I know You're looking for an aesthetic assessment...Pt. 1
of the effects of war on design and I've inquired about this before one way or another here, too. Let me take a long winded try it again.
First, let me say that the war, is not one war, but a series of wars, or invasions of middle eastern states that are no where near done yet. Syria, Iran, Somalia, and perhaps Libya seem programmed for the same vicious treatment Afghanistan, Iran and Lebanon have already received. I mention this, because economically these wars are going to drag seriously contract the usa economy. that means there will be alot less money available for buying new, innovative designs in any idiom.
Also, there appears to be a push on, with or without the wars mentioned above, but as it turns out coincident with them, to impose on usa something that influential policy institutes euphemistically refer to as "demand destruction." cut to the essense, these institutes want to contract usa demand by about 20-25% over the next few years. This amounts to creating a depression for the usa. why do they want to do this? i'm not sure i'm smart enough to understand or explain, but it goes something like this: china and india are being developed by the west. their development is bringing nearly 2 billion persons online and into the western materialist standard of material consumption. this process will put amazing pressure on basic commodities and raw material--everything from sand and concrete to steel and oil and fertilizer. basic commodities and raw materials are rather inelastic in their production in the short and mid term, which means they take considerable time to increase their production dramatically. this means that as china and india come on line, if everyone keeps consuming like they have been, well, then there will be a structural inflation that could topple the current western political and economic hegemony. so: someone has to consume less to make room for bringing china and india on line. and, truth be known, china and india have to grow a little slower than they probably otherwise could. the way i think about it is this: if they can cut the usa's consumption of raw materials by 25% for a decade, and hold china and india's growth rate to something less than what it otherwise would be, there is a chance that a global structural inflation can be avoided that would topple the western political and economic hegemony that is attempting to integrate china and india into the system. i'm not passing judgement on whether all of this is moral or immoral, good or bad...just saying that appears to be the context that design is going to be happening in. what it means is that product consumption is likely going to plateau or fall precipitously among ordinary folks in usa. the rich of course will be insulated from all of this as usual.
Pt. 2
so: i would expect two separate tracks of design that already exist--products for the rich and products for the rest of us--to diverge even more. there will be even more rich, ostentatious products for the rich. there will be less products for the rest of us.
designers and producers no doubt will adjust to this various ways. but i would not be at all surprised to see designers and producers begin to look very hard minimizing the quantity of materials used in products and beginning to seek out materials for production that do not have to be shipped so far, because one of the ways demand is going to be strangled in the usa is by sky high energy costs passed off under probably phoney rationalizations like postpeak oil shortages and global warming. I hate to go against the escalating propaganda here, but there just doesn't seem to be much evidence that we're really running out of oil, quite the contrary, emerging oil and gas producers like russia, iran, venezuela, n. korea, the 'stans in central asia, and iran before we took it and made sure the oil couldn't get to market, all seem to be constantly in the act of, or on the verge of destabilizing oil distribution mechanisms (it is not really accurate to call them markets for oligopolies control most of distribution and refinement) with OVERSUPPLY vis a vis the world demand for oil.
Pt.3
And global warming is not exactly the crisis that i would seem to be either. it is happening for an absolute empirical fact based on all the research to day, imho. and it is almost certain that human activity is contributing to the process. but here is where it gets fuzzy. global warming is proven to be tied up in solar cycles. global warming episodes have always taken place throughout earth's history. these solar cycles almost certainly contribute a much larger driver to global warming than do human activities. further, these solar cycles are apparently moving us toward a global warming episode at present. and there is apparently no way to prove by refutation of null hypotheses that the increment of human emissions is going to play a significant role in tipping the earth into a global warming episode. but the policy institutes are increasingly asking/propagandizing citizens to submit to reduced consumption to save the earth's climate, at a time when it is quite likely that it cannot be saved from a warming episode that may not occur for several centuries or even millenia. and they are asking us to do this coincident with their desire to impose a short to midterm demand destruction on usa to help bring china and india on line without destabilizing the status quo to the extent that the current western political and economic hegemony will be toppled. again, i'm not taking sides here on what's the moral and rational thing to do about global warming. some would say cut human emmission as much as possible regardless of suffering to save mother earth. others would say, make ordinary folks bear all the consumption cutting so that the powers that be can stay in power. still others would say, can't we find some equitable sharing of the burden across the broadest possible spectrum of society. judging from the crazy wars to control oil fields to protect against the volatility of oversupply and potential for unrestricted growth across the planet if every nation gets its own independent oil supplies, i'm guessing we're already well on the way to goring the calf in favor of the elites, but who knows? again, i'm not trying to take sides here. i'm just trying to point out some of the macro dynamics operating on context that producers and their designers will have to feasibly fit with to survive or prosper.
Pt. 4
i think these combined dynamics argue for an extremely lean period in design, a period where the minimum amount of material, and the cheapest possible materials, must be designed to provide the most durable goods possible, for a population that is going to be prevented, one way or another, from consuming as large a share of the world's raw materials at it has in the past. further, i'm guessing that this "lean design" paradigm (i coined it here first) is going to spread across china and india also, because just as we are affording less, they are affording more, but they have sooooooo many billions to bring on line that lots will have to make do with the least possible, too. hence, policy makers, propagandists, economists, and entrepreneurs are going to be propelled by this context toward instituting, officially, or unofficially, the idea of lean design.
now of course lean design and lean consumption will not be uniform even across the masses of ordinary persons. this transitition is going to put massive strains on all the oligarchies and all the institutions that they perpetuate themselves by and the economies are going to have both predictable and unpredictable asymmetries of who pays and who benefits from this shifting world economy and command and control system it operates under (sorry to resort to such military jargon, but that is what is emerging). and as always, humans, both the oligarchs and the ordinary persons, will be creative and contrary in unexpected ways. But I believe the long term dominant driver will be less with less. Everyone in usa will have less and it will be made with less. And the EU is likely to be put on the same diet, though it has somewhat less weight to lose.
Pt. 5
Do I think it has to go this way? Of course not. Everyone could have more with less, but that is harder than less with less and I find over most of history humans in large groups tend to take the paths of least resistance. So: I'd anticipate less of everything made with less. The only exception might be digital services. I think bytes will be substituted for bits. The next Marie Antoinette (oh how I hope there won't be one) will say from a balcony somewhere: "Let them eat bytes."
Now I leave it to you designers to speculate about and conceive the impact of all this on what our goods will come to look like as a result of this big squeeze from "designed" demand destruction.
I suspect Koen is on one feasible path that fits with the context I have outlined.
But I also suspect the post modernist designers are on another possibly feasible path. Why? Because they are trying to suffuse their cheap materials with a sense of humor and a sensibility that tries to cater to tactile and intellectual stimulation of people's perception of formal quirkiness. "Let'em eat quirkyness."
Pt. 6
Probably, like always, some people will approach this new world with a need for reasonable products that meet their needs during the lean times. Probably another group of consumers will want to deal with all this change through fantasy escape.
Look back to the great depression fo the 1930s to see how differently different consumers and desigers responded to the demand destruction of that era. Everything from carnival glass at filling stations to stream lined trains, to craftsman style homes to bauhaus astringency caught on during that period. when i look at that period, what i see is some people trying to endure the stress of it with fantasies about streamlining...moving through the lean times as fast as possible. And I see others responding with less is more.
In the coming period, I suspect we will see a similar bifurcation, but exactly what the equivalent of streamlining will be and what the equivalent of less is more will be I cannot say. I have already volunteered "less of less" as the equivalent to "less is more" I suppose, as I pause to think about it. But I am actuall kind of excited to see what designers will come up with to help our fantasies weather this coming lean period.
In closing, I hope the future is much rosier than I am forecasting. It could be, if oligarchs and the ordinary people can view the future as something other than a zero sum game in which the goal is throw people off the raft, rather than expand it, as east meets west and the tidal wave of Asian and Indian persons joins the global labor force and become producers and consumers of the goods and services yielded by scientific rationalism yoked to its rather irrational, inefficient, and often petty oligarchies and institutions. Fortunately, human ingenuity and technology have tended to be able to produce far more with far less than was previously thought possible, and it has always been able to redefine what prosperity was and how many could partake in it along the way to allow increasingly large portions of mankind to, as Bill Clinton once said, "keep muddling along on a generally upward path." The optimist in me doesn't want to shut the door on the possiblity that the lean years can be ameliorated or avoided. And the realist tells me that nothing is ever inevitable, though it is often virtually impossible for anyone person or group of persons to find the right levers to produce desirable changes even for the oligarchies themselves. But a good place to start is always with thinking about how we would like things to be. Designers are a group that is particularly good at that and so for that reason I have perhaps imposed upon you here at far too great a length.
I am not ...
well informed enough to contradict those scientists who made the link between global warming and our excessive use of fossil fuels. I understand very well that our planet has gone through a number of temperature changes and that at least part of the change that is now measured might be the beginning of such a "natural" shift...But only part... I also know that the amount of fossil fuel still available would carry us over to the time when these fuels have been replaced by other , more renewable sources. If I contunue to plead for less use of fossil fuels, it is neither because of global warming nor because of emminent depletion of that resource. My reasons to encourage moderation is that fossil fuels are not just fuels, they are also raw materials and the basis of most plastics. Unlike wood and other "growing" materials, oil can not be grown. So we have the choice: either to make materials out of it or to burn it. If we would burn 98% of our forests and use 2% for all other imaginable uses of wood, from construction to paper and furniture, people would be in the streets to protest the practice. Well it is exactly what we do with oil.
But back to the subject. My firts comment is that we exagerate the importance of war as the motivation behind innovations, very much the same way as Nasa or formule one racing is too often credited for innovations that had little or nothing to do with those activities. Secondly, war is an artificially created event, based on the believe that only the use of force can solve a earlier created problem. Considering that the available capital and manpower that is necessary to generate a n innovation is limited, a war situation createsa different order of priorities. There is no proof that this artificially created new set of priorities is more efficient in creating new innovations than the priorities developed by consensus in a democratic society.
It seems too easy to me to mention in that context the works of Eames (bend plywood medical equipment) or Dreyfuss (camouflage and antropometric tables). Both were part of what was called the "war effort" the first intention of the program was not to develop things but to keep talented people out of harms way. One of the few lessons learned from the first world war is that there were too many talented people lost in the battle fields. The war effort was a safe alternative to keep artists, both in the visual arts, entertainment, architecture, design etc. away from the front lines, and at the same time allow them to make a contribution or to give them the impression that they made a contribution...come to think of it I never noticed one of the Eames plywood supports in any war mouvie, no matter the pretended or real accuracy of the re-inactment...
a direct example
I agree with koen that the science behind global warming seems far more convincing (if not as well broadcast) as the propoganda to dismiss it.
But in terms of answering the orignal question I would point, as Koen has done, to oil. Whether the supply is running out, or can be put to better use, or is simply being controlled for the profit of "x" party-the price of gasoline is skyrocketing. This is having a direct effect on how Americans think about cars, and how manufacturers are producing them. For environmentalists (and us East Coast liberals) a hybrid car is the ultimate accessory and fashion statement. However, if you are a working class family, with a mortgage and a couple of kids in tow - then a hybrid becomes an economical no brainer. It will take some getting used to, but change is in the air - and the airwaves. The use of mileage as a selling point is increasing exponentially in American markets. (altho.. mostly by European and Asian makers)
SDR, Europeans pay more for gasoline and diesel...
and they get vastly more state services for doing so. A huge percentage of their fuel prices are taxes that go to a variety of state social and infrastructure services. As we pay more for gasoline and diesel, most of the price increase goes to the oilcos, not to taxes for more state services. European roads and bridges and social safety nets are quite good, while ours stink and are getting worse. Frankly, we're getting screwed imho. And as if this weren't bad enough, now the oilcos are working hard to privatize the interstate highway infrastructure and convert it to a privately owned or managed toll system; this way you get to pay high gas prices going mostly to the oilcos, AND tolls for upkeep of the road system you already paid to build, which will go largely to the same oilco folks who will hold the management contracts on the interstate highway system.
Remarkable, don't you think? Citizens pay taxes to build a system, the system is turned over to a private entity via a management contract and then citizens are charged to use the thing they paid for in the first place by an entity that didn't have to pay to build it!
An analogy would be that you design a chair; then you get the government to tax the people to pay for hiring you to build the chair. Then the government gives you a management contract extending for the life of the chair. Then you get to charge a toll to anyone who sits in your chair as long as it is in use. Sweeeet! Yes? You never put up a dime. You just get to control the asset as if you had paid to build it. Onerous, inequitable cost shifting if you ask me.
The way our communities...
in north America are planned and build is to a very large extend based on the availability of flexible means of transportation, like a car. It has allowed a development that, in line with modernist thinking, has located different social and economical functions in different concentrated locations. Head offices and economical istitutions have claimed the down town areas, industrial activity has it's own quarters according to size and nature of the activity and residential areas are generally quite homogeneous with some basic services as the few exceptions. All of this is car based. So, although our aversion to go to war for oil precedes by far the structural changes that are necessary to make these wars useless, we have to start to move into the right direction. Basically it means avoiding concentrations of fuctions. Diversity in land use will also increase the expectations we have of the environmental qualiteis of other economical activities. The main reason why a lot of industrial activity is allowed to be noisy, polluting etc. is that they are located far away from residential or commercial areas. If they were planned in the vicinity of residential areas, allowing for instance employees to walk or bike to there jobs, the standards of pollution control, noice control, etc. would be raised quickly and dramatically. We can simply not go on and enjoy all the benefits of our technological achievements without accepting the other consequences and by cultivating the "not in my back yard" attitude. The Hybrid cars are in my view only a transition tool. Something that will give us some time to re-structure our communities and to some extend avoid these inhumane wars. But it is also a distraction from the real solution which is to grow more and more independant from transportation.
dc...what about starting a thread on lean design?
Koen,
an interesting concept--use of urban diversity of land use to stimulate more responsible land use.
But there are significant costs to doing it in addition to the proposed benefits. Just a sampling of some of the costs of doing what you suggest: loss of significant efficiencies achieved in clustering like uses for firms. materials delivery systems can all be tailored to the scale that is required for clustered firms. wide roads. trailer truck parking and turnarounds. gas stations only in industrial neighborhoods require enormous parcel size to accomodate trucks. in residential neighborhoods they can be small. residential neighborhoods can have roads scaled chiefly to cars. delivery economies of trucks making several drop offs in one industrial neighborhood instead of to firms scattered hither, thither and yon. not having tractor trailer trucks pull up next to your house in the middle of the night and the floodlights on the dock going on in your bedroom window and so forth.
I like the idea of land use diversity in principle, if people really could get jobs in their own neighborhoods and if infrastructure efficiency losses could be made up in other savings earned by making the change. But the USA job and labor markets are incredibly fluid. People change jobs, or are layed off frequently. They already rarely can find another job in the same clustered land use area. They often have to go far and elsewhere to land the next job.
And frankly, Houston, Texas is one of the few places in America where there is virtually no zoning imposed clustering of land uses and, well, Houston is pretty ghastly both to live in and to look at. Sorry Houstonians. Just my opinion from visiting and listening to people who live there.
Houston as one case study makes me think that land use diversity if pursued would probably require as much or more zoning and land use constraints to achieve it in order to avoid looking and working like Houston.
Still food for thought, as always.
Koen, regarding saving oil for plastics...
I have often thought the same thing. Its to precious to just burn up. We need it to make things out of...plastics, as Elaine's dad told Ben Braddock in The Graduate. 🙂
But...
In reality, as a fellow pointed out to me, there is almost no chance that we will run out of oil to make things for two reasons.
1. Oil can be made from coal, and there is enough coal for many, many centuries, even if we keep fueling our stupid cars with it (though it takes more energy to crack the oil free of the coal than it generates so fueling cars would be very stupid to continue with if coal becomes the new oil). And if we quit using oil for gas and diesel, the coal reserves alone could yield enough oil to last humanity for many more centuries. I know, coal is messy and pollution rich. But if running out of oil for making things is what you are worried about, you like me, can forget it. The real problem will always be that we made too many short lived artifacts of oil and filled too many dumps with the toxic refuse of the artifacts.
2. Also, the science just keeps trickling in that oil doesn't come from dead animals and plants, at least exclusively, and perhaps not even largely. More and more the evidence suggests that oil from dead animals and plants hypothesis is refuted, or rendered at least inadequate as a scientific explanation. So where does it come from? The jury is out. But it is increasingly possible that it some or a bunch of it comes from a chemical process emanating from deep in the earth's crust or mantel. A trickle up theory if you will. I've had enough trickle down theories. I'm ripe for a trickle up one. 🙂
The problem facing humanity is too much oil. Not too little. IMHO. We can't resist burning it and making things with it because its just too plentiful. And it causes all kinds of problems, as well as good things.
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