Design and Violence and Design Design has a history of violence. Yet as a discipline, design tends to trumpet the ways it has bettered society, rarely acknowledging its complicity in the malevolence and brutality that has for too long been a part of human life. Design and Violence investigates this often ignored and murky terrain, defining violence as a manifestation of the power to alter circumstances, against the will of others and to their detriment. This volume assembles a cross section of design projects, each with an ambiguous relationship to violence, pairing them Design with an author’s response that brings in expansive perspectives from fields as diverse as science, philosophy, journalism, policy, Hunt Jamer and Antonelli Paola activism, and law. Nearly all the projects were designed after the year 2001, a watershed moment in the collective experience of violence that calls for a new appraisal of the forms and manifestations of violence in contemporary society. By marrying critical thinking with examples of challenging work, design becomes a lens to garner a deeper understanding. and Paola Antonelli Senior Curator, Department of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art Jamer Hunt Director, Graduate Program in Transdisciplinary Design, Parsons The New School for Design Violence Design and Violence Paola Antonelli and Jamer Hunt The Museum of Modern Art, New York Contents 7 Foreword 74 Magnasanti 154 Five Classified Aircraft 9 Design and Violence Ayssar Arida William Gibson 78 Borderwall as Architecture 160 Army Field Manual 5-0: Judith Torrea The Operations Process Hack Harry Jones 84 Technicals 19 The Box Cutter Aminatta Forna John Hockenberry 88 Operation Sovereign Borders Annihilate 22 Stuxnet: Anatomy of a Graphic Storyboard Computer Virus Ahmed Ansari 165 Mountaintop Removal Lev Manovich Laura Antrim Caskey 96 Female Genital Mutilation 26 Pivot: Design against Trafficking Awareness Poster Campaign 170 Mine Kafon Shandra Woworuntu and Angélique Kidjo Jody Williams Christopher L. Heuertz 100 Prospectus for a Future Body 176 M855A1 Enhanced 30 Hacked Protest Objects André Lepecki Performance Round Carlotta Werner and Clive Dilnot Johanna Sunder-Plassmann 108 Scary Beautiful Alison Bancroft 180 How to Kill People: A Problem 36 The Crisis of Credit Visualized of Design Gillian Tett Alice Rawsthorn 40 The Liberator Trace 184 Natural Deselection Rob Walker JC Cahill 113 Vice/Virtue Water Glass Series 46 HonestAds Susan Yelavich 188 Serpentine Ramp Leslie Savan Ingrid Newkirk 118 Violence 48 IR8 Anne-Marie Slaughter 194 Euthanasia Coaster Bruce Nussbaum Antonio Damasio 122 The Stiletto Heel 52 Menstruation Machine Camille Paglia 198 Beetle Wrestler Elizabeth Grosz Hugh Raffles 126 Head Hand Bag Cintra Wilson 202 Salty’s Dream Cast Casino Jamin Warren Control 128 Drone Shadows Arianna Huffington 206 Ninja Star 57 Nirbheek Pistol Brian Ashcraft Nivedita Menon 134 Digital Attack Map Gabriella Coleman 210 Glassphemy! 60 Republic of Salivation Geoff Manaugh John Thackara 140 Million Dollar Blocks Steven Pinker 214 AK-47 64 Plastic Handcuffs and Anti-Bite/ China Keitetsi Spit Masks 144 The Refugee Project Shira A. Scheindlin António Guterres 220 The Design and Violence Debates 223 Acknowledgments 68 Thomson Correctional Center 148 Blue Bra Graffiti 226 Contributors Raphael Sperry Nama Khalil 230 Index and Credits Foreword Published in conjunction with the exhibition This book represents the culmination of a pioneering curatorial experiment at Design and Violence, online on the website of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Museum of Modern Art exploring the intersection of contemporary design at http://designandviolence.moma.org, and and violence in its myriad forms. Born first as an online platform, and then as organized by Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator, a series of public debates, Design and Violence, organized by Paola Antonelli Department of Architecture and Design, and Director of R&D, The Museum of Modern Art, and Jamer Hunt, examines the ways in which violence manifests in the post- and Jamer Hunt, Director, Graduate Program 2001 landscape and asks what makes these manifestations unique to their era. in Transdisciplinary Design, Parsons The New The project is not only emblematic of our contemporary moment; its unusual School for Design, New York, with Michelle format and challenging, provocative content test the boundaries of traditional Millar Fisher, Curatorial Assistant, The Museum of Modern Art. exhibition making and represent a paradigm shift at the Museum. Today, humankind enjoys better health, longer life spans, and greater Produced by the Department of Publications, access to material goods than ever before. Connecting to friends and strangers The Museum of Modern Art, New York across both short and vast distances has likewise never been easier. The field Christopher Hudson, Publisher of design, whether through applied medicine or mechanical engineering or Chul R. Kim, Associate Publisher computer science, has helped to propel these advances. As such, design has David Frankel, Editorial Director Marc Sapir, Production Director been rightfully trumpeted as a force for good, a facet of creative production that touches all of our lives. Edited by Sarah Resnick Yet, this narrative, albeit comforting and easy to digest, troubles in its Designed by Shaz Madani Production by Matthew Pimm simplicity. Throughout history, design has both perpetuated and mediated Printed and bound by Ofset Yapimevi, Istanbul violence, giving rise to tools that harm, control, manipulate, and annihilate— from the simple, handheld weapons of ancestral times to the undetectable, self- This book is typeset in Bureau Grotesque and Helvetica. The paper is 130gsm Amber Graphic. propagating computer malware of contemporary ones. The potential violence wrought by these tools is compounded by systemic power imbalances and their © 2015 The Museum of Modern Art, New York reification in our bureaucratic, social, and economic structures. It is the reexami- Copyright credits for certain illustrations are nation of this omnipresent yet shadowy narrative that drives the investigation at cited on p. 231. All rights reserved the heart of Design and Violence. Over the last decade, several of the Museum’s design exhibitions, includ- Library of Congress Control Number: 2015931936 ing Safe: Design Takes on Risk (2005), Design and the Elastic Mind (2008), and ISBN: 978-0-87070-968-5 Talk to Me (2011), have staked the claim that design encompasses not only tangible objects but also information architectures, user interfaces, and com- Published by The Museum of Modern Art munications protocol. Design and Violence is born of this legacy, engaging 11 West 53 Street New York, New York 10019 with graphic, industrial, speculative, and architectural design, among other www.moma.org forms. The essays in this book, commissioned from a roster of talented writers, activists, and scholars, cast a suitably wide net. Among the various objects Distributed in the United States and Canada by ARTBOOK | D.A.P., New York considered, some are designed to propagate violence, others to subvert it; 155 Sixth Avenue, 2nd floor, New York, NY 10013 mass-produced plastic handcuffs used by law enforcement and spray bottles www.artbook.com repurposed as protest tools succinctly illustrate the two poles on this spectrum. Distributed outside the United States and Still other ideas presented in these pages animate violence in order to condemn Canada by Thames & Hudson ltd it, such as the roller coaster designed to induce euphoria at the same time that it 181A High Holborn, London WC1V 7QX euthanizes its passengers. The terror evoked by guns and by prison architecture www.thamesandhudson.com may be palpable and incontestable; but as with interface designs that engage Printed in Turkey with political lies or that celebrate the fraught processes of natural selection, 7 Foreword violence can also present in subtle and ambiguous ways, empowering and Design and Violence disempowering simultaneously. Since its inception in 1932, the Department of Architecture and Design has provided a platform for groundbreaking exhibitions and projects. Design and Violence, insofar as it bravely charts novel territory, represents yet another example of the department’s ambition. The design concepts in this volume often provoke discomfort, not only because they cast a harsh light on contemporary humankind—for whom death, destruction, and the deliberate infliction of harm are by no means unfamiliar—but also because they bring into relief our own often unwitting, and sometimes willing, complicity in the field’s darker recesses. In violence we forget who we are. The Museum is proud to support this project as part of its commitment to facili- —Mary McCarthy1 tating engagement with a broad cross section of contemporary art, architecture, and design discourses, no matter how challenging they may be. Design and Violence does not always make for easy reading, but the dialogue it provokes In 2011, acclaimed scholar Steven Pinker published The Better Angels of Our should not be shied away from. Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, a commanding attempt to correct what he sees as a widespread misconception: that the world is more violent today than Glenn D. Lowry ever before.2 On the contrary, Pinker argues, violence has for centuries been Director, The Museum of Modern Art on an evident decline. Perhaps intuiting the knee-jerk skepticism of future read- ers, he mounts an exhaustive defense, patiently and convincingly