In reading Barrympls' comment on the Design that doesn't actually work I have to agree that Stephen's thread has been diverted to a number of other interesting topics, related to the reasons why design does or does not work. There is a Russian-Jewish expression that I translate as: The intelligent use their intelligence to understand why stupid people succeed. Of course that does not apply to any us unless we count ourselves among the first group. But there is some truth in old wisdom and I have to say that those who complained have succeeded in convincing me to start this new thread. Not that I agree with them, nor do I see them as stupid, on the contrary, but I understand that it is not always easy to be interested in the complexity of our world and that in spite of the obvious advise, to look the other way, there is some compelling force that makes us read or see things we prefer not to read and to see. I too have a PhD. But in my case it is not the familiar academic title but a Personal Hair Dresser and English is not my first, second nor third language, so I have many good reasons to read DCWilson's contributions 4 or 5 times before I can reconstruct in my own mind the insight he has in his. But having gone through the process I always find it more than just interesting.
A French philosopher wrote something like: Things that are well formulated are well understood, and/or vice versa. Writing, to me is not just formulating an acquired insight; it is also an attempt to get the bits and pieces of that insight into a constructive and sometimes logical order. It means that most of it is not in that order yet at the start. It's one of the reasons why I like writing. It is not as Paulanna describes it: clear and concise. I agree with her that it's more efficient to be clear and concise but I do like the Ferris wheel: up and down, always the same landscape (subject) but always from different angles.
So, maybe we can move the discussion to this thread, it would make it easier to avoid?
Design and Politics....a rele...
Design and Politics....a relevant and worthy discussion topic!
I've avoided contribution to the previous thread. Largely due to the spaghetti quality of the topics it's hard to pick one noodle and work with it. I'm still wrestling with how to formulate/articulate my thoughts in the face of elder sages....but I do agree in large part with what has been discuss.
In a nut shell, humanities current state is not conducive to long term socio-economic stability and growth. I strongly think we are in the early stages of a green revolution and a growing consciousness. This gives me considerable optimism for the future (on occasion that nagging misanthropic lurks below). This I believe is what early postings of the previous thread misses...that there is strong culture and the reflection of that in current design, not lacking. It's a matter of interpretation or even willingness to accept/embrace it.
I know, not much of a contribution thus far...I don't share the same effluent writing skills as SDR, DC and Koen.
Maybe my usesage wasn't...
Maybe my ussage wasn't ideal. Eeffluence would've been better... but general definition is:
adj.
Flowing out or forth.
n.
Something that flows out or forth, especially:
A stream flowing out of a body of water.
An outflow from a sewer or sewage system.
A discharge of liquid waste, as from a factory or nuclear plant.
[Middle English, from Latin effluēns, effluent-, present participle of effluere, to flow out : ex-, ex- + fluere, to flow.]
WoofWoof...
Your use of "effluent" is appropriate. I understood exactly what you meant. See the Merriam Webster Online definitions below:
adjective.: flowing out : emanating, outgoing
noun: something that flows out: as
a: an outflowing branch of a main stream or lake
b: waste material (as smoke, liquid industrial refuse, or sewage) discharged into the environment especially when serving as a pollutant
You use the primary meaning. SDR uses the secondary meaning. You need make no apology for usage.
Design has a political-economic dimension, or touch point of fit,
that is always operant.
For example, when a designer designs a minivan to present family household income levels to be used by families that the sovereign has decided to use a variety of institutions to skew outcomes in favor of, that minivan design is an enabling of that set of politics. The designer is, by virtue of his work, enabling that political-economic status quo, or working against it, whether he means to, or not.
Likewise, when a designer designs a product with an enormous carbon footprint, or with rapid obsolescence designed into it, that designer is enabling a political economic status quo that embraces the politics and economics that yield big carbon footprints and rapid obsolescence.
When things go terribly wrong in a society the political and economic status quo of that society is strained. The equilibrium level of unmet needs rises sharply. In turn, the designer, like many other professionals finds him/herself facing a choice. Either he/she continues designing to political and economic constraints that used to (but no longer) hold, or he/she adapts to the new equilibrium of political economic constraints
continued
When the shift in political and economic constraints are small, designers make small changes in the design of their products, mostly to maintain margins and market share. Everyone says, "Its just the normal ebb and flow of business and politics. We all have to adjust."
But when the shift in political and economic constraints are large, then designers may have to make large changes and large changes make everyone even more nervous than the large shift in political and economic constraints has already just made them. Lets take the example of the failing politics and economics of Weimar Germany being overthrown by the National Socialists (Nazis); this was a huge shift in political and economic constraints on designers, architects, film makers, painters, fashion designers and so on (for ease of reference let's refer to all these persons as "designers" for now. When the Nazis came in, designers like Corbu and Albert Speer and Mies had to start designing for a political and economic constraint sets that prioritized things that exhalted a master race, not just an accelerating technological society. They had to design for a what a very narrow criminal oligarchy believed a master race ought to want. Dr. Porsche had to do a volks car cheap enough for everyone to afford one whether they were doing value added work, or simply incarcerating Jews and Catholics. Porsche had to build tanks so huge no bridge could support them, because Hitler, and not a market economy were driving demand.
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It was a big shift in political and economic constraints on design for all designers, when the Nazis took over, after the great inflations and depressions that rocked Germany for a decade and a half after WWI. Mr. Designer could no longer focus on what consumers wanted, or what he though consumers wanted, or even on what producer/capitalists wanted. He had to focus on what a small cabal of crazies said consumers should have. He had to design everything from monumental architecture to short sleeve shirts with a new logo--the swastika. Tastes in color changed. Brown shirts became very big. Black SS uniforms were also no doubt designed around this time. Unless the designer decided that the political and economic constraint set imposed by the Nazis (master race, subhuman treatment of Jews and political resistors, etc.) was not something the designer could embrace. And if the designer delayed long about rejecting Nazi chic (i.e., the political and economic constraints of the Nazi equilibrium), the designer soon found himself designing V2s, proto-computer logistical systems for mass abductions, and concentration camps, and crematoria, plus the occassional stylistic updates to the uniforms of the Hitler youth groups, and the various branches of the German military.
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Today in America, especially since 9/11, but dating back to the fast track legislation that the Clinton administration used to impose globalization wildly beneficial to producer oligopolies, and disadvantageous to a huge slice of American salary and wage earners, the political and economic constraints have moved quite a good deal. Uniforms must now be designed and refreshed for American soldiers and contractors to torture in, and for abducted, untried prisoners to be tortured in (and occassionally killed in). A new global torture prison archipeligo had to be designed. Maybachs, and fabulously expensive Cadillacs, and $45K SUVS, had to be created for the Vilfredo Pareto favored 20% of workers in the formerly more egalitarian society. "Value engineered" pieces of wheeled horse shit had to be designed and dumped on persons trying to adjust to service wages. New products are needed more than ever that recognize that perhaps half to three quarters of the jobs that paid a living wage capable of supporting a family in USA were shipped out and many of the pensions and medical benefit plans for retirement years were welched on by the expedient of bankruptcy reorganizations that leaves the company in business, but the retired employees up shit crick without a pension to paddle with. Steal and old persons pension check used to be crime. Now it is policy.
Designers who like mid century modern furniture have to realize that that mid century modern furniture was designed for a labor force that had jobs; that had jobs that paid a living wage and that that circumstance now applies to a vastly smaller number of persons. That furniture from the 50s assumed that America could become ever more democratic and ever more prosperous. No one in any government in the last 20 years has enacted policies in any broad sense to try to realize that sort of vision. A designer has to accomodate this by either moving up market, or "value engineering" products for an essentially warehoused labor force. This is all very political and very economical, whether designers want to admit it or not. To design products for either market segment is to enable the fork in the road that the current oligarchy has brought about systematically through biasing income and wealth distribution out comes with massive modifying and recurrent tweaking of institutions to produce the current asymmetries of income and wealth distribution. This is not abstract crying in one's beer. These are the harsh realities of what has become of America the last 30 years and what few government economic statistics have not been tampered with, spell this out with staggering certainty.
continued
The Nazi designers went along with the Nazi's new constraint set and though we rather callously embraced their pet designers, we don't generally admire the Nazi designers for going along to get along, do we? I mean, its okay to say that the Bauhaus had big influence, and that some of its designers really made fine contributions to USA architecture, but surely we are not to the point of absolute amorality where we can say, yeah, and it was okay that Corbu and Mies and so on enabled the Nazi dream.
As America muddles onward and apparently downward slipping down the slope away from representative government and market economies, and toward a unitary presidency, conditional habeaus corpus, torture prisons, USA military units operational and tasked with military missions and roles on USA soil, 40+ million without health care, high unemployment that all economists admit is massively understated by the government criteria for calculating unemployment, and a privately owned central bank centric ordinate to the USA government, and so on, designers working in America for Americans are going to have to recognize the changing political and economic constraints. They are going to have to decide, whether to enable the status quo and the dirction it intermittently seeks to push things with reinstituting, or are they going to design products that go against the grain of this process, or are they going to throw up their hands and leave?
continued
It is a tough choice. It used to be so easy to be political and economical in one's design work in America. America was not doing a lot of the things it is doing now. It was trying to stop doing a lot of the wrong things that it had been doing. It was trying to spread the wealthy around and invite more and more persons into the tent of republican government. It was walking its talk a lot more and it was at least occassionally staring down the oligarchy and some of its tougher enforcers and saying, we can make progress, we can move forward, we can do what is right more of the time.
All one had to do was design products for a flawed, but relatively egalitarian system in which the common vision and the progress of institutions was largely moving in the direction of expanding the distribution of benefits from representative government and market economies to more and more Americans. Design a toaster in those circumstances, and everyone took to politics and economics of that toaster quite for granted. But now, designing a toaster for the present circumstances that I have outlined above, and the politics and economics of the design are starkly political and starkly economical.
Enabler, or problem solver.
Collaborator, or resister.
Corbu collaborated.
Camus resisted.
continued
What to do, what to do?
One thing to do is not to reduce the issue to viewing contemporary America as simply a fascist republic teetering alarmingly close to what happened to Weimar.
Another thing to do is not to understate the huge shift toward totalitaianism that has occurred in the USA the last 10-15 years, and do not doubt that this drift will get worse instead of better if persons in all walks of life in America refuse to begin to treat their work as having political and economical dimensions, not just professional and net benefit dimensions.
The duty of us all is to find the peaceful path, the path where the recent vicious and unwise excesses of an often great and progressive country are repealed and resolved via a willful, persistent commitment to humane choice in issues great and small, collective and individual, until the often great and progressive country has found its way back toward the advance of representative government and market economies, towards freedom and equality of opportunity and the pursuit of happiness, rather than toward the retreat from these.
But have no doubt, however this plays out: design will have a political and economic impact on what occurs.
Most certainly, it will.
The only question is will design be part of the problem, or part of the solution in the broadest sense possible.
There might be one disadvantage
to lengthy posts. They may contain so much material for
discussion that it becomes difficult to react. Either one chooses to answer one or two points, giving the unwanted impression that the others are less important, or one has to answer them all, which probably takes hours and redirects the discussion in numerous directions. This being said, I think that your choice of historical reference is not very adequate. It certainly makes the point in a lapidary fashion, but in using recent history that is mostly interpreted in black and white and very few shades of grey, it perpetuates the idea that the choices are easy: Good against evil, "with us or against us" In other words:"Le Corbusier was a collaborator!" I fear that it
gives us the impression that, if we had lived through the end of the Weimar republic and the beginning of the 3th Reich we would always and without any exception have chosen the right side. Unless we consider the German people stupid or basically evil, millions of Germans in the 30ties have proven that the choice was neither that easy, nor self evident. I certainly acknowledge that part of the lack of resistance of well-minded Germans was terror. The Nazi top had skilfully co-opted what were basically street gangs and turned them into a merciless para-military force
(not very popular among the real military leaders by the way). To put that in contemporary context it would be as if Dick Cheney for political purposes, would have armed and have given carte blanche to the Hell's Angels...although de-capitation is not as popular among the Hell's as it was with Berlin street gangs in the early 30ties. In my view, to describe the choices we have to make as self-evident as those we can make with the benefit of historical insight is to some extend unfair. I will leave it at that for the time being and address more important things later on.
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