Design Culture Lab

Design tumblelog

The Design Culture Lab has been using Tumblr to keep track of design + culture. Check out what interest us at Design Culture in Brief.

Tags: links

Architecture and activism.

Design Activism—or Just Good Practice?

“Their professional code of ethics obliges architects and interior designers to work for the benefit of human health, safety, and welfare. [But] whose health, safety, and welfare are these professionals protecting? … Who will design for the three billion slum dwellers expected to populate the world’s cities by 2050?”

See also: Public-Interest Architecture & Expanding Architecture: Design as Activism

Tags: architecture, politics

Designerly ways of thinking.

Design Thinking by Tim Brown (IDEO) see also: Design Thinking article

blog review by Bruce Nussbaum

“Design thinking is developing into a powerful methodology to solve problems and guide us in an era of incedible and shocking change. It is a process of managing and optimizing a large number of new options, as opposed to a system of dealing efficiently with a small number of existing choices … Tim has quietly involved IDEO and himself personally into the growing social innovation movement that is embracing design and design thinking to raise the economic standing of people at the bottom of the pyramid.”

Ridiculous Design Rules

“[A] place where you could unload those pretentious sound bites about design you’ve heard from colleagues, clients or anyone else who thinks they know more than you. Designers don’t need anybody else to make us laugh, when we do it so well ourselves.”

(via Core 77)

Tags: culture, design, methods, politics

Performing the future.

“So they’re not gonna believe that you’re actually from the future. That’s what Dr. Sterling said to me. Use technical demos, he said. Unless you show them some actual, working, hands-on technology from the future, right there in public, on stage, they’re gonna think it’s all just vaporware and sci-fi hype. They’re computer people, they’re skeptics, he said. They have to be skeptics, that’s how they survive.

So, show them your personal computer, he told me. Why would that be exciting? I said. Because my personal computer is like a towel. It’s cheap and old and everyday, and I’ve always had one, and it’s like the dullest thing in the world. No, he said, in 2008 they’re computer pioneers. They still believe that computers are exciting. They’re on the electronic frontier, with arrows in their backs to prove it. They don’t get it that computers in 2043 are boring objects of everyday life, like bricks and forks and toothbrushes. And towels…”

Computer Entertainment Thirty-Five Years From Today by Bruce Sterling (September 16, 2008)

Tags: design, everyday life, futurism

The power of design?

When this t-shirt made the rounds online it was quickly countered by another proposed tshirt design that read “DESIGN WON’T SAVE THE WORLD. GO VOLUNTEER AT A SOUP KITCHEN, YOU PRETENTIOUS FUCK.” The designer of the anti-tee wrote, “I’ve seen the sentiment in other places. I think it’s misleading and primarily flawed; it’s inaction cleverly disguised as action. If you want to save the world, start by saving what’s prevalent in it: people. Help them. Love them. Rant over.”

Students in my collaborative design research course chuckled at this, but were also quick to remind me that their professors have always told them that designers must be responsible, must be sustainable, etc. precisely because they have the kind of power that does, and will continue to, change the world.

A slight twist on this kind of designerly thinking can be seen in (founding editor of the Design Altruism Project and executive director of Designers Without Borders) David Stairs’ review of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum’s exhibition, Design for the Other 90%.

In Why Design Won’t Save the World, Stairs describes the exhibition content as “shot through with well-intentioned nostrums, familiar statistics, and a messianic calling to open peoples’ eyes to the disparities of the world.” He argues, however, that many design solutions fail because they suffer three fatal flaws. First, the problem of remote experience is seen to compel “naïve criticism” and lead to design solutions that are contextually inappropriate or unsustainable. Second, he cites the problem of instrumentalisation, in which technology is most often seen to provide the best solution to problems that aren’t technological. (On this point he further suggests that “Designers are especially susceptible to this delusion, perhaps because they are often trained to solve immediate rather than long-term problems.”) Finally, the third error he identifies is gargantuan thinking which posits that design can fix such problems as “the need to house the world’s population, eliminate disease, and reverse global warming.” Presumably, the issue here is that design can’t fix such complex problems any more than any one field or group of practitioners can.

However, he does not abandon all hope for the power of (professional) design:

“Is there a realistic response designers from developed countries can offer? A starting point might be to recognize that in many cases, we don’t need to remake other people or their societies in our image and likeness. The idea of design intervention — sustainable or otherwise — may feel very intrusive to people who are still reeling from 150 years of colonial intervention. (You don’t just waltz into a patriarchal society and aggressively advocate equal opportunity for women, or deliver pumps and boreholes to peasant farmers without understanding the sociology of migratory herdsmen). Living among other people and learning to appreciate their values, perspectives and social mores is an excellent tool of design research.”

Yet the first comment on his essay hints at the challenges of bringing such a culturally relativist and scholarly (i.e. broadly anthropological) position to the practice of design:

“You don’t just waltz into a patriarchal society and aggressively advocate equal opportunity for women… Why not? Why should patriarchal society be challenged in the West but accepted everywhere else? While I agree that the world doesn’t have to be remade to look like New Jersey, I don’t think we should be unwilling to promote, even aggressively, those values which we hold to be fundamental. Otherwise, we end up doing the very thing we are trying to avoid: treating the other 90% as The Other, foreign, mysterious, unknowable. Are we really one people or not?”

While the avoidance of ethnocentrism is one of the central tenets of cultural anthropology, it is rather complex in practice. For example, activist anthropology, and activist research in general, assumes that scientific methods (including those of the social sciences) can never be entirely objective or without bias, and since we always affect those whom we study, we should stand as advocates for social justice. This notion, in turn, comprises its own set of cultural and historical values and tends to position the researcher as hero, which raises another set of concerns.

Yet on a basic level, what we are facing here is simply political difference. For example, as far as I am concerned the desire to aggressively promote any values held to be fundamental makes one a fundamentalist. Without getting into the force that fundamentalism plays in global politics today, it is generally a political and ethical position I actively challenge and work to subvert.

So what can we say about the power of design (or anthropology for that matter) if it comes down to political struggle? Does “power” simply mean the will to power?

Tags: design, ethics, everyday life, politics

A question of ethics.

I’m comfortable with research blogging, but Internet research is complicated all-around.

In this case, since I’ve identified my place of work and the classes I teach, I will follow standard ethical protocols surrounding confidentiality and anonymity. That means I won’t name my colleagues or students, or describe them in ways in which they could be identified, without their express permission.

I really don’t think this will be an issue, but I figure that it can’t hurt to make it explicit.

Tags: ethics, methods

Day 1, in two parts.

After the first class:

I like the students. They seem happy. The corner classroom looks out over the city, and catches the morning sun.

I’m happy.

After the second class:

I like the students, but I felt too serious sometimes in there. And 23 students is still a big class.

The room is very boxy. The one wall of windows had its blinds half drawn. Must remember to see if opening them makes it less dreary in there.

I am thrilled to learn that so many of them like drawing! I think I’m going to try to get a graphic novel reading group going…

Tags: architecture, teaching

Gold lions and mechanical dogs.

I got a package today from an old friend. Just like when we were teenagers, he spoke Art to me. Altered objects. Photographs. Music.

Now they’re my office’s only decorations. And I remember what I like best about art.

Tags: architecture, art, material culture

Protocol.

The syllabi are done!

DART 391 - Collaborative Design Research

This is a core theory-based studio course in design research methodologies and strategies for collaborative project development — highlighting the role of designer as social and cultural mediator. Throughout the term we will focus on participatory, sustainable and responsible methods for designing with, and for, non-profits, government and other public organisations. Each week, studio practice and project development will be augmented with lectures, readings and discussions that locate collaborative design research practice within the broader cultural and material dimensions of public life, civic engagement and social justice.

CART 453 - The Digital Nomad

In order to explore the roles that computational art can play in an increasingly technologised and mobile world, this studio course examines the social, material, ethical and aesthetical dimensions of nomadism in everyday life. Each week, studio practice and project development will be augmented with lectures, readings and discussions that locate computational art within the broader cultural and material dimensions of global mobility and nomadic lifestyles.

Tags: collaboration, methods, mobilities, teaching

Montréal. Overlooking Ste. Catherine.

As someone who always imagined spending her post-doctoral year somewhere baroque, the EV Building is almost overwhelmingly modern. Still, I can’t think of where I’d rather be.

In 2005, Concordia’s Engineering, Computer Science and Visual Arts Integrated Complex was introduced as “an exciting place for synergy between the arts and technology.” All glass, metal and exposed concrete, some engineers say it’s a work of art and some artists respond that it’s not a great facility.

My first thought is that the floors are perfect for roller-skating.

Tags: architecture, collaboration