyodorov in The Philosophy to bring about a happy miracle. of the Common Task (1906). Deriving from IRINA STARKOVA the Greek word kosmos meaning order and Perhaps the depreciation of the term ‘utopia’ harmony, cosmism interprets death as a de- has to do with the word itself. Utopia literally sign flaw that can be overcome by advances in technology and stipulates that the collec- The museum’s utopian bent can be observed Since their conception, museums have em- was the product of an imaginative sketch tive mission and common goal of humanity is in its perfectly preserved artefacts, suspend- ployed a ritualistic and myth-building ap- found on a palaeontologist’s desk. The skel- to banish death and resurrect our ancestors. ed in artificial conditions making them im- proach establishing a perfect harmony be- eton is referred to as a ‘composite’, which The utopian impulse of cosmism promises mortal spectacles. Visitors can take comfort tween seemingly disparate objects. gains an altogether new meaning when we immortality through materialism and science in the historical continuity of permanent mu- take into consideration how little the sum of rather than the anticipation of spiritual sal- seum displays whilst a confusing and erratic Cultural institutions systematically employ genuine skeletal parts were required in or- vation. Fyodorov believed that resurrection world ensues outside. Miscellaneous items affect as their sine qua non to devise a meth- der to satisfy the meaning of this word. The of the dead is the only way that the build- from the past are contained within period od for the derivation of authenticity and museum in this way begins to shape the ers of the utopia can partake in the society rooms to create the semblance of seamless truth from an accumulation of rubble. Where linguistic meaning of the word ‘composite’, that they helped to construct. It invites things anthropological development and provide a churches wait for the Messiah, the museum aligning it more to the idea of a composite that have died away back into our lives, and retrospective sense of order to history. They projects progress and movement towards an fantasy. Only as a gigantic mould, rather than guarantees that people are not written out presuppose progress and actively pursue idealised cultural system where history, art a toe bone fossil, does the work succeed in of history. As its name suggests, cosmism history through noospheric ordering. Within and science become a connected network of conveying the astonishing feat of the miracu- also looks beyond life on earth towards oth- the noosphere the museum carefully crafts all cultural manifestations. lous paleontological discovery. The sublimity er planets for the resettlement of our resur- kosmos through reason and regulation of of our encounter with Dippy suspends our rected ancestors to create a constellation of nature. The museum preserves, stores and Take, for instance, Dippy the dinosaur’s tow- faculty of reason giving way to the projec- cosmic period rooms akin to museums. It is restores objects to prevent them from being ering skeletal frame which held the fort at tion of our own imagination onto the object. no coincidence that the Soviet space pro- destroyed from the chaos of the biosphere. the Natural History Museum. The discovery Jurassic Park is an obvious manifestation of gram emanated from The Philosophy of the The museum archivists, restorers, cleaners of the fossilised skeleton of Dippy, excavat- this type of dreaming. Common Task. and attendants are all complicit in the pro- ed in Wyoming in 1898, consisted of just one ject of immortality. toe bone. The rest of the 70-foot fossil display Dippy is not the only dinosaur model, she But rather than imagining what a cosmist is one of several casts on display in various utopia would look like today or at some point European capitals including Madrid, Berlin in the future and reconfiguring our reality and St. Petersburg and since her removal completely, I will employ cosmism as a reg- from the Natural History Museum, Dippy has ulative idea to the extent that it places pres- been touring the country too. She has visit- ervation over reproduction, and privileges ed Cardiff, Birmingham and Dorset to name restorers, archivists, nurses, carers and un- but a few stops she has made in recent years. dertakers. In this way, we can salvage utopia What we can summon from Dippy’s adven- at least in relation to gesture and certain as- tures is that fiction and artifice play a vital pects of human endeavour. role in every crevice of human endeavour. They sustain and invigorate politics, cultur- The Immortal Space al institutions and capital markets. Repro- Museums establish “a sort of general archive, duction and circulation whether physical the will to enclose in one place all times, all or through the stream of the worldwide web epochs, all forms, all tastes…a place…that perpetuate immortality as a manifestation of is itself outside of time and inaccessible to utopia through an endless reproductive cycle. its ravages, the project of organizing in this way a sort of perpetual and indefinite accu- mulation of time in an immobile place.” By this definition, the museum registers as an impossible place, where all things are des- Fig. 1. Dippy in Number One Riverside ignated to a fixed point in time and remain insusceptible to change. The Immortal Artefact The imagery and representations on the Golden Record have aged, its content pre- sents outdated and undiversified views, but its gesture and desire for contact relies on the most important principle underpinning all utopias––hope. It is also the product of human endeavour. Like a relic in a museum, it cannot be updated and equally it cannot be destroyed, by us anyway. The interception of this object at some point in the future, when we are no longer around, would be nothing Fig. 3. Ilya Kabakov, The Man Who Flew short of a miracle, but is a possibility nev- Into Space from His Apartment ertheless, and is therefore not equivalent to nothing. The nightmare that would ensue should an alien life form actually intercept the object, is of course not something that we want to imagine. A full enactment would be more aligned to a dystopian nightmare. No Death with Utopia, No Utopia without Death There have been no more missions like Voy- ager since. The enthusiasm for utopia has Fig. 2. The Voyager Golden Record cover died away not because it disappeared but because it has been forgotten. Through the sober lens of post-utopianism it appears to What can be said of the immortal artefact? The Golden Record is an object which will us like a fanciful and farcical display. Howev- There is so much that is yet unknown and outlive us. Teetering on the edge of our so- er, we cannot discount the fact that optimism unknowable to us in the universe. This is lar system, it has travelled further than any was strong enough to launch the Golden why I believe that objects like the Voyager human. By the time an alien life form deci- Record into outer space. In this light, it is a Golden Record launched into outer space phers the map inscribed on the Record and possible object by virtue of their being re- in 1977, despite its evident shortcomings reaches us, if it ever does, we would have alised as object and being. It is this gesture, and one-sidedness, offers a promise or a long since disappeared along with our 1977 embodied in impossible objects, that keep possibility through gesture. In its inscribed utopia. Like the past, we cannot bring it back utopia from disappearing entirely. messages to a potential extra-terrestrial re- as it propels itself deeper into the galaxy. All Utopias, like art objects, present a freedom cipient, the Golden Record has written out we can do is pine for its loss along with its to create inessential and illogical work, but wars, famines and oppression, rendering a quixotic adaptation of human history. work which embodies a dream. These objects uchronic version of our existence. We have Launching postcards into outer space, none- are not offering a miracle cure or a transfor- presented not only an idealised reflection theless, shows our capacity to entertain the mation of our totality, but point to a more of ourselves, but exhibited our planet as the idea of possibility. The Golden Record is a humble but ultimately important endeavour utopia originally conceived by Thomas More. scientifically impossible object, in so far as of contemplating possibility through the im- The 12-inch disk made of gold-anodized alu- empirical data on which science relies would agination without providing logical scientific minumis is built to withstand radiation and posit the existence of any aliens (let alone ra- steps to realise these dreams. They represent extreme temperatures on its journey. tional, intelligent ones), as nonentities. an exercise in our capacity to dream. Art objects, like Kabakov’s installation The Man Who Flew Into Space from His Apart- ment presents us with a freedom that is trag- ic in so far as it acknowledges its own limita- tions. Ironically, the work’s greatest triumph is embodied in its failure. The installation consists of a cluttered room with Soviet post- ers, a fold-out bed, shoes, maquettes, a hu- man catapult contraption and a gaping hole in the ceiling. A dream shared by many of his time––the instinctive desire to disappear Fig. 4. Vladimir Lenin’s body in Mausoleum altogether. Kabakov’s room in the communal apartment building is not a private space, it does not belong to him, it is a space owned Take Lenin’s entombed corpse on display in mensurate ideal. Death would thus be the by everyone and by no one. Perhaps this is a purpose-built Mausoleum in the Kremlin chief curator of our imaginary museum.” why Kabakov wanted to partake in the utopi- perimeters. His body has rested there since It is the fallible objects, ones susceptible to an dream of space flight as the only way to 1924. Perhaps Lenin is a cryogenics experi- decay and degradation, which represent hu- escape from the confines of communal living ment waiting to happen? Exhibited at a cal- manity and its limits. Like the soil beneath our in the Soviet Union. Embedded in the work culated temperature in a dimly lit room, the feet, the fragments buried in its silt become is the desire to catapult himself out of his conditions are optimal for the preservation fertile grounds for fiction-building. They rep- penitentiary into outer space straight from of Lenin the artefact. His body is carefully resent a moment in time, and potential, or his bed, the last place where dreams are still monitored and undergoes a chemical bath the possibility of a resurrection. They point possible and have at least an oneiric experi- of glycerol and potassium for thirty days to an instance which stood on a precipice of ence of utopia. every 18 months by a dedicated team of sci- something that came before and allow us to entists. Though his skin appears waxy and see something in ourselves, the accident of By acknowledging its own limits, the art- jaundiced, we can still encounter Lenin as our own existence. work survives itself. Thus the recognition of he really was. There is an undeniable aura Lenin is ostensibly an accidental object. His failure, rather than signalling the end, repre- when confronted with his cadaver and a dis- corpse embodies the fragility of life, ideology sents, if utopia is seen as a progression or tance between Lenin the person and Lenin and mortality. Lenin is not a deity any more, movement towards something, “the continu- the object. but an artwork on permanent display. As an ation of its failure to ever arrive”. In this way Lenin, by becoming an artwork, loses his artefact, thanks to the work of his restorers, it becomes immortal insofar as it never con- identity and becomes an immortal object he is the embodiment of a social utopian clusively fails. Thus the realm of possibility that cannot be stripped of the biggest failing dream-builder and in this light can only be cannot account for the possibility of things of his lifetime––death. As an object he can perceived as an object for visual contem- that have not come into being yet. Nor do continue to persist through time and survive plation. As an art object we forget about the they discredit events which have passed, but himself as object rather than as self. brutality suffered by ancestors at the hands instead ask us whether the full scope of their “It is only after his death, eventually, that the of his regime. Instead we marvel or wonder possibilities have been fully exhausted. writer of abjection will escape his condition why unnecessary labour is going into the of waste, reject, abject. Then, he will either preservation of his body, labour that is vital sink into oblivion or attain the rank of incom- for his metamorphosis into a work of art. 09 Introduction Culmination Points Let us discuss the role of the designer – Let me begin by introducing the problem of specifically the ‘design saviour’. Designers culmination points. We are more and more might not be our world’s saviours in abso- aware of our contemporary age about how lute terms. However, designers can save us interconnected we all are. We live in a world from our illusions. The lesser designer would of networks, platforms, digital infrastructure, succumb to popular thought and language. the world of globalisation and it’s many ef- The more successful designer can traverse fects on society, economy, ecology and de- “the net of language” of our own invention – sign. We went from being perceived as indi- The role ephemeral ideas that we shape into words, viduals with rational approaches to life in the and conceptual models to control the world. industrial age, to now being more complex assemblages with multiplicity of identities capable of collective impact on our urban of the design contexts and global environment.1 saviour and our cities. This art installation by Tomas Saraceno, “On Space Time Foam”, uses visual poetry to make us think of this societal interconnect- edness with ‘space’. “[...] Space does not exist until you enter it KRISTOF VAN DER FLUIT with your own body. MA School of Design 1 Indy Johar, ‘The Boring Revolution: Figure 1 Hangar Bicocca, Milan 2012. AA School Unit 13’ (2018),1 Tomas Saraceno. 4 Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, A Thou- sand Plateaus, trans. by Brian Massumi, Bloomsbury Revelation edn (Great Britain: When there are two people on one layer, they Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2019), p.17 press it below, when two people are in the 5 Ibid.,p.5 same space they curve the layer. That means 6 Ibid.,p.xi things start to fall, and things gather together into the same spot which in the ends is hard to escape. It plays with the idea of proxemia; the distance between what you communi- cate with one another; if you get too close, you get trapped; into this quasi social black hole. And it is very difficult to escape… you have to find a way to separate, very slowly one from each other. The perception of the other person; you become very aware of each other, and each other’s movements, each other’s behaviours and responsibility around how you live [...].” 1 - Tomas Saraceno, Interview 2012 His use of ‘social black holes’, can be com- pared to that of culmination points 3, used by twentieth-century empiricist philosophers Figure 2 Million Dollar Blocks, A Screenshot of a live Centred Systems & Determinism in Design thought, the principles of the rhizome are Digital Map showing incarceration in Chicago. Deleuze and Guattari. They describe a pla- By being aware of “social black holes” or cul- required to be stated in full, as this will be teau as ‘a continuous self-vibrating region of mination points, only then can we slowly and referred to throughout. They are as follows; intensities whose development avoids any consciously separate and transform without orientation towards a culmination point or causing a further collapse. Evolution over 1 and 2. Principles of connection and heterogeneity: 4 revolution. For us to evolve out of culmination any point of a rhizome can be connected to any- external end’ . Saraceno makes us ponder This example of mapping and using data to points, we must identify centred systems 4 and thing other, and must be. This is very different from the relationship between communication, inform systemic failures can help educate their hierarchies and pre-established paths, a the tree or root, which plots a point, fixes an order. proxemia and culmination points. Culmina- policymakers and open dialogue to under- A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections [...] move towards the thinking with rhizome 5. tion of ideas and models of living, leading us stand the failures of local piecemeal initia- 3. Principle of multiplicity: it is only when the multi- to think about heterogeneity and homogene- tives, and as designers we should first identi- ple is effectively treated as a substantive, “multiplic- An introduction to Deleuze & Guattari’s phi- ity in our contemporary society; systems and fy and then address these culmination points. ity”, that it ceases to have any relation to the One as 5 losophy, will help to explain what is meant hierarchies; energy and matter flow . However that does not often seem as simple, subject or object [...]. Multiplicities are rhizomatic, when prompting us to think with the rhizome. and we cannot erode the existing complexi- and expose arborescent pseudo-multiplicities for These postwar french philosophers of differ- The Million Dollar Blocks is an example of ty that exists in reality with our thinking, our what they are. A multiplicity has neither subject ence, a pair philosopher and psychoanalyst, nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and such “social black holes” or failures coming conceptual dogmas and our buzzwords. from the effects of culmination points in our aim to bring positive concepts around the dimensions that cannot increase in number with- 6 out the multiplicity changing in nature. current systems of organising people. Million ‘affirmative nomad’ thought . 4. Principle of asignifying rupture: against the Dollar Blocks is a study by the Chicago Jus- 3 Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. by Brian Massumi, Bloomsbury Revelation edn (Great Britain: The opening section of their book A Thou- oversignifying breaks separating structure or cut- tice Project describing urban blocks where ting across a single structure. A rhizome may be Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2019), p.23 sand Plateaus explores the concept of the the American public is paying $1 million per broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start 4. Ibid.,p.23 rhizome. They challenge the “arborescent year on incarcerating the block’s residents up again one one of its old lines, or on new lines. model” of thought. In short against tree-like that are found in low-income neighborhoods 5 Manuel de Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, 5 and 6. Principle of cartography and decalcoma- of Chicago 6. The concentration on specif- (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1997), p.21 hierarchical thought that is prevalent in phi- nia: a rhizome is not amenable to any structural losophy and (un)consciously shaping our or generative model. It is a stranger to any idea of ic areas is so unapologetically clear, that a 6 Chicagomilliondollarblocks.com, Million Dollar perception of the world. This arborescent Washington Post article called it “a war on Blocks (2009), https://chicagosmilliondollarblocks. genetic axis or deep structure. It is our view that 7 neighborhoods”. 7 com/#12/41.8656/-87.7214 [accessed 8 July 2020] thinking can lead to overcoding , or as re- genetic axis and profound structure are above all ferred to above as culmination points. The infinitely reproducible principles of tracing. All of 7 Emily Badger, ‘How mass incarceration creates ‘million danger of this, may lead to centred systems 8 the tree logic is a logic of tracing. 9 On Space Time Foam | Tomás Saraceno dollar blocks’ in poor neighborhoods’, Washington Post, July @HangarBicocca, dir: Videorize, Nov. 28 2012 30 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/ with deterministic outcomes. To understand https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIPLjOG wp/2015/07/30/how-mass-incarceration-creates-million-dol- their proposal for an alternative model of vhtM&feature=emb_logo [accessed 8 July 2020] lar-blocks-in-poor-neighborhoods/. [accessed 8 July 2020] With a realisation that we may be more influ- Yet throughout the twentieth-century and the 10 Henri Poincaré, Science and Hypothesis, ‘Greater variety is an index of the great structural enced by arborescent thinking, that lead to a rise in optimisation in engineering studies (Dover Publications, 2012), p.151 complexity a semilattice can have when compared 11 Mathias Standfest, Applying Emergent with the structural simplicity of a tree. It is the lack certain effect of determinism in the way we we have seen the obsession with measura- Features Of Architectural Geometry, of structural complexity, characteristic of trees, design, we may need to understand how we ble performance, to define design specifica- (ETH Zurich, January 2017), p.2-3 which is crippling our conceptions of the city… can escape this perception of the world and tions. And furthermore, driven by industrial 12 Ibid., p.3 the semilattice, by comparison, is the structure of processes, “form follows production” carried our society. complex fabric; it is the structure of living things’ 14 over and is still influential in design. You How designers can be saviours 7 Ibid.,p.47 could even go further to say, the root of it It is important that we consider the structural 13 Christopher Alexander, A City is Not a Tree 50th 8 Ibid., p.17 all is the rise of the free-market and welfare realist approach that ‘form follows form’, and Anniversary Edition, (Portland, OR: Sustaisis Press, 9 Ibid.,p.6-11 state, where market-driven industrialised 2019), p.1 apply rhizomatic thinking that might help us production (of design and architecture) opti- 14 Ibid., p.8-16 escape our limited perceptions of the world. “Form follows Function” or does it? mise for cost; “ form follows profit”12 . Leading However, this is still not enough to be the bet- They teach us now, as they did then, that to the predominant industry of low-cost de- With this Alexander means that there are a ter designer. The most important capability there is such and such a relation between sign for emerging cities. great number of interactions of systems that of the designer is the skill to recognise and this thing and that (...) But these are merely live within and shape cities. The risk of de- design around/with existing living systems. names of the images we substituted for the Digitalisation now gives us a new opportuni- signing cities as a tree-like structure means real objects which Nature will hide forever ty to seek the relations between objects that that you predetermine only a select few sys- Deleuze and Guattari were not the only ones from our eyes. The true relations between make up reality as Poincaré proposes. Think tems; and ignore thousands of other systems. attempting to address our tree-like thinking. these real objects are the only reality we can of image recognition, advancements in audio Christopher Alexander a mathematician and attain, and the sole condition is that the same processing and natural language processing To summarise, we were questioning how the architect may shed light on this. A mathema- relations shall exist between these objects as where non-functional contributors to form designer might be a saviour within the con- tician from Cambridge and PhD from Harvard between the images we are forced to put in are included; contextual meaning, seman- text of designing for cities. We are more and in Architecture as well as having lectured at their place. tics, symbolic meaning are indexed. These more aware of our contemporary age about MIT, Harvard and Berkeley, has seen great —Jules Henri Poincaré, Science and Hypothesis emerging descriptors, semantic labels can how interconnected we all are. Culmination influence in the field of computing and his (1905) 10 account for reality that is only accessible by of ideas and models of living, leading us to work on pattern language, but for architects means of topological order. think about heterogeneity and homogeneity and city designers he is most famous for his With computer aided design as a rapidly in our contemporary society; systems and expanding field for cities (think data-driven, hierarchies. As designers, we should first machine learning models or simulations) we identify and then address our illusions and may still fall into the same centred systems society’s culmination points. For us to evolve that is the dogma of functionalism. As an al- out of culmination points, we must identify ternative to functionalism and its Aristotelian centred systems and their hierarchies and (process oriented and functionalist, using our pre-established paths, a move towards the senses to observe and derive) and Platonic thinking with rhizome. methods (objects as symbols for referencing a conceptual form that we cannot observe Digitalisation now gives us new opportuni- directly) of interpreting form, it is worthwhile ties for rhizomatic approaches. Looking at considering alternatives such as structural relations rather than predefined specifica- realism before we ‘drift towards determin- tions as a starting block for design. We might ism’ 11. Looking back at history, we are famil- see these technologies translate to a city iar with Louis Sullivan’s modern functionalist scale, which may challenge the performance Figure 3 Explanation of Structural Realism’s essay A City is Not a Tree. In his essay, he ideas of architecture and design “form follows oriented functionalist approach, and move renewed relevance with computing advancements. shares sentimentalities that occur in rhizom- function”, however, we know that this implies from “form follows function” to “form follows atic thinking. He urges us to compare the na- that form may be influenced by other factors. form”. Most importantly, we should do all That means, looking at relations rather than ture of the city to that of a ‘complex abstract Another famous maxim on form can be found of the above, all whilst being conscious on predefined specifications as a starting block structure called a semilattice’ 13 rather than by the ancient Roman architect and engineer a city-level not to ignore the living systems for design. We might see these technologies organising our cities artificially as a tree-like Vitruvius “firmitas, utilitas, venustas”, to trans- that exist. translate to a city scale, which may challenge structure: late; solid, useful and beautiful. So we know the performance oriented functionalist ap- that form has non-functional contributors. proach, and move from “form follows func- tion” to “form follows form” as the Structural Realist approach (see figure). 2. Designers are creative geniuses that can pop in to save the day every time – people are still using the term “author design” 10 to describe the type of work small studios or famous designers do. A good example is how people refer to the work of star designers such as Stefan Sagmeister, Galliano or Philip Stark. All design is authored may it be done by one single person or in companies where several professionals with different specialisations collaborate–“authors’ design” so to speak; or by even several stakeholders (non-designers) that collaborate to create a solution. However, in many of these cases people often prefer not to sign Author(ity) the creative work, which makes it impossible to assign authorship to the result of a design process. Although this is common and seen as fairly reasonable it may be at the root of a problem: absent JOÃO ALVES MARRUCHO authors are absent decision makers. He who is absent cannot be held responsible for a poor decision. We are all citizens before designers. Most of us don’t even consider Authorship in itself does not guarantee the quality and success of ourselves designers so it’s of no surprise that some people reject a certain design process. In an ever changing world, when problems to be called designers/authors even if they are involved in creative have so many different causes and contexts, I must define what processes. After all we all need to make creative decisions on a authorship means in this text: Authorship is the individual or regular basis. In the end we all have authority to make some decisions collective construction of the process needed to achieve a certain so we are all authors in a way. Calling everyone a designer seems solution. And this construction seldom depends on the designer(s) pointless. But isn’t authorship at the heart of creativity? And is alone. This construction is influenced by the context–the educational creativity essential to problem solving? Isn’t problem solving some context for instance: in many design courses, the teaching of design kind of salvation? What is persisting in the design’s main narratives is strictly tied to specific methods and well-defined phases; that keeps pushing forward this idea that claiming a creative other courses prefer not to pass on a set of procedural models. decision is a bad thing? There are pros and cons to both educational approaches: if we think about the need for flexibility, a designer that was taught and asked If we look into how design as a discipline has formulated its to recreate and redefine a design process can be better prepared discourse we can identify two opposing general trends: to innovate; on the other hand, a designer that carries with him a specific way of approaching a project may save some time and achieve 1. Designers are a piece of the creative process, no freer and more faster and even better results methodically. Designers are normally important than a bookkeeper or a scrivener – this stand can be a mix of these two archetypes in one degree or another. Unfortunately, traced back to at least the Third Industrial Revolution. It denotes regardless of their abilities, designers are, at the beginning of a reluctance towards acknowledging authorship. Authorship is both their careers, completely unprotected when they enter their first a sinful sign of vanity and the antithesis of both the modernist professional experiences. And authorship is often the first thing to design movements, and the currently popular Design Thinking ‘school’. be stricken out. This is how things can roll out: while working in large design agency, for instance, they might find themselves Whether we work alone, in large or small workshops, good results involved in processes in which, from the first conversation with are easier to achieve when there is enough trust (competence the client until the arrival of the brief, there was a translation/ and accountability) between all the links in the design chain. interpretation by at least an “account manager” (this is an accounting This trust and transparency will spur a good work environment role that has been passed on to the design universe). In this case, and will have a long lasting impact on everyone’s mental health. the brief may not be there to be challenged or reinterpreted–not by Sure, the quality of services and products are a consequence of any junior designer at least. And from the moment the first ideas our socio-economic realities. But hidden in these realities may are ready to be presented until they reach the final client again, be archaic professional structures. These hidden unaccountable the work will be re-evaluated by an account manager (who may have a structures are creating a collective state of mind where from degree in marketing) or by as many more people as the human structure a young age and during our lives we praise quietness, modesty at of the process requires. What I’m trying to say here is that, all all times and invisibility. It may actually be beneficial to put in all, it can be irrelevant if a designer leaves school knowing authorship front and center, not to idolise authoritarian and a particular ‘school of design’ (a set of models and tools) or if untouchable figures but for the very opposite reason–for the sake the designer leaves school prone to reinvent his approaches to the of transparency, trust and confidence in decision making processes. design every single time. The job/market context will take care of An iconoclastic culture that stands against all exceptions, removing many essential aspects of the decision making process out a culture blindly reluctant to change and accountability in the of the designers hands. creative processes will surely do us no good. This scenario is not always the case. Less frequently, if a designer has the means and wishes to start his career in his own terms, he/she may start by working with clients who have clearly identified their needs to start with (a big part of the design process). More than 1 2 that, one can be fortunate to work with clients who trust the designers I remember a job for the Ministry of Health in Being an author can also mean being an agent Portugal that was mediated by another or practitioner of an action. In rarer cases, faculties enough. In those cases, as roles are well defined, it’s communication agency, which in turn also when designers produce their own content, easier to assign responsibility in case something goes wrong. had its own approval structure, and where, being an author can mean being the main at the other end of the chain, was the Secretary cause of an action. of State, preceded by the assessments In both circumstances (working in a long or a small chain) competence and approvals of his office, adding a total of 3 and accountability are essential. By competence here I refer to the 18 people entitled to an opinion hierarchically Competence can only be achieved by making superior to the designer. It goes without saying ability that a particular person (individual or collective) has to mistakes (learning) and this the matter for that it was one of the most painful and distressing another text. resolve a matter adequately. And by Accountability I mean the capability jobs I ever did, and with very poor outcome. of assessing who is/was responsible for which decision. If we have both, then we can trust the decision making process. I would at last like to claim that we need to simultaneously grant responsibility and authority to a designer so he is able to make decisions, but we also need to break down the different levels of responsibility of each element that acted throughout that chain. Ultimately one could argue this information could even reach the final user/audience (like the credits of a movie, a supply chain chip or a nutrient chart). is still somewhat using the path of an applied John Thackara’s latest approach on sustaina- arts education as an easy way out to not play a ble design, case studies of open-source design role it could. Although I do realize it is not only strategies from the industries and insights on the designer making a step towards a serious social behaviour towards economies, I will jus- position in economies and politics, but also tify such a radical proposition. This justifica- 11 the market having to take a step towards the tion will lead me to close the dissertation with designers. Therefore, I decided to take up on solutions that are minimalizing the need of my responsibility as a designer to dive deeper public invasion and introduce again parasitical into our skills, visions and the need for design revolts as my take on using and abusing such in the future – which for me could certainly not tools as design-language to come together as rely on aesthetics but must be reviewed from a strong design cohort with an awareness of the distance and independence of its’ current design ethics and a possibly hidden agenda role for the market. towards human-centered or even genuinely communally embedded designs that promotes Responsibilities I am using this piece to investigate the stand- anti-growth as an exchange for authentically ing and opportunities of design as a discipline social and sustainable design. further – not only showing a possibly impos- sible design utopia, but also understanding In my previous design philosophy I started to the current problems evolving around design break down all design definitions, buzzwords & Opportunities language and the design economy in order and creative phenomena into the most basic to build thoughts around the realistic neces- definition of the purpose of design: Design sity of the solution I designed in my former must always serve the human being. It might work. This work is not meant to suggest a fi- be an easy way out to narrow it down to not nite solution or framework but rather raise the only the Latin meaning of the word and the awareness of a need to debate our options mechanisms of the Gestalt but to nail it down and ethics as designers and especially design on this sole purpose. Especially considering of Design in students with the means and capacities within this my main statement on why design and art our universities to drive the change without are not of the same kind. Not that art cannot immense financial barriers. serve the human being, in fact it certainly does in inspirational and abstract terms but in con- In order to do so I will start with a recap on trary to design an artwork can still be a mag- the Economy my thoughts since the development of the de- nificent representative of it’s kind when only sign philosophy. I will then re-evaluate the term serving the ideal of the artist itself or even human-centered design as opposed to plan- produced in a transcendental state of mind et-centered design to adjust and legitimate without entering the world. Whereas I’m very my criticism in front of current movements. I strict with the design as it cannot be a rele- will then move on by sharing my thoughts on vant contribution to it’s field if it does not in- VALESKA NOEMI MANGEL the issues evolving around design language, itially mean to serve the human being. Design which will be constituted as an enemy and must be designed for our population, for parts blessing for my theory. Through the works of of it, for target groups but never for the sake As a designer I was beginning a journey general economic structures using or abusing Stafford Beer and Alfred Sohn-Rethel I will of satisfying it’s creator or vaguely arousing through theory, experiences and literature design for their western capitalist productions. further analyse the interconnections between responds from an unknown audience. Design- trying to find purpose in the design branch. I The gap between the socioeconomic purpose language, time and institutions to finally estab- ers solve issues, they analyse, understand and sadly realised, that our trade was known and and impact seen in design by theorists and the lish a criticism of current bureaucracies and they serve humanity in creative ways. This used in most decorative ways hiding their im- political reputation of design as an equal to in- their dysfunctional designs. The systematic can, of course, mean creating a typeface that is pactful possibilities behind beautiful means of novation for economic drivers in a global race criticism is in this case a repetition of issues very pleasing and readable or at least promot- communication, commercials and Coopera- for progress is most disturbing. And while we I already considered in my previous work but ing and communicating an event worth recog- tions. I didn’t accept this extend of design and seem to be living in an epoch of high frequen- will now use to understand their origins in a nition. It can also mean designing a spoon that was almost amazed by the widespread opin- cy progress, abandoning the thought of any capitalist society more deeply by reframing lays in our hands so well we feel more human ions on the purpose and futures of designers finite solution or stability, the design process Schumpeters concepts in a modern innova- by having it made for us. But from now on according to philosophers, sociologists and becomes crucial but just as a means to not be tion culture. The evaluation of the economic when I write about design and it’s current state analysts. I compared the perspectives of de- irrelevant and keep up with countries, indus- concepts will lead me to new critical thoughts or future I don’t mean the graphic designs, the sign theorists and sociologists with current tries, flexible start-ups and shareholder inter- around the necessity of responsible designs posters, the fonts, the spoons or any physical political manuscripts on design, such as the ests. In the midst of this understanding of the that imply an anti-growth movement. Through design. I’m by far more interested in an often EU plans for innovation and design as well as design works the design education feels like it visible design must be invisible. And further sign of our environment. This theory sounds overlooked design which lies upon all physical rather then the invisible structures behind constantly invisible which raises the need of distant and utopian and the earlier barrier of objects and can even be resolved from those: them, the progress since then becomes ques- sufficient feedback loop. Practically this leads the co-dependence between design and econ- The invisible layer of design. Good and famous tionable. It feels like we ignored the end of our me to the solution of human-centered design. omies and lately increasingly politics is not designers, like Reinhart Butter or Dieter Rams, design curve and forced upon aesthetic peaks A discipline currently becoming a buzzword resolved or even widely approached as an understood that a design object in any form is able to sell ever new inventions in ever new like many others but still purely practising issue yet. Still I belief unconsciously we move designing a psychology of a human being us- ways without changing the routine behind it or what it states: Design for and with the human towards a new design attempt and the time of ing it. This goes as far as to say that with every even doubting the effectiveness of the job as being only. This would not benefit profits and commercial and physical designs are almost design there comes a much bigger psycholog- a designer in the industries. In terms of politi- politics directly and we would definitely have counted. Therefore, my following analysis will ical effect that invisibly creates our setting and cal, reputational and capitalist progresses de- less pointless goods (designs) around to pur- focus on the practical implementation of hu- well-being in the world we shaped. Or as Han- sign is definitely valuable and probably fixed chase but it would eventually set us at ease in man-centric strategies in current economies nah Arendt put it: more ending cycles then we acknowledge so our universe of things. My philosophy ended in western countries as well as the political sit- far. Yet we are as designers never more than a by imagining such a world of closed cycles uation. Taking out barriers through empirical ‘The durability (of the commodities) gives the consultant and mostly hardly valued for more and smoothed out edges. We wouldn’t need knowledge and scientific theories will hopeful- world, as the structure of the human hand, than the aesthetics of a brand or product. The to worry or bleat or suffer. Our environment ly stress not only the desirability but the fea- the permanence and stability without which skill of envisioning alternatives and thinking would be constantly designed to comfort us sibility and viability 6 of new design criteria the mortal-unstable being of humankind on a invisible level about our human environ- alongside our inherit biological and sociologi- (Meta-design) serving the human being with- on earth would not be able to establish itself; ment has a highly relevant angle to our current cal progress. The new problems arising would out claiming ownership as a protagonist. they are actually the human motherland society as I believe we can deliver solutions possibly be of a humanly destructive level of humankind.’1 erasing disruptions in everyone’s everyday life caused by the boredom of the paradise. The The Abyss of institutional Design-Absurdity may they be small and relatively trivial like the idyll is made for the gods not for the humans. Why is all the improvement, progress and inno- Looking at post-war design of the German bus stop miscalculation in Burckhardt’s exam- The endless struggle between individualism vation not satisfying us yet? Movement in any Werkbund in the 60s for instance it becomes ple. Or essential like environmental solutions and humanism would peak in the ease of our direction might be necessary but the political clear how the real functionality behind the in developing countires. I came across the well-designed cosmos. Which is why design- and economic movement we have is not con- round couches and patterns were to subcon- issue of disruptions and the media theory of ers would not lose their purpose but change sulting the human needs enough to actually sciously smooth out the hard edges of the Na- Thomas Weber describing beautifully how the their roles and use the entirely invisible layer be organic. It is a very forced progress and zi-regime. The tone and invisible impact can be innovation in a science fiction movie is only of their design propositions to push humani- might not be progress at all. Looking into cy- immense and is surely used intensely for the visible to the audience if it has a mistake, such ty into a creative, ethical realm – giving away bernetics we can learn how destruction is an increase of sales and production in consumer- as the robot starting a revolution against hu- democratic opportunities for everyone to be- innate objective of any human creation. The ism. But as a stand alone design issue it is not manity. Whereas the villain could be a stylish come a designer themselves and being ethical mere logical reason is that anything we can recognised or I’m sure we’d be able to inde- telephone in the same movie but as it didn’t in their comfort zones. I called this state Pap- imagine and therefore build or develop is al- pendently use the invisible layer in a positivis- cause disruption it wasn’t noticed.3 So should anek’s Paradise and the sustaining job of the ways time bound. Which makes every creation tic approach on many other strategies. Which invisible design be disruptive to be seen? Di- designer‚ ethical nudging‘ to ensure the strive a piece of its history and ultimately outdated leads us to the next extend of this thought. eter Mersch argues that we need to create of human centered design ultimately leads to by the innate human progress. Every creation Taking this ideal further like several architects disruption in order to discuss it in society.4 a desirable future but also endures and ex- therefore also becomes a perception highly bi- including Lucius Burckhardt and many mem- And that is important indeed. On the contrary tends into an extreme of the designer-less de- ased by current circumstances. It might even bers of the experimental University Hfg Ulm I would like to believe that design should an- just be a delusional necessity created by our did – design can be entirely invisible behav- alyse and understand a definite, current need timely consciousness. As a marxist theorist ing in forms of systems within a physical inter- well enough in the first place. Meaning design 1 Hannah Arendt, Vita activa oder Vom tätigen Leben Alfred Sohn-Rethlel explains how we can only action. Burckhardt therefore analysed streets should be empathetic and liberal enough to be (München: Piper, 2019). ever be somehow objective in our thinking if and infrastructures by using Strollology and able to erase disruption, as it‘s sole purpose 2 Lucius Burckhardt, Design ist unsichtbar: Entwurf, we analyse the links between time and move- a political angle on cities. The invisible system is to give people back their confidence in us- Gesellschaft und Pädagogik (Berlin: Schmitz, Martin ments and further subtract the historic con- behind bus plans and window shoppings were ing their environment and behaving in their Verlag, 2012). sciousness off the movement again. ultimately uncomfortable and unproductive for systems. One could say design would there- 3 Thomas Weber, ‘Das Design futuristischer Medien im the human needs. His main conclusion was fore just close loose ends (disruption and dis- Kino’, in Design der Zukunft, ed. by Lund, Cornelia and ‘The truth about our world is concealed that busses would need to pick up passengers tress) and hence close already begun cycles Holger (Stuttgart, AV Edition, 2014) pp. 111-122, (p. 114). to everybody under the spell of his false increasingly by night, when they’re vulnerable, (dysfunctional systems and products) making 4 Dieter Mersch, in Thomas Weber, ‘Das Design futur- 7 5 consciousness.’ alone and possibly under the influence of alco- them invisible. Debate may be needed when istischer Medien im Kino’, in Design der Zukunft, ed. by hol instead of only having frequent service by design claims to be political or economical Lund, Cornelia and Holger (Stuttgart, AV Edition, 2014) On the other hand the subjection of our day.2 Realising how this idea was raised in the but in my scenario it is just serving the hu- pp. 111-122, (p. 114). conciseness is for him the only correct con- 60s when designers were spending their time man being and can therefore not be enough 5 Gabriel Tarde, ‘Monadologie et sociologie’, in Eine neue sciousness as it includes the society itself. on the design of the buses and cars themselves of a protagonist of any movie, to disrupt. In- Soziologie für eine neue Gesellschaft. Einführung in die Akteur-Netzwerk Theorie, by Bruno Latour (Frankfurt am Main, 2017) p.35. 1 Hannah Arendt, Vita activa oder Vom tätigen Leben 2 Lucius Burckhardt, Design ist unsichtbar: Entwurf, (München: Piper, 2019). Gesellschaft und Pädagogik (Berlin: Schmitz, 6 IDEO.org, The Field Guide to Human-Centered De- Martin Verlag, 2012). sign, (Canada: Design Kit, 2015). which makes them visible, relatable and timely. ´Crowds, doubtless, are always unconscious, Any objective real world could not possibly the ongoing problematic of non-changing in- Why do we need to go back to a shop for the but this very unconsciousness is perhaps one represent the necessary understanding of the stitutions Beer uses the cybernetic idea of vi- sake of an economy if it is risking our own well of the secrets of their strength. In the natural world populated by a mankind with a ‘False able and non-viable systems. Due to our high being? What is more important – Free health- world beings exclusively governed by instinct consciousness’8 which makes this very con- degree of development in western industrial care or real estate? How much long-term dis- accomplish acts whose marvellous complexi- sciousness justified or even beyond that: countries we have a very dense complexity ruption is generated in a child’s life if it cannot ty astounds us. (…) The unconscious acts like in all our functions, systems and institutions. go to school? Or is the school not the institu- a force still unknown.´14 ‘Necessary false consciousness, thus, Therefore each single institution for instance tion for learning anymore? The strength we is not faulty consciousness. It is on the has a vast amount of possible means to un- feel through the chaos of a pandemic is the Gustave le Bon wrote about crowd in 1895 in contrary logically correct, inherently ravel human uncertainty and basically fulfil power of feeling time. We are aware of our own Paris when he felt the strength of the nations incorrigible consciousness.’9 its job on society. Those different states are a consciousness while it is happening. He will coming from a language of the crowds within variety that is part of every dynamic system. be thanked for how he handled the crisis. – it. And certainly the shift towards a power of So we can conclude from Sohn-Rethels marx- And it produces a flux depending on the vari- Is one of the terms used in the media around masses has increased even further alongside ist point of view that we need our historical ety. In order to move it needs perpetuation and political decisions that are currently undertak- our communication tools and digitalisation. bias to gain a rightfully false consciousness finding a equilibrium in order to gain stabili- en. A future that is foreseeable, because we are He was projecting a positive influence after of our perception. And this very perception ty again. The time until an institution reaches sensing the passing of time more than before. the negative examples given during the First hence produces goods and systems highly this state is called relaxation time.12 The big This is the real power that is given to us by this World War. There certainly is a power in the linked to the time of development: issue now is that there cannot be perpetuation global crisis. We gained awareness and the crowds and we do use them by all means for if there is no decentralisation of the function of time to be active, which already lead to a lot various incidents. As I write we are currently ‘Our notions of things and the concepts in each institution. By working as a closed cycle of social and collaborative movements. We do experiencing the #blackouttuesday protest as which we undertake their systematisation are the institutions became bureaucracies unable feel linked stronger to our local communities, part of the blacklivesmatter movement on so- historical products themselves.’10 to learn and resistant to new equilibriums. Or seeking new bonds and commitments to social cial media, protesting digitally for equal rights the other way around: interactions and support. May it be food banks, and against racism linked to the latest rac- Taking this concept further we have to then donations, rainbows or protest movements. ist murder by white police men in the United admit that cybernetics is correct in saying that ‘In decentralising, the need for the bureaucra- Ironically a separation had to happen to bring States. Everyone can feel that power. But I am goods and systems have an innate expiration cy disappears. But we are already in the trap. us seemingly closer together, which has many not speaking about the influence in human date. Or as described by the beautiful meta- Bureaucracies exist, and are powerful: this is reasons but for one it aligns with a new con- rights movements and international political phoe Stafford Beer, a renowned cybernetic obvious enough. What is less obvious is the sciousness of our being that we gained in the agendas (which I do hope change through theorist, used – the wave’s happy white crest argument I used just now: they have them- very moment it was certain that we were in a the willpower of the masses). I want to point destroys the wave itself but only through its selves become viable systems that price them- time that is pre-historically a visible epoch. out the slow adaption of the omnipresent eco- destruction it become the defined wave that selves.’13 nomical system, that is directing all political in- it is. And this happy white crest seems to be And already carrying the title of our timeline stances in capitalist countries and is therefore ignored and extended to eternity by current Timely Disruptions during the Pandemic on our shoulders we realise the potential, sub- more resistant to change, as it – again – is a authorities and hid behind a curtain of false Disrupting these stiff processes is a task that consciously mostly but still actively and col- crowd itself. progress that really is a loop nursing the very seems impossible under any circumstanc- laboratively. Which is sending a strong signal same institutions over and over again without es. Even in the current pre-historic times of a not only for each individual cause but general- The Capitalist Crowd real change. Stafford Beer states it very clearly: global pandemic. A post-capitalist system in- ly for the ability of communities to work togeth- And taking a step back we can see that we still cluding closed cycles of bureaucracies seem er and produce meaningful notions, services, follow the same economic notions as in the ‘The problem is that the institutions in which to float above what seems to be the disruption artworks – designs. early 60s when Schumpeter introduced the we humans have our stake resist change. of a lifetime for many generations, currently theory of creative destruction. At the time it Therefore we feel as individuals hat we cannot facing major financial, social and mental crisis. On an individual, communal and globally so- was a breakthrough in economic theory and afford to embrace it. And this is an extremely Many believe in a system change due to the cial level this is a strong pointer towards new philosophy to understand, that a capitalist sys- sound argument.’11 empowering chaos. And looking back it would mind-sets and also proves the possibility of tem would always strive towards innovation by make more than sense to rethink not only our human-led practises as in participatory de- destroying past innovations, generating new What he thereby also incidentally claims is the environmental impacts and real needs, but fur- sign. But alas we face a bigger wall, which is a monopolies in proportion to technological in- effect that this procedure again has on the hu- ther questions systems that supposedly sup- system that doesn’t act in itself. A bigger sys- ventions. Cybernetically speaking: Destruction man psychology. It’s a psychology of non-own- ported us but really seem to not function in a tem, that functions like a crowd without hu- as the nature of all existence. Linking back to ership. Even when being apparently involved it human way. After all historical curve balls like man stakeholder. Hannah Arendt it again does make sense to means to be fead with pseudo-bonuses and not wars, disease, natural catastrophes and scien- align new inventions with our general realm of seeing the change you signed up for. It means tific discoveries did enable bigger and smaller objects that comforts us by its lifecycle, which to not feel addresses by authorities and not systematic changes in the past. Now, many is outliving us as human beings but still die even by the closes institutions. To understand questions became a liveable, daily trouble, 7 Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Geistige und körperliche Arbeit. Freytag, Oliver Schlaudt, Françoise Willmann (Freiburg, 10 Alfred Sohn-Rethel, p.29. 12 Stafford Beer, p.11. Theoretische Schriften 1947-1990 Teil 1, ed. by Carl Wien: ça ira-Verlag, 2018) p. 26. 11 Stafford Beer, p.76. 13 Stafford Beer, p.80. 8 Alfred Sohn-Rethel, p.27. 9 Alfred Sohn-Rethel, p.27. jects (that are indeed evolving independently The dilemma of increasing misfits, disappoint- eventually and decompose as part of their the once being questioned, because who are as they outlive human beings and embed them ments and subconscious doubts in our en- own lifespan.15 those innovations really serving? The three- in their culture and rituals). This again leads vironment could meanwhile already be met fold of human strives established during the us to the continuous question of why this rela- due to our timely inventions. It seems as if, al- So when Kondratjew developed the cycle of French Revolution were liberty, equality and tionship is not interacting with the social fabric though we had the second industrial revolu- innovative technologies, mapping out the links solidarity. Setting them as an ideal for human- Latour mentions nowadays and therefore, has tion long ago, we still try to apply the systems between our economic wealth and the rise of ity I do believe our innovation culture is more the ability to not only live through humans but of the first one. Ironically the idea of inventing inventions from the steam-engine to the in- likely to set a systematic movement in the op- also compel the human society. further kept us from seeing the value in what is formation technology, creative destructions posite direction instead of fully embracing our already produced. seems a reasonable explanation of how we achievements towards those human rights. By We are living in a time that has options beyond keep things economically afloat or even how empowering growth we lost track of the needs an innovation culture that is directed in a top ´An electronic mafia lurks around the corner. innovation opens windows of opportunities for of the masses that could have had a break- down approach. Objects evolve in a shape me- These things are all instruments waiting to be economic monopolies to grow. What we seem through when knowledge finally became ac- diated by potentials independant of the human used in creating a new and free society. It is to overlook is that Schumpeter not only praised cessible to everyone through the internet. The need. And we still hold onto the habit of under- time to use them.`23 the destruction of innovation as part of pro- commercialisation of the biggest new peak in standing social behaviours from the perspec- gress but also ultimately already introduced the modern Kondratjew Cycle instead abused tive of the ivy towers just enough to produce, And the attempt to make the match between the destruction of systems itself as part of this its power by setting new laws and hierarchies or rather adapt, our inventions (hybrids) to feel public desire and production is an effort we natural habit. Capitalism therefore was never to restrict the potential to new literates. It al- suitable. spend a lot of resources on. Including the re- meant to last and consequently the whole pro- most gives the latest inventions a live of it‘s source of the designer. A job currently highly cess behind the manufacturing of innovation own through the economical potential. Although Schumpeter sees the value of the linked to a commercial marketing justifying and ideals in our economic system.16 consumer satisfaction for a production he the already dysfunctional products. It is not And much like Arendt, Bruno Latour suggests does however not include it as a relevant fac- hard detect those dysfunctions, when follow- So far we still aim for continuous progress in that we define ourselves by the dichotomy tor int the organic process of Creative Destruc- ing the everyday narratives and complaints of innovation, the fascination for the new as a fac- between society and nature. Whereas nature tion as there was a lack of opportunity to track the people. It can be a small detail, like the in- tor for growth is inevitable. But is it? is again a world of objects and technologies, the outcome of innovation for society. security and pointlessness of Alexa, or more that have their own intrinsic culture, history systematic, like the over-bureaucratised sys- The grants for patens continuously grew up and relationships. Looking at this dichotomy ´Moreover, even if we had the means of meas- tems of recycling or even bigger, like the un- until 1.42 million in 2019 worldwide and keep from a post-modern angle he then continues uring the change in the technological efficien- democratic voting system in America and the increasing on individual and nation-wide level. to say that the modernists constantly generate cy of industrial products, this measure would untimely education in European schools24. 17 New inventions are being made constant- hybrids interlinking those two realms. Which still fail to convey an adequate idea of what it And the campaigns, ads and satirised graph- ly generating small and large interventions is not necessarily a bad habit as it creates all means for the dignity or intensity or pleasant- ics trying to convince the target groups of the in our environment and generating financial innovation but he also suggests that due to the ness of human life – for all that the economists opposite are then again a job by designers, growth around the globe. The ideal of pro- current acceleration in science and technolo- of an earlier generation subsumed under the keeping their headspace from thinking about ducing the new doesn’t find an end. And here gy we reconnect ´human and non-human` to heading of Satisfaction of Wants.`20 the real deal: creative construction. we are producing conspiracy theories on 5G hybrids that became monsters (thinking ma- that is supposed to pave the way to our con- chines and ozone layers).18 He then solves the inefficiency occurring And designers are not the only wasted re- nected, self-driving and available future while through the communication gap between source in this process. Looking at the mon- creatively destroying the old networks again. ´By rendering mixtures unthinkable, by empty- mass production and the social needs by de- ey spend on their work but also on research But the unrest around innovation and the de- ing, sweeping, cleaning and purifying the are- scribing the benefits for increase in labour and understanding the, apparently confusing, creasing acceptance seems to grow accord- na that is opened in the central space defined and wages to support the working class from needs of new target audiences and trend re- ingly, too. There has always been the nostalgic by their three sources of power, the moderns a Marxian perspective.21 ports, as well as environmental resources used urge to resist the change. During the invention allowed the practice of mediation to recom- by shifting workforce for the rectification back of the letterpress it started a war as opposition bine all possible monsters without letting them The revolutionising effect in the patterns of and forth, the overproduction of unwanted to the new possibilities alongside with it. And have any effect on the social fabric, or even Creative Destruction hence are drawn from products and insufficient service, we come to there is surely no going back to the restrictions any contact with it.`19 ´new consumers‘ goods, the new methods of an immense inefficiency that needs a humble of limited knowledge provided by the church production or transportation, the new markets, eye to reframe the way we approach progress. and the view intellectuals anymore. But the dif- The overall idea that non-human objects have the new forms of industrial organization that Progress means movement after all, and I said ference today is that we have to doubt if we their own culture and therefor are constantly capitalist enterprise creates.`22, rather than the before it can go in any direction. Maybe it’s change to the better. Back then the view pow- changing even retrospectively would resist society and the mentalities of the masses. time to just don’t be equivalent with growth erful instances were suffering and protesting any form of redesign. Which is why I would im- anymore. Maybe we have to cut the link to but today it is the other way around. The pow- ply that a designer can actively seek the role innovation in general as we keep misunder- erful cooperations deciding on the change are of a mediator to shape the relationships of ob- 14 Gustave le Bon, The Crowd – Study of a Popular 16 Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and pdf> [accessed 14 June 2020]. 19 Bruno Latour, We have never been modern (Massa- Mind (Varna: Pretorian Books: 2019) p.5. Democracy (USA: Martino Publishers, 2011) p.61. 18 Scott Lash, ‘Objects that Judge: Latour’s Parliament chusetts: Harvard Univsersity Press, 1993) p.42. 15 Hannah Arendt, Vita activa oder Vom tätigen Leben 17 WIPO World Intellecutal Propoerty Organization, of Things ’, 20 Joseph A. Schumpeter, p.66. 24 Alex Beard, Wie Kinder gerne lernen, (München: p.11. 26 John Thackara, How to thrive in the next Econo- written by Roy Rothwell, Kerry Schott and Paul Gardiner 21 Joseph A. Schumpeter, p.76. Piper Verlag GmbH: 2019). my, (London: Thames & Hudson LTD: 2015) p.15f. with Kathy Pick, Design and the Economy (London: The 22 Joseph A. Schumpeter, p.83. 25 John P. Heap, The Management of Innovation and 27 Dr. Robin Roy and Dr. Stephen Potter of the Design Design Council: 1990) p.39f. 23 Stafford Beer, p.57. Design (London: Cassell Educational Limited: 1989) Innovation Group, Faculty of Technology, Originally we could solve here. Instead I’ll just lay out a Everyone knows you have to have it. Nobody the contributions of a local public possible. This design framework or this job for a design- small mind set I’d like to achieve as a design knows what you get. So why not get ethically Here also comes the use of our technological er seems like a nice idea right? It also seems to cohort that is taking up on these notions with a nudged and load the term with meaning? As tools into play. work very well on a council and community lev- parasitical approach while being considering propagandistic as the idea sounds, as valuable el. I was recently in touch with Kamal Sinclair, the ethics based on what is possible and not it can be, provided the designer is aware of his Looking at Start-ups or small digital initiatives who co founded a network called the Guild of what is asked. own ethics. such as Decidim we can see how the combi- Future Architects in Los Angeles. They connect nation of self-explanatory graphic and In- creative and professionals from multiple fields Commercialising Language I cannot say often enough that we as designers terface Design meets a well-researched and for the purpose of a more ethical, democra- Regarding our buzzwords I for instance see have to be particularly emphatic and aware empathetic concept as well as a strong use of tised design of our environment. They share a chance instead of another barrier, which is before we can exercise responsibility. There open-source coding and communication tools. resources and projects to help many commu- in itself I believe a classic reason as to why are enough professions in which we do not Decidim is a community platform entirely sus- nities and solve literacy or even spiritual prob- we need professional designers. Our design see this empathy. For us designers there is no tained by the local communites themselves. It lems in participatory way. As a small project language from fragmented degrees, over tools other choice if we want to make a contribution. enables people living in some European cities group they all bring together their own back- and principles, must become a tool, a service Empathy is to a large extent this contribution. and areas to organise their community from grounds, contacts and experience.29 Which is to design, itself. And this is where I think it And I don‘t mean empathy before a design is the inside. That can mean founding NGOs or probably a main reason for their success. But becomes highly interesting for the theory of brought into the world. It‘s empathy, period. finding collaborations for more permanent or as young designer the chances of producing parasitic revolts. Let us look at the fragments There are concepts to help with guidelines for larger projects but also to initiate the request Participatory design seems doomed since it is of language as form; as formable media, which this ethical and emphatic approach to design for resources such as parking lots or play- not promoting growth for a potentially coop- is that buzzwords never contained a repartee work. For example the Design Justice Network ground while using a voting system to get a erating partner. The direct match of need and but never an essence. Then we have in front and its online signature list.30 Here design- profound public backing and prioritisation in solution is blocking the productions and ideas of us a rechargeable mass of linguistic mate- ers can commit themselves to ethical design order to inform the local council or govern- organisations seem to like spending funds on rial. We have already known that words like principles and thus constantly remind them- ment of the need. A live tracking tool can then and cooperation want to increase their wealth. Design-Thinking are bestsellers. Everyone selves of these guidelines before a design can guarantee that the authorities are held respon- knows it‘s absolutely necessary. Design-Think- be thought through to the end. The concept sible through transparency and constantly So I would like to come back to the idea of the ing should not be missing in any knowledge makes sense but the individual principles are show the progress of the request.28 small revolts. We may not be yet able to make profile on Linked-In and is the hit in the de- surely arguable. this a viable future for all designers that are sign principles of modern corporations and At least in theory the communities thereby wishing to works responsibly and loosen up start-ups. I could also explain at length what Let‘s go back to the, on the other hand, very have a chance to self-direct their own envi- on the idea of aesthetics visual designs as a the idea behind it is, what the original appli- unconventional buzzwords and design think- ronment, making it efficient while growing job. But we all can take part in a crowd of crea- cation at Stanford University was and why it ing I would now like to suggest the following: together and have a highly reduced need of tive invisibly driving the change into a partic- has become so trendy. But you can also just If we as designers have a common code of external decision making, selling campaigns ipatory direction. read about it in the dozens of blogs, e-books conduct to which we attribute ourselves and for unsuitable interventions and governmental and papers that are available online, thanks to which we always pursue behind the facades observation. The need literally comes to the Parasitical Revolts our shared knowledge. Instead, I suggest the as a common vision. Then we can deal with authorities. The curation of the content is also In the beginning I started with the issues of rel- following useable problem: The term is now ar- empty words without getting lost. We can use citizen-led through open-source coding and evance and our barriers in the design language bitrary. Design Thinking, for the non-designer, our Code of Conduct through them in the form can be deleted if voted unfit. A democracy, that keeping us from being recognised as the game can be anything that is not tangible and un- of ethical, human-centered and invisible de- uses digital tools to be sustained. The design- changers I belief we can be. I also do belief we derstood as a method. For our purposes, it is signs for the commercial sector. A commercial- er in this example is still translating, from the can use our underdog qualities and confusing therefore above all a - A bestseller. If we think isation of non-commercial design through the need for democratised decisions in the pub- buzzwords productively. They might look like of the term as a material, we could think about use of hypes. The nudging of ethical nudging, lic spaces and the need to find each other for absurd ideas or small steps. Of course I think how to use it to sell something that is really if you will. Is that politically correct?! Certainly projects, but also educates through design, we should try to think democratically, less aes- relevant for us. So let‘s take an ethical design not. But whoever has a better alternative to the through interfaces, graphics and codes. And I thetically driven and more humble on how we concept or a design workshop that promotes current orders of design in the broad masses don’t only mean educate in a way that design- can create such design systems or consult in the design philosophy. Let’s take Participatory of the commercial assembly line should be er point out how to get funds and become an more relevant way. Ideally I would say even design or a democratic design that will have able to distribute it. And if empty words sell active member. More importantly the designer politicians have a well educated designer by an anti growth effect. Responsible design is no better than actually good ideas, then there is enables the citizens to think about their envi- their side constantly asking why we cannot cakewalk as we know. Raising money for such enough wrong with the design world to legiti- ronment themselves. Design took out barriers just redesign the fundaments of their systems a design that doesn‘t have a long tradition of mise it to turn the tables. so everyone has the freedom to review their or bugging the scientists on why they do not selling and commercializing is not a priori- community from a design perspective and find just put their research up for vote to create ty. But under a flag of design thinking it can solutions that ideally serve the problems em- technologies and cures that are most needed. I become a necessity for reputational reasons. pathetically for many residents. don’t want to begin with the amount of biases 28 Decidim.org, ‘Decidim’, All this points towards a designed material culture that is – lack of a broader perspective when framing design problems, and inherently inclusive and sustainable because it recognizes – exchanging moral responsibility for capital gain wellbeing as both empathy towards plurality and the path (i.e. redemptive consumption). towards intentionally designed futures. This perspective can help us as designers make decisions about “whether a problem merits our attention at all” and whether our solutions are “on the side of social good” (Papanek, p56). The challenge 1 Spirituality from spiritus,‘of breathing’ – the constant exchange between inner and outer – as in approaching this heady prompt is misinterpreting good as well as ‘soul’, ‘courage’ and ‘vigor’. Its use is consistent in various cultures throughout the ages such as the Greek pneuma, Hindu prana, Chinese qi or ch’i, Tibetan rlung, and Algonquin manitou. one way of being. When good becomes objective it becomes singular. Binaries then arise and the good feel obligated 2 As Tony Fry says. “For all the celebration of human intelligence...we have become too dependent on artificial worlds…” which, “continue to sacrifice the future to sustain the excesses of the present”. to impose themselves upon others who are not so good i.e. colonialism, the crusades, ideological warfare, etc. 3 It goes on to say “Tapping into customer emotions and evoking a positive emotional response to a given trigger is key to creating delightful UX”...kind of creepy, no? In this sense, good is approached as an instrument of power, control, and conformity and doers of good risk Too often the questions we ask are framed within the context of focusing on the product’s marketed benefits, the consumer can business goals. For example, I Googled “What is meaningful ignore hidden costs such as the waste that comes with using design?”...Google defines meaningful design as “...building unrecycled, single use plastic, the fact that in 2015 Ethos deeper connections with a product or service”. This framing sourced their water from California during a terrible drought, considers human connection and self-development strictly within and that only $0.05 from each purchase goes towards water the context of a product or service. The subject does not projects making Ethos almost entirely a for-profit business. improve for their own right rather, the object becomes better Redemption is the release from blame of debt. It is the act for the subject and the subject becomes better for the business. of removing obligation. By using consumerism as a way into This framing positions the object as the goal of the subject, virtue we confirm that virtue can be purchased and that its effectively supplanting the subject’s need for things other than value is second to the profit of the companies we support. the object. As this seems to be design’s biggest application, This is another form of subsidization. Going back to “why am the discipline is on a path towards emeshing meaningful I doing this” can help us bridge out of myopia and become more development with profit; our highest goals and aspirations self-aware of underlying motives behind our actions. Meaningful become commodities and commodifiable. design as a process of empathy-based practices also pushes us towards connection and away from subsidized actions of virtue. The same tools used to help us progress towards meaningful Everyday, individual acts performed with meaning and conscious change can and have been used to further this monochrome intention–living as praxis–is then the path towards narrative through redemptive consumption. Just because we intentionally designed futures. solved a “problem” of low user engagement in an app doesn’t mean the solution has made the users better people. Just The spiritual aspect of our humanity has the potential to open because we’ve solved the “problem” of high resource cost up our frame of problem solving and orient our practical doesn’t mean subsidized commodities has made the world better. endeavors in ways that have important social ramifications, Just because we’ve solved the “problem” of localized overfishing bringing a moderating influence to acquisitiveness and doesn’t mean transporting operations to other parts of the consumerism. Both of these are primary elements of contemporary world makes the practice any better. These solutions ignore interpretations of sustainability, i.e., the triple bottom line the delayed yet inevitable negative consequences of shortsighted, of economic, ethical, and environmental accountability. myopic thinking. They willfully ignore the broader system and pursue success within the context of a single story. The same narrative underlies redemptive consumption. 4 Movie: ‘The Social Dilemma Ethos Water–a Starbucks subsidiary–is a brand of bottled water 5 Fossil fuel production has adverse environmental, climate, and public health impacts––estimated with a social mission of “helping children get clean water.” to have cost $5.3 trillion globally in 2015 alone and yet, taxpayer dollars continue to fund many Grab one while in line for your coffee and read that by simply fossil fuel subsidies in the U.S. and around the world. purchasing a bottle you could help a water-poor community 6 As of June 2020, virtually all the trawlers in Ghana are Chinese and the trawler agents–the somewhere in the world. Sounds pretty good; your Ethos is people who profit from arranging the sale of licences to fish–are MPs. Yet in Ghana, over two million local people depend directly or indirectly on marine fisheries for income or employment. bettering the world. So you buy a bottle and feel good about The incomes of artisanal fishermen have fallen by 40 per cent since the turn of the century due in doing your part. This relationship between personal ethic, part to extreme overfishing and there is a growing tide of criticism on social media of the damage Ghana’s politicians are doing to their own country. Similar stories can be found in West Africa emotional responses, and business interests represents the vital where, according to World Bank figures, 78 per cent of trawlers are Chinese and fishing stocks link between our inner selves and our actions in the world. In have plummeted. this instance the consumer hands over their virtue to the company 7 Ethos water is manufactured by PepsiCo, & Safeway’s Lucerne brand. Unlike other Pepsi prod- by exchanging an artifact for the responsibility of action. By ucts, Ethos bottles do not contain recycled plastic. But more important than this, the inclusion of spirituality and new dreams of a future that extends not only into the twen- the personal ethic is essential for creating spaces of dis- ty-first century but also beyond it. cussion and debate around alternative ways of being, which is the prerogative of Speculative Design. Design speculations can Bibliography act as a catalyst for collectively redefining our relationship to reality as they open our imaginations to new possibilities Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. “The Danger of a Single Story.” Oct 7, 2009. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Ihs241zeg&vl=en. of living. Spirituality adds a critical dimension of personal meaning to this pursuit; one that goes to the heart of human Clover, Charles. “How China’s Fishermen are Impoverishing Africa.” The Spectator, June purpose and fulfilment, and the plight of people and planet. As 9, 2020. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-china-s-fishermen-are-impoverish- Fredric Jameson remarked, “it is now easier for us to imagine ing-africa. the end of the world than an alternative to capitalism”. Yet, Dunne, Anthony, and Fiona Raby. “Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social as Dunne and Raby say, “alternatives are exactly what we need”; Dreaming.” MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2013. Ericson Santos, Marc. “Five Factors of Meaningful Design: A conceptual framework for “meaning” in product design.” UX Collective, July 2, 2019. https://uxdesign.cc/five-fac- tors-of-meaningful-design-6819cda0cef2. Fry, Tony. “Design Futuring: Sustainability, Ethics, and New Practice.” Bloomsbury, London, 2019. Gibbons, Sarah. “Empathy Mapping: The First Step in Design Thinking.” Nielsen Norman Group, January 14, 2018. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/empathy-mapping/. Hara, Kenya. “Designing Design.” Lars Müller Publishers, 5th edition, Japan, 2017. Hochschild, Arlie. “The Deep Stories of Our Time.” On Being with Krista Tippett, October 18, 2018. https://onbeing.org/programs/arlie-hochschild-the-deep-stories-of-our-time/. Jameson, Fredric. “The Seeds of Time.” Columbia University Press, New York, 1994. Moyer, Justin Wm. “Starbucks’s Embarrassment: Ethos water comes from drought-rid- den California.” Washington Post, May 1, 2015. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ news/morning-mix/wp/2015/05/01/starbuckss-embarrassment-ethos-wa- ter-comes-from-drought-ridden-calfornia/. Powell, D. “Technologies of Existence: The indigenous environmental justice movement.” Development, 2006. https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.development.1100287 Tippett, Krista. “Becoming Wise: An Inquiry Into the Mystery and Art of Living”. Black- wells, 2017. Walker, Stuart. “Design and Spirituality: Material Culture for a Wisdom Economy.” Mas- sachusetts Institute of Technology Design Issues, Volume 29, Number 3, 2013. https:// www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DESI_a_00223. 13 We are existing in a society that is constantly lives. Repetition, lack of change and the even- flooding our lives with continual overstimula- tual normality or reality of this, in turn makes tion from multiple channels and a perception us bored. In correlation, the ‘inescapability’ that we have to be productive: constantly of boredom could link to lack of distraction working, living or growing. Especially as as a coping mechanism. Lack of change, and The Importance creatives, designers, we are often regarded somewhat distraction, leads to lack of stimula- as the implementers of progress, as saviours tion. In addition to this, Lars Svendsen defines with the mandate to do better, to inspire. That boredom as the idea that a situation or our is an incredibly great responsibility to place existence is deeply unsatisfying (Svendsen in the hands of any person. A burden that 1999). Whether this be due to repetition and of BOREDOM quite often can lead to burn out and trade off lack of stimulation, or linked to existential dis- of ones integrity to function flawlessly and contentment, boredom can be cultivated from serve “the system“. many things. On the other hand, despite the seemingly negative connotations of boredom, Idleness, standstill and boredom (god forbid) many philosophers and academics claim that have therefore become states almost entirely boredom is a ‘fundamental experience’ with for the Design connoted with something negative that needs claims that boredom is a privilege of modern to be avoided at all costs. man (Svendsen 1999, p.11 and p.21). With boredom comes a perception of time. The But what if boredom and idleness are actually boredom that Svendsen defines as privilege essential for the creative practice? Assum- is a state that Elisabeth Prammer presents ing that they could be regarded as a catalyst as “creative inactivity“ (Prammer, 2013, p.31). Saviour for creativity and invention, forcing creative In this restorative boredom or idleness lies practitioners to change the fundamental potential that can generate creativity. Hence questions that they were asking themselves boredom can be fleeting and allow recreation. in their discipline, are we as creatives not By thinking that boredom can be overcome, it consequently self-sabotaging our problem allows people to find ways, if they are motivat- solving thinking, progress and ability to think ed to, to alleviate it. VIVIEN REINERT out of the box by ignoring and evading them? Why are we, as a modern society, as design- Considering that our society ostensibly is ers and artists, seemingly condemning the constantly moving, fixated on success and concept of boredom, what are its impacts on progress one could assume that boredom creativity and how is this relating back to the would not be given the opportunity to occur design saviour? and that there would be no need for it in the first place. One could go as far as to claim that A widely accepted explanation of boredom today’s culture has developed nothing short is defined by monotony; a sense of repeti- of an infatuation with the idea of creativity. tion and lack of stimulation. According to This obsessing would be fine if we were ac- Peter Toohey, it is “the result of predictable tually good at fostering inventiveness. Instead circumstances that are very hard to escape. a force has been engendered in the creative (…) characterised by lengthy duration, by its working life environment that generates a predictability, by its inescapability” (Toohey feeling of inescapability and impotence to 2011, p.5). Here, Peter Toohey emphasises that experiment and breakout and strongly en- boredom as a state of mind is hard to alter courages focus on vocational specialty or and heavily impacted by how we live our ‚discipline’ in order to be regarded as credible According to the English author and social very much meaning followed by free time we and trustworthy. However, qualifications such of philosophers and academics claim that cre- psychologist Graham Wallas, every new idea, decide to fill with sensations and impressions as a Ph.D. oftentimes indicate a record of rit- ativity is “(...) the ability to produce work that innovation and the infamous “flash of inspi- that give us just as little meaning. Consid- ualised obedience rather than of exploration, is both novel (i.e. original, unexpected) and ration“ are the result of a creative process ering this lack of meaning, it can be defined experimentation and imagination, in short the appropriate (i.e., useful, adaptive concern- which he divides into four phases: prepara- as ironic that we as a society have become contrary of creativity. Figuratively speaking ing task constraints)“ (Sternberg et al. 2005, tion, incubation, illumination and verification addicted to these stimulations. (Svendsen, somewhat of an intellectual „monocropping“, p.351). Nonetheless, since narrow-visioned (Wallas 1926, p.10). No one can be creative 1999, pg?). Modern media is trying to fill this to plant all your land to one crop, has become thinking of specialists is reinforced positively, without first going through all the four stag- shortage of meaningless by overwhelming its increasingly strengthened. Despite the fact the need for interdisciplinary, lateral thinking es. That involves a lot of time to study, think society with an abundance of information, that a person trained in a discipline, a so and exploration of the novel usually consid- and reflect, practice and fail. The best way to noise. But this is not the meaning that most called „expert“, is unlikely to have the wide ered as a theoretical matter for future dis- promote and nourish it is to give it room and people are looking for. As noted by Svendsen, view, flexibility and adaptability needed to cussion, impractical and time consuming and substance. An inventor creates new things humankind is looking for personal mean- integrate his expertise into a larger system. wasting. In a Zoom interview with Anne Marr, not by “being creative” and “playing it safe“ ing and the absence of the former leads to Jewellery, Textiles and Materials Programme but by finding new solutions to problems. boredom. According to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi crea- Director at Central Saint Martins – Universi- That requires long, stubborn, springy work: tives are „remarkable for their ability to adapt ty of the Arts London and a member of the a willingness to test something to the limit, Boredom naturally arises “…when we can to almost any situation and to make do with Textile Futures Research Community, that I even if no one else deems it relevant. Often, a not do what we want or have to do some- whatever is at hand to reach their goals conducted in lockdown as preparation for this large number of these ideas for the problem thing we do not want to do.” (Svendsen 1999). (Csikszentmihalyi 1997, p.1). Yet by putting dissertation she confirmed that, solving do not arise in the workplace, when It derives from repetition and has caused creatives into pigeonholes, placing great “(...) it’s the balance of recharging/refreshing put under pressure and with the demand to great development in human kind in the past. responsibility into their hands and putting and having time to play and just doing stuff be prepared at all times to fix arising issues, However, since boredom, “…contains a critical enormous expectation onto them, any explo- that isn’t always just outcome driven. (…) but in the outdoor, in the shower or quite often element” and reflection as well as conveying ration spirit becomes extinguished. Instead, Having that time to experiment; for me that whilst daydreaming, i.e. in moments when you a feeling of emptiness, we as a society have it creates an intuitively sensible urge to work leads from the boredom into that experimen- let your mind wander (Ritter and Dijksterhus, decided to overcome it by filling it with new for security, affecting effectiveness and risk tation phase. This then leads to new ideas 2014, p.1). Numerous studies have shown that sensations and impressions (Svendsen 1999). taking. The problem becomes apparent: and new discoveries. Doing something that there is a high correlation between day- Even though boredom itself is according to security and its accompanying conservative you don’t always do because you are really dreaming and the development of creativity Bertrand Russel, “One of the greatest motive stance is the exact opposite of innovation. Oli time pressured and don’t have that head- (McMillan, Kaufman and Singer, 2013, p.3). powers”, there is lack of downtime because Mould, author of the book “Against Creativity”, space, that mindfulness. It is really hard to In this context it is important to know that we are unable to face the emptiness and support this argument by stating that much step out of what it is that you as an artist and daydreams arise in phases of idleness and the request to self-reflect (Russel 1930). By of what we call ‘creative’ nowadays is not cre- designer are always doing because you don’t boredom (Andrade, 2010, p.100). To summa- distracting ourselves with media such as our ative at all but rather cementing the existing have the time to develop a perspective from rise, one can conclude that time (boredom smartphones, laptops or TV’s we are trying parameters, eternally in the service of capi- the outside.“ and idleness) is an essential and elementary to remove the discomfort. It is apparent that tal, labor, and consumption. Being creative requirement for creativity and that by ex- in doing so instead of attacking the disease, in today’s society has only one meaning: to pecting designers to be always ready to save modern society is only fighting the symp- carry on producing the status quo. “Creativity,” and solve the former is deadened, leaving a toms. According to Svendsen our population however, Mould writes, “is about searching meaningless creative practice behind. finds nothing as intolerable as the state of for, giving space to and trying to realise the As already mentioned previously, by putting complete rest, when we become aware of our impossible“ (Mould, 2018). Dr. Helmut Schlick- designers on a pedestal as saviours and absence of passions, occupations, diversion supp, one of the best-known researchers in solvers, retrievable at all times, society places and effort, because then we feel our, “(…) the field of creativity, defines the term as “(...) a great burden on their shoulders, possibly nullity, loneliness, inadequacy, dependence, the excellent thinking ability to solve poorly paralysing them and depriving them of their helplessness (and) emptiness” (Svendsen structured and defined problems such as ability and capacity to take risks and learn 1999, p.17). Fleeing into distraction instead search-, analysis and selection problems“ about something new and explore different of channeling this state of discomfort only (Schlicksupp 2004, p. 32). Furthermore he de- fields. Repetition, monotony and “playing it creates an illusion of peace of mind. This has scribes it as “the ability of humans to create safe“ has lead to a creative sector and society become the normal state of mind and endem- compositions, products or ideas, regardless of that has become engrossed in the lives of ic in contemporary society. what kind, which are new in their substantial celebrities instead of actively living and pur- characteristics and were previously unknown suing their own. We are constantly surround- to their creator“. Conformity can hence be ed by stimuli that distracts us from reflecting regarded as the opposite of creativity. In the upon our own lives: work that does not give book “Creativity“ by Sternberg et al. a series The problem with escaping this conflict is As described by Peter Toohey boredom with time, staying still in this state of denial makes you “stand apart from other people, and repetition, one’s ability to break out of it from the world and (…) apart from them- and desire to see and learn something new selves. Boredom intensifies self-perception“ and different dies away. Without allowing (Toohey 2011, p.187). Idleness and boredom yourself time, as well as willingness to reflect can fire and inspire imagination and creation and to embrace boredom, which itself leads process. With time to think and pressure put to new stimuli, there is no ground for anything on themselves lifted, designers and other to grow. According to David Bohm, “(…) the creatives are able to question what they were action of learning is the essence of real per- doing previously. This pausing is a crucial ception, without it a person is unable to see part of the creative process and of finding what is fact and what is not. (…) one needs solutions for problems. It serves the collection to be attentive, alert, aware and sensitive (…)” of intentions, ideas and thoughts internally, to in order to see something new (Bohm 1996, let them mature and eventually clarify them. p.5). Bohm attributes this fear of boredom also In summary, it can be concluded that the to modern human’s fear of making a mistake positive connection between boredom and in a society in which maintaining an image of creativity is strong. Perhaps it is high time that self and ego as flawless as possible has be- artist and designers understand the phe- come crucial (Bohm 1996, pp.20-21). Alexan- nomenon of boredom better and rate it more der Schleifenbaum, art director of the market- positively. Subsequently it is essential that the ing agency MCCS Hamburg, also mentioned in art and design sector as a whole as well as his email interview with me that self doubt as society ensure that creative practitioners are a hindering factor in the creative process, “Be- given the opportunity to draw on the, “critical ing afraid of taking risks or the perception of and transformative potential“ of boredom in how someone else might see what you creat- generation of work (McDonough 2017, p.14). ed. If you create something that is truly yours Based on the ideas of the German philos- you offer a part of yourself to the world which opher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin, can be scary.“ Human beings are creatures of “Boredom is a warm grey fabric lined on the habit and everything that could threaten what inside with the most lustrous and colourful of is familiar, secure or precious preferably gets silks. In this fabric we wrap ourselves when avoided, even if it is at the expense of original- we dream.“ (Benjamin 1927-1940, p.24). Phas- ity and innovation, leaving behind a society es of idleness or boredom are, depending on of mediocre. However, that conformity is the the circumstances, not wasted time but could antithesis to the novel and creative. Anthony contain immense creative potential. Consider- Burrill expressed the opinion that, “(...) as ing the current challenges, such as constant soon as you start doing as you are told and availability and the perception that creatives follow the rules you stop being truly crea- have to be ceaselessly productive and serve tive“(Burrill 2017, p.56). In connection to the as saviours of our time, need to be critically creative practice the fear of boredom and the reflected and reviewed on by creative prac- steering away from the unpleasant emotions titioners and modern society as a whole. that come with it, represents itself as a dilem- Targeted used phases of boredom can be a ma for the modern artist and designer: the strong driver for innovation in art and design. risk of facing emptiness which could result in a failed attempt to explore new worlds by getting rejected from the society, or court acceptance by walking on the same already well-explored paths. 14 Disclaimer Acknowledgements None of the authors, contributors, administrators, Please take all steps necessary to ascertain that The Society thanks all our lovely contributors who Valeska sends a huge thank you to the Journal Team: vandals, or anyone else connected with Royal information you receive from Royal College of Art worked intensely on our theme and their Vicky Evans for the graphics and Laura Dudek College of Art Design & Philosophy Society, in any Design & Philosophy Society – The Myth of the dissertations and submitted these fabulous pieces. and Magdalena Bravo for their thoughtful editing. way whatsoever, can be responsible for your Design Saviour is correct and has been verified. use of the information contained in or linked in Check the references at the end of the article. this student publication. 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