[lit-ideas] Re: Massive Change (2)
- From: David Ritchie <ritchierd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 24 Mar 2005 14:16:41 -0800
Here is my buffalo coin's worth.
Last Fall I traveled up to Vancouver, B.C. to see the Bruce Mau exhibition;
I posted a Sunday poem on the subject. In that same week I attended a
presentation by one of the designers in town. (It was a private talk, so
I'll let him remain anonymous.) Given the background buzz to the two
events, I expected to have much to digest. Certainly the claims were huge:
design is going to emerge from small companies and boardroom decision-making
and take center-stage in our future decision-making processes. We should
expect not only well-designed things, but well-designed solutions.
The fact that the utopian language reminded me immediately of totalitarian
states and the final solution, I quickly cleared from my brain. I also
wondered about Rimbaud and our college's exterior paint. But there's no
point going out of your way to address something new with a tired cynic's
heart.
Here's what I saw and heard. First, the talk.
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.
What is new here?
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?
Bruce Mau seems to think that design's "processes" are going to help reform
the way humans make decisions. Some of what the exhibition showed suggested
ways forward: designs that took account of how products would be recycled,
materials used in innovative ways, heart-in-the-right place diagnoses of
humanity's problems.
But what was the first object at the entrance to the show? 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.
I was very interested to see the collection of objects in the Vancouver
show, but objects were, we were told, not the point. The point was that in
a cacophonous culture--there were two very loud rooms that *demonstrated*
cacophony, one filled with images, one with sound--design and new materials
and good intentions were somehow going to move us towards a better future.
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.
David Ritchie
Portland, Oregon
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