This text concludes a mini-trilogy on D&D, aka #designanddisillusion. As I plan to be busy with this theme in 2021, I take the chance to start a thread.
networkcultures.org/entreprecariat…
networkcultures.org/entreprecariat…
https://twitter.com/silvio_lorusso/status/1335875546937503744
“I kept hearing about ‘design-led’ and all that and it got me excited. I was pushing for it […] Years later now, I’m in a phase where I realize that [advocacy] was really important, but in reality, design is not that important.” John Maeda, 2019. 
"This Papnek's (sic) claim that 'There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a very few of them' is well-intended but wrong: He gives too much credit to designers who are generally too low in the power structure to matter." Don Norman, 2020
"In the Crapularity, design becomes the cause of wicked problems, much like the pest doctor who realizes that he is the cause of the plague in Lars von Trier’s 1987 film Epidemic." @florian_cramer, 2019
archined.nl/2019/11/welcom…
archined.nl/2019/11/welcom…
(can't find the source :( )
"It is also in the interest of the Establishment to provide science-fiction routes of escape for the young, lest they become aware of the harshness of that which is real." Victor Papanek, 1971
Enzo Mari, 1971
from my archives
ok, all together now
:(
Jan van Toorn, 2016 modesofcriticism.org/operationalisi…
Music and Apocalypse, Max Linz, 2019
design double bind:
field: "with great power comes great responsibility!"
society: "can you make the logo bigger?"
field: "with great power comes great responsibility!"
society: "can you make the logo bigger?"
source: instagram.com/p/CJBC6b1FTtC/
source: criticalgraphicdesign.tumblr.com
What We See When We Read, Peter Mendelsund (2014)
"For centuries, humanists have looked at the global, technicians at the particular, and I've always thought I belonged to the first family." Enzo Mari, 2011
The Blind Men and the Elephant, Katsushika Hokusai
"The trouble with experts is that they know too much and they think they same way other experts think. And designers don't know anything, and that's your brilliance", Don Norman, 2020
If we consider a design degree in the same way as a product, we can say that the biggest business in the field, even in terms of revenue, has become the "industry" of design schools. Enzo Mari, 2004 (p. 123)
some of the concepts that will populate the glossary of Design and Disillusion (1/2):
Diluted design
Ornamental Politics
Design Double Bind
Autodesign (contra Self-design)
Bureaucreativity
Designer Without Qualities
The School
Survivorship Bias
Diluted design
Ornamental Politics
Design Double Bind
Autodesign (contra Self-design)
Bureaucreativity
Designer Without Qualities
The School
Survivorship Bias
(2/2):
Practice of Practices
The Field
Research as Product
Museum-Festival Complex
Design Intimism
Design Revanchism
Soft-skilling
Canned Futures
Design School Industrialization
Practice of Practices
The Field
Research as Product
Museum-Festival Complex
Design Intimism
Design Revanchism
Soft-skilling
Canned Futures
Design School Industrialization
"Too often in the world of design, the harshness of the *real* is okay only if it is translated or made imaginative." Marco Petroni, 2020
László Moholy-Nagy, 1947
Ivan Illich and Carl Mitcham, 1994 mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.116…
1966 (Unimark) 2016 (Sagmeister & Walsh)
"From objects, the design of the real moves towards hyperobjects establishing a new field of action." Marco Petroni, 2020
"vector introspection"
"Design is an incantation. Design becomes a chant, a mantra, an invocation sprinkled across disciplines in hopes that it will work its magic." Gerritzen & Lovink, 2019
Ellen Mercer, 2015
"We hope that privacy breaches are a design issue, but designers often are mere executors of strategic decisions made well before they were employed." Gerritzen and Lovink, 2019
concept for a series of AirBnB talks by Meredith Schomburg airbnb.design/designed-chaos/
"Personally, I believe that we will become extinct, and I also believe that we need to design a better, more elegant ending." Paola Antonelli, 2019 fastcompany.com/90280777/moma-…
Critical Graphic Design, 2015
werkplaatsellectuals, 2020 instagram.com/p/CJyfJRfheC9/…
the irony <3
"Growing weaker and weaker for want of oxygen, traditional design vainly thrashes in what was once a sea and has now been reduced to a miserable pond. Its ideologically positivist and rationalist matrix has worn out, and the institutional approach has become barren." Mendini, '73
"D&D" #wip: "Design is first and foremost about the production of an orderly inside and a chaotic outside. But the line is porous: our ordering attempt is inevitably artificial and its outcome necessarily unstable: entropy corrodes the negentropic islands of our projects."
"In fact, when all is said and done, the avant-garde school seems to entail the 'non-existence' of the school itself, it consists no longer in learning but in living." Alessandro Mendini, 1973
notice the "freelance writer"
the state of design in 2021: hating it has become a bonding mechanism
Source unknown.
from Graphic Designers Surveyed, Roberts, Wright and Price, 2015
from the Design & Disillusion glossary:
Professional Malthusianism aka "there are too many designers"
Professional Malthusianism aka "there are too many designers"
"Design is a craft with responsibility. The responsibility to help create a better world for all. Design is also a craft with a lot of blood on its hands. Every cigarette ad is on us. Every gun is on us. Every ballot that a voter cannot understand is on us." Monteiro, 2019
quote above: clear example of field aggrandizement by over-responsibilization
realized it works better this way
partial reading list for Design & Disillusion
"The problem of 'founding a school' coincides this time with the problem of 'freeing oneself from school', of teaching to learn, [1/2]
… of organizing in order to guarantee discontinuity, of making contacts in order to spread one's personal case, with taking one's place in history in order to remain a pure phenomenon" Andrea Branzi, 1973 [2/2]
Gonna tweak and use Franco Raggi's bio for Global Tools: "He has written and spoken about design, though actually doing very little of it, and believing in it less and less."
Monteiro, 2019
added to the D&D glossary: Emotional Streamlining
added to the D&D glossary: Design Omnipresence,
i.e. there is no place to which Design knowledge and power do not extend.
e.g. "If you're affecting how a product works in any way whatsoever—you're designing." Monteiro, 2019
i.e. there is no place to which Design knowledge and power do not extend.
e.g. "If you're affecting how a product works in any way whatsoever—you're designing." Monteiro, 2019
"Looking around, one would tend to categorize current graphic design […] into two large repositories: on the one hand, the things that, if there were no graphic designer doing them, one would feel no need for; and on the other hand, those that anyone could do […]" Lussu, 2012
"We choose design schools based on how amazingly creative and special they make us feel." Monteiro, 2019
"In the Stanford d school we attempt to bring students through a series of experiences that change their self-image so that they think of themselves as being more creative. We call this boosting their _creative confidence_" Bernard Roth, 2015
added to the D&D glossary:
Project Block, i.e. the inability to create meaning using the instruments that traditionally belong to the design field.
e.g. "If I have to do yet another poster, I'm gonna explode"
Project Block, i.e. the inability to create meaning using the instruments that traditionally belong to the design field.
e.g. "If I have to do yet another poster, I'm gonna explode"
Whereas the memetic patron saint of Entreprecariat was Hide the Pain Harold, I'm thinking that Sad Affleck Balancing Stuff is a good candidate for Design & Disillusion
Enzo Mari's desperate call for young, courageous, humble, knowledgeable entrepreneurs, 2004
the point generally missed is that those two characters are often THE SAME PERSON
Mari, Mendini, Illich… to a certain extent Papanek and Flusser… more recently a wave of Design Thinking detractors. Who else can be considered a "design pessimist" or "design skeptic"?
"Personally, I would like to outlaw design. Design is one of the most authoritarian and annoying practices that modernity has created. […] Properly human activities [were] killed by the separation between activities of planning and realization." Antonio Caronia, 2009
Richardson, 1993
"Logos seem to be most useful to the graphic designers who make them—it's a way for them to put food on the table, and certainly isn't as harmful as arms trafficking or other income sources." Lussu, 2012
optimism of the portfolio, pessimism of the cv
design pessimism:
1st gen) Global Tools
2nd gen) Critical Graphic Design
3rd gen) Dank Lloyd Wright
1st gen) Global Tools
2nd gen) Critical Graphic Design
3rd gen) Dank Lloyd Wright
"The issue here is that of control, or rather the illusion of having it when in fact it is in the hands of others." Richardson, 1993
"[…] design is a way of life that so many people want to participate in, they'll do it whether or not there's a viable living in it." theguardian.com/artanddesign/2…
"We might have better luck teaching psychologists how to design for the web instead of teaching UX designers how to learn the psychological tools we need for this new landscape." Monteiro, 2019
Michael Rock, 1996
ornamental content: when instead of form decorating content, content (an ideology, a current, a theory), content decorates form
the most blatant expression of ornamental content in visual design is keywordism
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