[lit-ideas] Re: Massive Change

This message is a belated response to David Ritchie's response to the 
Bruce Mau exhibition Massive Change. My thanks to David for privately 
re-sending me his message.

As I read what David has written, I find myself thinking of how 
strongly we are all conditioned these days to what psychotherapists 
call "Yes, but..." responses. It is very much to David's credit that he 
makes a conscious effort to restrain an initial negative thought:
>
>
> The fact that the utopian language reminded me immediately of 
> totalitarian
> states and the final solution, I quickly cleared from my brain.... 
> there's no
> point going out of your way to address something new with a tired 
> cynic's
> heart.
>

Still, however, an ambivalence remains.

Having told us that,
> The designer's argument consisted of two propositions: that identities 
> and
> allegiances in our world are currently shifting, and that some
> companies--Apple, Target, Smartcar--believe that design is *replacing*
> marketing.  The latter proposition he elaborated; in his view it is no
> longer the marketer's job to sell the thing, or even the illusion of 
> the
> thing--it is now the designer's job to make the thing appeal not just 
> as a
> thing, but as a part of a *culture* to which the buyer wants to 
> subscribe.
> One doesn't market to a consumer, one designs for a changing culture.

He asks,
>
> What is new here?

He evokes history to suggest that the thinking the designer articulates 
is not all that new after all.
>
> Allegiance to nation states is perhaps two hundred years old.  I think 
> it is
> a fading allegiance.  People have owed local and tribal allegiances for
> much, much longer.  Today we belong to tribes that are not defined 
> entirely
> by geography, but by some other common feature: an interest in ships or
> sushi or Switchfoot.  Designers have re-discovered these older kinds of
> allegiances, the sorts of tribalisms anthropology has been telling 
> about for
> more than a hundred years.  Designers have also found what a subtle
> sixteenth century peasant would tell you, that a person never has a 
> single
> identity; he or she has many, some of which he or she gets to choose:
> Catalan and Catholic but crypto-jewish and, when charivari comes 
> around, a
> bear.
>
> From the Bauhaus we got the idea that lives will be improved by
> well-designed objects and spaces.  This was an idea with, as they say 
> in the
> movie industry, legs.  And the repeated claim of designers thereafter 
> was
> that life in the future would be better because our objects would be 
> so much
> better.  Now the claim is that life in the future will be improved by 
> what,
> exactly?

Re the sixteenth century peasant, I observe that his multiple 
identities were, while multiple, "givens," a narrow range of 
possibilities already inscribed in the peasant's culture. The peasant 
did not, unless he was a very unusual peasant, do what the designer 
does, imagine himself coming up with new things conceived as components 
of new lifestyles, new cultures, radically new possibilities no 
previous culture has included. (This is, I hasten to add, a way of 
conceiving oneself, not the mundane reality that most designers are, in 
fact, what Claude Levi-Strauss called bricoleurs, rearranging cultural 
debris from the past.)

Also, if my memory serves me right, Bauhaus was part of a Modernism 
that saw itself as stripping away the excresences of Baroque to 
Edwardian kitsch in favor of a stern "form follows function" ideal that 
would ultimately lead to the chilly anomie and despair that Robert Paul 
finds in Le Corbusier's "Cartesian cities." This is a world away from 
contemporary, postmodern design's playful seriousness.

>
It is, indeed, too bad that the first object at the entrance to the 
show was

>  The Segway Human Transporter: useless on roads because cars will 
> crush it, useless on
> sidewalks because it threatens and impedes pedestrians.  Humans could 
> choose
> to empty city centers of all traffic--not uncommon in Europe--and then 
> ride
> these, but that would not be a design process so much as a messy 
> political
> debate of the kind we've always had.


This was not the case in Ontario, where the entrance to the exhibit was 
a massive video display of changing cityscapes and the Transporter only 
one of several ideas for new modes of urban transportation candidly 
presented as experiments with various pros and cons.


> I would compare the experience to reading, in the Aug 11 2003 "New 
> Yorker,"
> about GM's commitment to fuel cell cars; it inspired considerable 
> hope, and
> puzzlement or even fear about where this all might end, both at one 
> and the
> same time.
>

Here my feelings are very close to David's, with mine perhaps more 
closely aligned with the "Gee whiz" feeling of the Tom Swift books my 
grandfather gave me to read on my 13th birthday in 1957.

My feelings are also informed, however, by a new sense of 
possibilities, less Ayn Rand and more Open Source/Linux. I note, in 
particular, this statement on page 17 of the Massive Change book,

> The reality for advanced design today is dominated by three ideas: 
> distributed, plural, collaborative. It is no longer about one 
> designer, one client, one solution, one place. Problems are taken up 
> everywhere, solutions are developed and tested and contributed to the 
> global commons, and those ideas are tested against other solutions. 
> The effect of this is to imagine a future for design that is both more 
> modest and more ambitious. More modest in the sense that we take our 
> place in what our studio's chief scientist Bill Buxton calls the 
> renaissance team, a group that collectively develops the capacity to 
> deal with the demands of the given project. More ambitious in that we 
> take our place in society, willing to implicate ourselves in the 
> consequences of our imagination.


I find this a heartening alternative to what Richard Rorty so aptly 
describes as the "cultural despair," and I see embodied in the 
knee-jerk "Yes, but..." responses now so pervasive on the Net and in 
mass media "news" dedicated to Punch-and-Judy "debate" instead of solid 
information.

Whoops, there's my own despair showing....

John McCreery

------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html

Other related posts: