thinking about things

Designer as Social Engineer

What is the future of design as a discipline? What do design educators need to teach in order to create the next generation of designers?

Having had recent conversations with Karen Blincoe and Daniel Charney (Goldsmith’s BA Design External Examiners), I’ve been confused and concerned by what seems to be a split within the design discipline. Now this split maybe in my head – which is quite likely – but I’ve come across a couple of articles, blog posts and papers recently that have made me think this.

From what I can see, the split is this: some people are looking at the future of design as way to transform the world and peoples lives (this is arguably what design has always done), we can see clear evidence for this in the way that Hilary Cottam won (the rather ambiguous) title of ‘Designer of the Year’ in 2005. There were rumblings within the design community (and beyond) that this was a bad decision, that Cottam wasn’t a ‘designer’, she didn’t design ‘things’. Hilary Cottam represents a shifting view that design can “tackle some of the more intractable social problems of our day”. Designers will then need to work more closely with policy makers, politicians, and other ‘social engineers’.

What this signals is the use of design, both its processes and people, to engage fully in both political and social processes, enabling designers (and their collaborators) to find ‘solutions’ (even though this word is fraught with problems) to change peoples lives for the positive.

One of the main implications for me in this is: what skills and knowledge do design educators need to impart on their students? I find the question really exciting. I’ve always had a bit of a problem with ‘skills-led’ design education, it feels like putting in a gun in a child’s hands and telling it to go into the world and have fun. Designers need to learn how to think, how to create things that engage and change peoples lives… designers need to understand the implications of their work.

In my conversation with Karen she said something that has stuck in my mind, to paraphrase: “Eco-design’s biggest problem has been its failure to create leaders, instead its created designers with no confidence, who believe they’re losers”. At the core of this is the need for design education to value and instil cutting edge thinking, a critical practice, and the skills to enable the communication and implementation of this through design. Quite a challenge. So design education needs to create leaders – people with the confidence to go into the world and have a vision of what it can be in the future.

Now the split happens when designers have narrow views of their discipline, when they say “ideas are easy, now detail it and make it sell”. Understanding design as purely the detailing, production and selling of things, will continue to feed the view that designers are slaves to industry. And as Matt Jones said (via John Thackara) designers are the “shapers of possibility spaces, rather than things.”

Perec - Practical Exercises

Observe the street, from time to time, with some concern for system perhaps.
Apply yourself. Take your Time.
Note down the place: the terrace of a cafe near the junction of the Rue de Bac and the Boulevard Saint Germain
the time: seven o' clock in the evening
the date: 15 May 1973
the weather: set fair
Note down what you can see. Anything worthy of note going on. Do you know how to see what's worthy of note? Is there anything that strikes you?
Nothing strikes you. You don't know how to see.

You must set about it more slowly, almost stupidly. Force yourself to write down what is of no interest, what is most obvious, most common, most colourless.

Georges Perec, Species of Spaces, 1997:50

Best question: Do you know how to see what's worthy of note? How do i see? When do i know what i'm seeing is either interesting or relevant? How do i mark this 'note-worthy-ness'? How do i share my 'things worthy of note'? Are thier different ways to explain why i find things 'worthy'? Do i have hierarchies of 'worthy-ness'?

Perec the design tutor

I’ve been a massive fan of Georges Perec for years, the reason why, is due to his wonderful way of looking and capturing the everyday. His writing in someway captures the ordinary and elevates its beauty so everyone can bath in its glory. He’s the king of the banal, the prince of the quotidian.

Space melts like space running through one’s fingers. Time bears it away and leaves me only shapeless shreds…

To write: to try meticulously to retain something, to cause something to survive: to wrest some precise scraps from the void as it grows, to leave somewhere a furrow, a trace, a mark or a few signs. (George Perec, The Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, p91)

He literally writes the space of our everyday lives:

This is how space begins, with words only, signs traced on the blank page. To describe it: to name it, to trace it, like those portolano-makers who saturate the coastlines with the names of harbours, the names of capes, the names of inlets, until in the end the land was only separated from the sea by a continuous ribbon of text. Is the aleph, that place in Borges from which the entire world is visible simultaneously, anything other than an alphabet? (George Perec, The Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, p13)

I think every design student should be given a copy of Species of Spaces and Other Pieces when they start design school. Perec is wonderful teacher of how to look and record the things that most people miss, the things that designers should revel in.

Zugzwang

Zugzwang is the German for 'compulsion to move' and is a chess move where one player is put at a disadvantage because he or she has to make a move - it places them in a weaker position.

Sometimes i feel i'm in a constant state of zugzwang, in lots of different ways - from the desire not to fix meaning (which ends up fucking with my head) to the uncomfortable compulsion to get and do something (which means i never relax). Hmmm... got to go - need to get up and move.

thanks claire

Suspending my disbelief – Designing the future

Yesterday, Fiona Raby came and joined me at Goldsmiths. I invited her to give a lecture and then talk to the MA students about their current project (which is called ‘Fictional Futures’ and is about the design of imagined, science fiction inspired, future artefacts).

One of the projects Fiona presented was created for the Science Museum Energy Gallery (images of three scenarios exploring the ‘ethical, cultural and social impact of different energy futures’). Listening to Fiona about her and Tony’s work was great.

One of things that hit me – which may seem very obvious – is how important story telling is to design. I’ve been reading and writing a lot about Science Fiction recently, and Fiona’s talk made me realise that designers engaging in ‘future products’ or ‘future scenarios’ need to paint a picture of the future, they need to use any means possible in order to make the audience ‘believe’ – the type of narrative varies massively between the different types of design explored, how far into the future the scenario explores and who exists and engages in the imagined future.

In the Science Museum project there's a wonderful poetic and humor in the narrative, they hint at enough and leave enough to the imagination - all this is brought together in brilliant photogrpahs.

Design always engages in prediction, whether it’s how things are used or read, what social effects resonate from the design, or even down to the commercial success of the design. One of things I think design does very well within a research context is the construction of carefully crafted visions of the future – these visions open up potentials for the here and now.

The transformative potential of Utopia depends on locating it in the future, on thinking through the process of transformation from the present, and identifying the potential agents of transformation (Levitas, 2003:14 in Dark Horizons)

Drawing - shedding doubts on what I know

Drawing light
Originally uploaded by mattward.

Drawing for me is about fluidity. There may be a vague sense of what your
going to draw, but things occur during the process that may modify,
consolidate or shed doubts on what you know. So drawing is a testing of
ideas, a slow motion version of thought...The uncertain and imprecise way
of constructing a drawing is sometimes a model of how to construct
meaning.

William Kentridge, South African artist

I was sent this by one my students, strange how fits in so nicely with my last post on drawing. The speed of drawing is so important to how my ideas are formulating and expressed - this is something that have only just realised.

Cyclical drawing machine

Cyclical drawing machine
Originally uploaded by mattward.

After conversations with Jack Schulze and Matt Webb, i've decided to start drawing in a different way. I've developed a certain 'style' of drawing that works for me - it allows me to think in and through the drawing process. However, because it is only one way of drawing, it is also one way of thinking - hence me deciding to disrupt it and try something new.

This is an example - the difference is on a few levels. First, i'm using pencils (i normally draw with a pen, never a pencil). This immediately changes the process, where (in the past) i've relied on a confidence in my drawing to allow for ideas to emerge throughout the drawing process, here i consider and re-consider one line and it's attendant meaning. The object (and meaning) emerges in more considered fashion, the idea is contained - almost using the medium to edit during the process.

Second, I am drawing a contained 'idea', where as before i represented lanscapes of thought - this has its pro's and con's - there is less scope for strange unexpected juxtapositions, but a single idea becomes more 'readable'.

I'm still approaching the act in the same way - i never think before i draw (in this example, i didn't say "Right, i've got an idea for a cyclical drawing machine - time to represent it) i always think during the drawing. In this example i started with a mobile phone attached to a printer, it kind of grew from there. Obviously it still has lots of problems.

Moving forward, i think i'm going to continue to experiment see where my drawing and thinking takes me.

Pencils

Pencils
Originally uploaded by mattward.

Design Engaged 2005

Just returned from Design Engaged where my presentation was titled: Has design lost its way - towards a critical utopia. My slides can be found here(approx. 3.5mb).

Once again I'm confused at how things float around on the ether - I talked about utopianism and how design (and technology R&D) has a simpisitic utopian vision. I looked towards the like of Archigram, Archizoom, and Constant Nieuwenhuys. Constant came up more than once over the weekend (mainly through a fantastic talk from Ben Cerveny).

The first part of my presentation went a little like this:

I’ll start my presentation by declaring some of the underlying assumptions I have about design, now of course these can be challenged, debated and discussed, but they need to be said to position myself and make sense of the rest of this presentation.

My first assumption is that design is always ideological, whether the designer acknowledges this or not, the design process is effected and influenced by specific world views that are shaped and moulded by a wide variety of social and cultural factors. This means that design always responds to and is generated from, the context in which it‘s produced. So design is a product of the society it originates from. Now this seems a simple point, but it is important to make because it leads me to my second assumption.

Which is, that design is also world shaping; design is essentially a future orientated activity - as designers we engage in the ‘not yet’, the ‘soon to be’ and the ‘maybe one day’. (sometimes even with the ‘wouldn’t it be cool if…’). Design is the imagination and production of the future, and a field that cannot claim autonomy from the politics of social change. So assumption no. 2 is that design is also a producer. This means that design has a double action – it is both, at the same time reflective and constitutive.

This leads me to my main focus, which is the notion of the Utopia.

Thomas More first used the word utopia in 1516 in his book of the same name. The word is neologism from outopia meaning ‘no place’ and Eutopia meaning ‘good place’.

So what is utopian thinking? Utopianism is about the desire to be somewhere different, the desire for a world to exist that is a happy social place, free from the problems and difficulties of this world.

It’s therefore no great leap of the imagination to link utopianism to the act of designing. This means that some designers design ‘things’ to change the world, they see design as a way to make the world a better place. This indeed was one of the key drivers behind the modernist movement, men like Le Corbusier had visions of the future were social problems where solved through the rationalism of design. Projects like Unite d’habitition were created to solve the post-war housing problem and to change France ‘socially’ for the better.

From the beginning the Designer existed within Utopian writings, to quote from More’s Utopia:

“The minds of the Utopians are exceedingly apt in the invention of the arts which promote the advantage and convenience of life”

This is great, this means designers are really powerful, designers have visions of the future and then they design stuff to create these worlds?

Unfortunately the modernist utopian dream didn’t work, the designer got it wrong, and the avant guard became the worst thing of all –they became conservative. For an example of this we turn to Mies van der Rohe, Mies was an architect with a strong socialist vision for the world, unfortunately within the walls of the great modernist temples there is no room for dissent. During the trial of the Chicago 7 in 1969 within the Chicago Federal Building, designed by Mies, Judge Julius Hoffman told Yippie Abbie Hoffman to "Get back in your place - where Mies van der Rohe designed you to stand". Architecture that set out to give people freedom, became the tool for their control.

If we examine how design influences everyday life it is clear that it can assert control and power, this is not to say that all design is controlling, but design certainly has this potential to shift the power relations within a given situation. To give another architectural example of this, and one that is linked to the city we’re in, is the work of Albert Speer. Speer worked for this man, and acted as the chief architect of the Third Reich. He worked on the master plan for Berlin, which was (to say the least) totalising. Speer’s work used tactics to intimidate and control its occupants; the scale and materials he specified changed the way in which people occupied the space, highly polished floors made people slip, made them walk funny, made them feel uncomfortable.

So after Mies, Corb and Walter was there room for utopianism in design, was there still hope for social change through the act of creation? Amazingly there was, the sixties brought about a whole wave of theorists, artists and designers that believed in social change – that believed in revolution! From the Situationists to Archigram we saw the culture of the day move towards a new radicalism, a re-birth of the avant guard.

However, something had changed, and I think it was a significant change. The work of Archigram and Constant Nieuwenhuys presented us with a different type of utopianism, some even describe it as anti-utopianism. What they essentially did, is learn from the mistakes of their great modern forefathers. Instead of designing to create a totality of social action, their schemes allowed for difference. They designed spaces that worked in the inbetween space of choice and control, they created a metamorphosis of action.

From this I want to pull some thing out – it is the notion of creating a utopia of difference; this is a very different type of utopia than the ones we’ve seen before. Since the hay day of the modernists that type of utopia has been described as ‘terroristic meta-narratives’. This new type of utopia is one that celebrates difference.

To ground this in an example, to stop you all thinking – what the hell does he mean by ‘difference’, I’ll turn to Superstudio. Instead of assuming and defining the programme of space, the way in which people move and use space, superstudio allowed for the different uses and actions within space to define its architecture.

Their ‘continuous monuments’ where in some way a critique of the modernists.

Which brings me to a term that I believe is useful when discussing utopia. That is the concept of the critical utopia. The final part of this presentation will put a case forward for design and tech research needs to start to formulate critical utopias.

coming soon...

MA Design: Critical Theory and Practice

I'm now into my third week as programme leader of a new MA (currently called MA Design: Critical Theory and Practice - soon to become MA Design: Critical Practice). The cohort of students is exciting, i'm hoping that they'll produce some great work. I've set up a course blog - watch this space!