Thanks for calling designers attention to public vs. private rights...Part 3
As you might expect in a constitutional republic, the institution that creates it is negotiated by the same three types of players: those with alot of influence and power, those with some and those with little. As a result, while the people are the sovereign, the constitution usually sees to it, that despite some idealistic words to the contrary, some people are more sovereign than others; that is, the constitution creates certain biases in the structure of goverment that allow those with alot influence and force to exert it from time to time to preserve their place in the pecking order. In turn, equal rights may apply in some things and not others, as well as to some people and not others, at some times and not others.
With this background, we can meaningfully distill the following: sovereigns patent property rights and give themselves the right to keep them, distribute them equitably or aymmetrically, and reclaim them if they choose, all according to the rules of an institution, which itself can be amended, or abolished and replaced, at any time, through renegotiations based on influence and force.
The above seems kind of tenuous, doesn't it? In reality, however, there is a phenomenon called "institutional stickiness" that makes it less tenuous and prone to mutate than it would appear. Basically, most human beings are wary of change, even if they talk a good game about liking innovation and progress. This waryiness of unforseeable outcomes, combined with the knowledge that the players with the most influence and force can often impose their preferences on those with lesser influence and force, results in a legacy system that is often so intransigent that subterfuge and force are resorted to out of frustration in order to change it.
So: with the above hopefully in some contextual focus, why do sovereigns create the distinction between public and private rights which we find in theocracies, monarchies and constitutional republics (albethey different in each)? This question gets to the heart of institutional function. Players, as already suggested, consent to institutions to get something they want; i.e., better net benefits at lower risk of losing them and of having violence applied to them.
There are actually two dimensions to this question that need to be clarified and unsnagged: 1)public vs. private property interests in property rights; and 2) collective and individual economic efficiencies of production and consumption.
Let's start with public and private property right interests in property rights. This distinction refers to who owns something and so gets to control its use and enjoyment. The sovereign creates the property right, then he creates the distinction of public interest in that property right and the private interest in that property right, too.
Thanks for calling designers attention to public vs. private rights...Part 4
A single family home gives a familiar example of this distribution of rights. Citizen A owns the private property interest in the property right that controls the space that includes the house (technically speaking, real estate is property rights to use and enjoyment of space delineated by fixed points on earth). The sovereign (in America the people or the public) retains the right to tax, police and condemn it. So even in the sanctity of ones own wholly owned home, one is sharing the property right with the sovereign/public's public interest in that property right.
Frankly, I can think of no property right that the sovereign/public does not retain at least some kind of public interest in, even if it is rarely or never exercised.
The cases of police, taxation and condemnation make clear why we have different kinds of interests in the same property right. Some activities make more practical and strategic sense to be carried out by an agent of the sovereign/public than by the individual involved, or by all the other individuals of the sovereign/public on a one by one basis. Practically it would be fantastically inefficient for every individual to provide his share of the police, taxing and condemning activity required by the sovereign to maintain function and secure order in and around the house. Strategically, it is also in the sovereign/public's interest to retain some control over the house and its inhabitant so the sovereign gets to stay the sovereign.
So: public and private interests in property rights exist to achieve practical efficiencies and strategic agendas of the sovereign.
But as I said there is also this collective vs. individual production/consumption dimension (already hinted at in discussing public vs. private interests) that needs to be distinguished, too.
Some goods and services are consumed collectively and some are consumed individually. For example, you can drive your car alone, but you can't take a bus alone, at least not intentionally. Buses are designed and their business models only make sense for use by multiple riders. A bus service and its bus are a collectively consumed service and good. An automobile tends to be an individually consumed good.
Thanks for calling designers attention to public vs. private rights...Part 5
I mention the collective vs. individual consumed good distinction in tandem with the public vs. private interest distinction, because it is often simplistically assumed that any collectively consumed good is publicly owned and controlled, while any individually consumed good is privately owned and controlled. Not necessarily. As we are learning to some of our alarm these days, almost anything can be owned and controlled by either public or private interests in property rights. The recent wave of privatization is simply the transfer of ownership and/or control of collectively consumed goods and services (military logistics, intelligence, torture, secondary mortgage insurance, portions of medicare, attempts to privatize Social Security, etc.) traditionally owned more or less exclusively by the sovereign/public interest to private individuals and private firms. Likewise, deregulation is often the repeal of significant public interest in the property rights to various goods and services (airlines, insurance, banking, telecoms, drugs, food, etc.).
What is the relevance of all this to koen's description of the public and private interest in various kinds of artifacts? And to the morality of the allocation of the net benefits related to those public and private interests?
Well, to understand the legacy rules (and their coming changes) concerning the public and private interests in artifacts that designers design, one needs to grasp the practical efficiencies and strategic benefits that accrue to the sovereign/public.
Further, one needs to understand the changes in the weighting and composition of the sovereign/public to understand how the tradeoffs of practical efficiencies and strategic benefits will unfold. What is clearly occurring now is that players with much influence and force at their disposal are in a phase in which they are seeking to privatize and deregulate much activity away from the traditional constraints imposed by the sovereign/public interest in property rights. In short there is a political economic philosophy that has taken hold that advocates far more activites take place beyond the jurisdictional reach of the sovereign/public and within the influence of those with the most influence and force at their disposal. This is called by many names, but it is at least accurate to characterize it as a pronounced drift toward oligarchy in some respects.
Thanks for calling designers attention to public vs. private rights...Part 6
In turn, the tendency of drift toward greater oligarchic influence matters, because it determines not only how the institution of property rights will evolve regarding public and private interests in property rights, but in how and where and when the moral imperatives of society should be injected into the process to skew it towards fair outcomes for every thing from employement, to welfare, to civil rights, to the rights of designers and sovereigns regarding the designers' creations.
For a few centuries now, designers and the rest of us have ridden a rising tide of liberal democracy that brought generally increasing protection of the private interests of the designer and manufacturer, at times even favoring the designer. This could happen, because the manufacturers and designers (mostly the manufacturers, but both had some mutual interests) were able to apply considerable influence on the sovereign/public to get a preferred distribution of costs and benefits, because, frankly, it was for a time in the USA sovereign's interest to encourage the flourishing of manufacturing and design.
Now, however, the game is changing. The sovereign/public's influence and central role seems to be being eroded and perhaps even eclipsed by central banking and linked corporate oligopolies. In a world where the sovereign/public's influence is diminished, the question becomes: will the manufacturers and designers interests still coincide and produce institutions that foster the designer and the manufacturer's well being, or will reinstitutionalization begin to shift to favor the manufacture far in excess of the designer, as it already has vis a vis organized labor? Or will manufacturer AND designer begin to find themselves on the short end of the stick to some new constellation of influence and force that makes manufacturer and designer and organized labor largely subservient to, say, an alliance of finance, information and security organizations?
I am not taking any kind of a political position in this overly long post. I am not saying what should or shouldn't prevail. What I am trying to do is lay out some of the contextual forces relating to institutions that will continue to come into play to shape the role of designers and design in information age, and in turn alter the public and private interests in the property rights to designs created.
some other thoughts
I always knew that one can start with any subject and get to the much larger scale only in a few steps, but you (dc) did it in a fascinating way. Although so much evidence seems to point toward the "conspiracy" theory, I think that some of it is structural in the sense that we have created institutions that, because of what they are, lead to a particular result. They do this in spite of the fact that we have the impression that they also could lead to other and better results.
One of the obvious ones has been the use of the military to 'police' socio-political problems. An army generally does what it is supposed to do: fight, so'.they are very bad in policing. In a similar way the battle between private and public property is to a large extend the result of our chosen way of measuring the economy, not by the results, but by growth. In other words, not by the achieved well-being of the citizens but by the incremental change in the percentage of measurable growth. As long as clean water is free and the access to it considered a right, it does not contribute to the growth in the economy. Make people pay and all of a sudden you produce something and?it shows up on your brut national product (BNP). Economists and politicians are literally addicted to that growth, not only because of the resulting illusion of improvement but even more so because so much in our economy is based on the expectation of growth. If a company would admit that they see no growth in the market but that they are working efficiently, producing a good product and do so with a reasonable profit, happy employees and expect to continue to do so for years to come there existence on Wall street would be very short lived. In fact that is what many companies were facing and the only way out was to grow by acquisition. But acquisition is not the same as growth, so the newly acquired company had to show the potential of growth under the new owners' well we know what happened! I have colleagues involved in developing products that are made for one purpose: To hold a news conference when the stock shows a downward trend, in order to impress the analysts with the prospect of a new product and turn the trend upwards. Months later the product is just forgotten and of course never produced.
cont.
We have created this institution called the stock exchange and we keep it open every working day?.is there a reason for it, no! We could very well re-assess the value of a stock every week, nothing strange happens because the exchange is not open on Saturday or Sunday. In other words it is the character of the institution that takes over, regardless what would be dictated by logic or common sense. Back to growth and the consequences of being addicted to it. To some extend the battle for less public property and more private is a battle to contribute to growth, not by increasing the output but by moving public property to a different column. A public school does not count in economic growth because it is a cost. A private school has a turnover and contributes to BNP. And so we see relentless attempts to move activities to where it contributes to what we call the ?economy? even if it is counter productive or does not make a difference in the well-being of the citizens.
There are three ways to deal with the accounting problem you describe...
1. reinstitute less emphasis on growth, which would be trying to slow down a runaway train. It could be done, but the slow down will cause suffering on an unprecedented scale as the economy is redirected.
2. reinstitute the emphasis on growth so that all the things we want to be happening (not just some) are defined quantifiably and order them included in the count. this requires teaching people to think about things they once thought free or unquantifiable as being quantified. Changing people's thinking is slow and costly, but this is the fairest way, imho. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with looking at the world through the lens of growth if the lens were properly focused. True, somethings defy, or at least resist quantification, but those cases are not are real, structural economic problems. We literally are phasing out the idea of workers working, not just euros and yankees, but eventually all the poor third worlders as well. digital robotics and nanorobotics will eventually do to urban society what the industrial age did to agriculture. There literally will be very little need for people in the production process. And all professionals are under the same harrowing spectre of obsolescence over time. This is not science fiction. It is happening.
3. Stand pat with the institutions as they are and lest the process inevitably marginalize more and more persons first to irrelevance, then to poverty, then to death. This is what we are doing and it is the easiest path with the most dire potential for catastrophy from unforeseeable consequences.
I vote for number two, because quantification is of the three the most capable of rational, equitable analysis and control and the most conducive to continuing the perpetual interations between freedom and equity.
I'm off for a brief digital free vacation, so it'll be week or so before i can continue this discussion. Thanks for keeping me thinking.
Quality of Cassina / LC7
Hello, I own a LC7 chair and I had some bad experiences with the seat. It broke twice, and I heard that this is a problem wich occures very often. So is the high price of Cassina really justified in terms of quality ? Do anybody else have the same experience ?
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