What do the critical designer, the radical designer, the activist designer, the designer as researcher, the speculative designer have in common? They all manipulate their own content. From this perspective (from this persp. only) they're all variations of the designer as author.
back when i was a student: students found design texts boring
now: both students and teachers find design texts boring
now: both students and teachers find design texts boring
h/t @freduarte 
The Invisible Committee, 2007
Danah Abdulla, 2021 futuress.org/magazine/again…
(it might be that what Abdulla advocates for is already there, but not in the form she hopes for: performative optimism on the surface, actual pessimism inside; *pessimism*, not criticality: pure negativity and contempt that can't be employed to improve neither world nor self)
Glad (& slightly scared) to announce this talk organized by the great people at Post-Radical Pedagogy in which I'll try to structure a bit this messy thread. When: next Friday on Feb. 19 at 1 PM EDT (7 PM CET, Rotterdam time) How: eventbrite.com/e/post-radical…
Addendum to the promise essay. Invisible Committee, 2007
"A design entails a passionate alliance between 2 persons: a soldier of utopia (the designer) & a tiger from the real world (the entrepreneur). It is always the tiger, if he wishes, who can allow at least a fragment of utopia to be attained. Today tigers seem to be extinct." 🪖🐯
"Design thus has become a media event—and we have a considerable number of publications that serve as resonance boxes for this process." Bonsiepe, 2006
For the series 'quotes that didn't age so well': "The design entrepreneur must take the leap away from the safety of the traditional designer role into the precarious territory where the public decides what works and what doesn’t." Heller and Talarico, 2011
Designers' satisfaction according to the AIGA Design Census 2019. More that 1 out of 3 is dissatisfied. designcensus.org
Design Dilution:
1) technical, e.g. Desktop Publishing and AI
2) methodological, e.g. Design Thinking and Designerly Self-help
1) technical, e.g. Desktop Publishing and AI
2) methodological, e.g. Design Thinking and Designerly Self-help
in other words, the magic wand and the post-it note
"In an era of digital production and disruption this chapter probes how design might now best labour under a philosophy of nothing." Paul A. Rodgers and Craig Bremner, 2018
one of my favorite design books (honestly it's not great but I can't resist the title + bass-like illo combo)
Adam Curtis, 2021
Baptiste Fluzin, 2016
Arjun Appadurai
(in his view, planning is basically the katechon of design, while design is the katechon of fashion. Maybe what we witness, then, is a crisis of this withholding role of design. The reaction? A wishful jump on the planning bandwagon)
"If […] one needs to 'subvert' design, this implies that a dominant framework of design reigns – and I think one of the reasons why it *reigns* is that it has managed to fold any and everything under its agile wings. I am not the first to raise this concern." Ruha Benjamin, 2019
the thing we call Design is a ghost, only designers and artifacts exist
Colomina and Wigley, 2016
In a context where praxis is less and less the domain of the design field stricto sensu, designers are *condemned* to theory: what's left to them is to indulge in sociology, anthropology, political theory, etc.
this is what design looks like
design thinking? self-help for organizations
"Engineers are healthy and virile, active and useful, moral and joyful. Architects are are disenchanted and idle, boastful or morose. That is because they will soon have nothing to do." Le Corbusier, 1923
the saying goes: "reddit is the place where memes go to die"
well, design is the place where contexts go to die
well, design is the place where contexts go to die
design can't be defined anymore, it can only be diagnosed
"[…] like earlier attempts to understand and to contest design’s status as an “institution of power,” the [First Things First manifesto 2000]’s critique was quickly rehabilitated into an apolitical affirmation of 'the power of design.'" J. Dakota Brown, 2019
dank.lloyd.wright, 2021
werkplaatsellectuals, 2021 instagram.com/p/CLmNbRdBDli/
2019
Papanek, 1971
what if the "everyone is a designer" truism is mainly a marketing strategy for selling design books to a larger public?
The Future of Design Education Initiative, 2020 static1.squarespace.com/static/5ee28b9…
Reading academic design literature one realizes that the field ended up surrendering to pure empiricism: methods cannot be neither replicated nor generalized, thus design becomes simply what designers do.
a theory of design dilution:
- the magic wand (technical): desktop publishing + online freelance marketplaces
- the post-it note (methodological): design thinking as an ancillary competence
- the spell-checker (cultural): fast curatorial hype cycles, design research as product
- the magic wand (technical): desktop publishing + online freelance marketplaces
- the post-it note (methodological): design thinking as an ancillary competence
- the spell-checker (cultural): fast curatorial hype cycles, design research as product
Donald Schön, 1983
Colomina and Wigley, 2018
#me {margin-left: 70%;}
#wip on design, professions and complexity
Tschumi, 1976-1977
when you ask me if I'm a pessimist
Jan van Toorn, 1971
one of my favorite posters ever
one of my favorite posters ever
Van Toorn, 2009 mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.116…
"Although design students remain some of the most forward-thinking individuals, designers are occupying rather fragile positions in society. As a dept., we hope to [prepare] young people […] for a practice w/in a profession that is increasingly hard to define." De Vet, 2020
tag yourself
My definition of design? The mess we're in.
Today, more than ever, design is polarized. It feels either all-encompassing, infrastructural, planetary, big, inaccessible or improvisational, ad-hoc, tiny, volatile.
"The medium designer does not exist and never will exist; capital executes the plan and the designer must dance along as they always have." Rogan, 2021 archpaper.com/2021/02/keller…
Michèle Champagne in conversation with Chris Lee, 2020
from a twitter bio, lost the source
not so rare instance of doomer design scholarship link.springer.com/chapter/10.100…
Dürer, 1514
"I've heard [graphic design] usefully, if circularly, described as 'the discipline without the discipline of another discipline.'" Reinfurt, 2019
not so sure about that, Victor
"[Moholy-Nagy]'s wearing a workman's jumpsuit over a dress shirt and tie, looking like a hybrid worker-technocrat." Reinfurt, 2019
more Margolin feat Camus
Design's ontological delusion:
- everything is design
- everyone is a designer
- everything is design
- everyone is a designer
Willis, 2006
Why this thread and the work behind it? Cause I believe the question of design as a cultural domain with very material ramifications has been approached lightly, or not at all. At best, the expansion of design has been theorized in abstract, at worst it has been taken for granted
Don Norman famously proposed a psychopathology of everyday things. It's now time for a psychopathology of everyday design practices.
design & disillusion "same energy" bibliography
the goal: specifically discussing the genericization of design culture
A strong instance of ornamental content, i.e. where content becomes the ornament of form, is the work of Boot Boyz Biz, so consciously citational, diagrammatic, simultaneous. boot-boyz.biz
generalism is the result of a specific intent
teh design process
im the guy on the left
"The question is then to what end continuity and to what end change? Or more specifically what should be constant and what should change?" Max Bill, 1953
Don Norman, 2021
Stefano Vannotti, 2021 degruyter.com/document/doi/1…
Bruce Mau, 2005. We were so carefree and we didn't know it.
in a proliferation of projects, design deprives itself of a destiny
biographical component in design projects, a compass:
red panel: counter-hegemonic representation
green panel: the personal is political
yellow panel: trapped in self-reflexivity
blue panel: enterprise-unit optimization (turning life into a project)
red panel: counter-hegemonic representation
green panel: the personal is political
yellow panel: trapped in self-reflexivity
blue panel: enterprise-unit optimization (turning life into a project)
wip
Lucy Suchman, 2011
First instance I could find of the "everyone is a designer" truism. The Architectural Forum, August 1962
Suchman, 2018 culanth.org/fieldsights/de…
wip
nobody: young designer:
Four little excerpts from the in-progress Design and Disillusion book. If you are a publisher and you like what you see, get in touch.
more wip
Two oft-heard assertions inform today's understanding of design: "everyone is a designer" and "everything is design". It is within such professed *design panism* that designers (struggle to) articulate their role and position.
Bonsiepe clearing things up
Here's a timeline of design panism (aka "everyone is a designer" and "everything is design"). What am I missing? networkcultures.org/entreprecariat…
Today in the empire, the simulated metaverse of culture broadcasts: the pluriverse.
after a lenghty power trip, design has discovered the joy of cupio dissolvi
design disillusion is the sentiment of who has access neither to the reassurance of the center nor to the radicality of the margins, who's stuck in some sort of cultural, theoretical suburbia
Arturo Escobar, 2018 (added to the design panism timeline as well: networkcultures.org/entreprecariat…)
"[design] has become too important to be left to designers" - Tim Brown, 2009
On the 2nd of April I'll present some more D&D work in progress at the Paris College of Art. This time I'm gonna focus - surprise, surprise - on the complexities of design panism, aka "everything is design" and "everyone is a designer". More info here: paris.edu/introducing-th…
Much of this work deliberately insists on "sense", "feeling", "perception". This is because perception matters as much as knowledge, and emotion as much as reason, or to put it another way, reason is one of the many form that emotion takes.
More than design subjects, designers are, like everyone else, subjected to design.
kinda obsessed with Dürer's Melancholia
everything kinda ready for tomorrow's talk: come for the slide deck, stay for the mess > paris.edu/introducing-th…
Munari describing an orange as a design object, 1963.
Here's a little text I wrote on the ghostly status of design featuring @ruha9, Bruno Munari, Processing and… Slimer networkcultures.org/entreprecariat…
generalist design (i.e. design that nurtures the wealth of human experience) vs generic design (i.e. design as a label with no relation to the thing)
designers tackling the issue at stake with no preconceptions whatsoever:
Florian Cramer, 2021 link.springer.com/article/10.100…
@LaRossa, 2017 larossa.medium.com/design-as-a-th…
(One of the few texts I stumbled on that brings into focus designers' self-doubt and the issue of self-realization.)
(One of the few texts I stumbled on that brings into focus designers' self-doubt and the issue of self-realization.)
a map
graphic resign
this is what a productive day looks like, more or less
Deleuze, 1985
The branch of design studies we need: Design Theodicy
updated the Design Panism timeline with Tim Brown, 2009 networkcultures.org/entreprecariat…
category time
- universe: modernity, good design, one world
- pluriverse: altermodernity, design for transition, many worlds
- metaverse: postmodernity, design thinking, world simulation/encoding
- universe: modernity, good design, one world
- pluriverse: altermodernity, design for transition, many worlds
- metaverse: postmodernity, design thinking, world simulation/encoding
David Edgerton, 2021 revistadisena.uc.cl/index.php/Dise…
"Professional designers are looking for a metaposition so they can perform their function as leaders." Mieke Gerritzen and Geert Lovink, 2010
true generalism is peak specificity
one of the cringiest design trend that is hopefully gone for good: the fake picket (pic comes from the opening of Dutch Design Week 2019)
"In the latest issue of She Ji, Blackler et al. (2021) use data mining methods to analyze twenty years of archived discussions on the PhD-Design discussion list. They found that the discussion has made little progress towards defining design."
updated the Design Panism timeline networkcultures.org/entreprecariat…
"Insecurity is fundamental to the way the design process works." Brian LaRossa, 2017 larossa.medium.com/design-as-a-th…
"Hi, I'm here to perform some design research."
Paul Rand, 1992 paulrand.design/writing/articl…
HUGE finding of the day: sociologist C. Wright Mills (whom I quote quite extensively in a recent essay*) wrote a chapter of an unfinished book on the figure of the designer!!
* networkcultures.org/entreprecariat…
* networkcultures.org/entreprecariat…
Gunnar Swanson, 2006
"We shouldn't be doing something that someone else is doing. If someone else starts doing it, we should stop." Ito, 2014
A big curator: "Designers are respectful, curious, generous, and hungry for other fields’ bodies of knowledge and expertise, designers invade without colonizing. Who can we trust more? They should run the world."
Designers:
Designers:
Wright Mills, 1958
forget UX UI (this is from 2016)
If we follow Herbert Simon's definition of design, that is, the activity of converting actual situations to preferred ones, we immediately realize that design is intrinsically optimistic. Pessimism can be only exercised outside of design. A pessimist design is an oxymoron.
Schön, 1983
Bailey, 2006
WdKA Teacher Memes, 2021 instagram.com/p/COccb0RFQwN/
Reinhild Dettmer-Finke, 2020 arte.tv/en/videos/0921…
Reinhild Dettmer-Finke, 2020 (haven't watched it yet, this is the first thing I read while skimming). Starting to think one needs to highlight disillusion to contrast this sort of "design was a mistake" perversely self-congratulatory attitude
wip on the design discipline
design: from how to who
The Carnegie Mellon University's Transition Design framework "sees the designer's own mindset/posture as an essential component of the design process"
western design discourse nowadays
Blauwelt, 2002
am i late to the party? #carson
"designers' liberation front" (in the sense of liberation *from* designers), 2012 pensieromanuale.tumblr.com/fronteliberazi…
International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus
J. Dakota Brown, 2019 post45.org/2019/01/americ…
Emigre 11, Ambition/Fear, 1989
the whole issue of design agency can be formulated as follows: the designer might exert a certain influence over the *design* but they have little or no control over the *plan*
"[…] designlessness as such is a forgone historical possibility, even if it can still be posited as a desirable horizon." Escobar, 2018
"This poster is worth about the 50.000 euros spent by my parent to let me graduate from the Drama Arts and Music Studies Cinema instead of buying a luxury German car." Giuseppe de Mattia, 2021 instagram.com/p/CPBQcvHFc8N/
"Design can either make a contribution to the creation of the possibility of praxis, or it can go through the motions of redecorating the cabin of the zeppelin while it crashes. Safe travels, designers." McKenzie Wark, 2010
"[…] in order to adapt to what is required of them, they [designers] must redesign themselves and their way of operating. But then this is what is required of everybody today." Manzini, 2015
Reinhild Dettmer-Finke, 2020
Reinhild Dettmer-Finke, 2020 (pretty telling line)
Platonic Design: design that focuses on ideas rather than things. PD promotes theories, fosters reflection and criticizes positions. Instead of transforming the environment through its products and services, PD claims to raise awareness and sway public opinion.
the state of affairs, more or less
"Obviously many designers and engineers have been involved in the creation of my razors over the years […] but what more are these creators of the individual models than little cogs in the perpetuating Gillette Company?" Koert van Mensvoort, 2010
"Although […] the current context encourages people to design their own lives, it [also] hinders them by creating expectations that cannot be satisfied, strewing difficulties in their path and reducing practical possibility of realizing their life projects." Manzini, 32
"Design is no longer a pedagogic discipline that intends to uplift the taste of the ‘normies’ in order to give their daily lives sense and purpose." Lovink, 2019 monoskop.org/log/?p=21718
On an emotional level, what characterises the precariat according to Standing are four A’s: anger, anomie, anxiety and alienation.
from Entreprecariat, 2019
"if the sense-making side [of the design process] must be considered too, the question is who has the capability and the authority to decide what to do and how." Manzini, 2015
the beginning of the end (Blauvelt, 2002)
"[…] what the expert designer must point to, in order to demonstrate what he has done, is the series of design initiatives he or she has set up, or in which he or she has actively taken part", Manzini 2015
Yuri Veerman, 2021 (via networkcultures.org/longform/2021/…)
"How is it possible that two bookshelves, all but identical in appearance and construction, can exemplify both left-wing critical design and the world’s most successful capitalist furniture-manufacturing strategy?" thenation.com/article/cultur…
"If even the most respected critical project of the most respected critical designer looks all but indistinguishable from a product made by IKEA, how credible is the whole prospect of politically engaged design?" ibid.
"By the time something is designed, it is usually too late to determine its political effect. Commodities are principally the outcome of power relations, not the cause of them." ibid.
"the claim of cultural and professional autonomy resembles more a retreat from a hostile marketplace and an indifferent public than the actual exercise of disciplinary independence."
disillusion: disillusionment + unveiling
needless to say, the passage from education's vita contemplativa to work's vita activa naturally involves a certain degree of disappointment and a reframing of one's goals and values
As I discovered the work of @JDakotaBrown, I became a fan. His essays on automation & autonomy in graphic design are such rich contributions to the field. The good news is that tomorrow he will be in dialog w/ urs truly thanks to @burghalle! Info: burg-halle.de/hochschule/inf…
✅ nostalgia for a mythical age of stability and order
✅ technical dilution
✅ self-reflexivity
✅ melancholia
via @aubreymcfato
✅ technical dilution
✅ self-reflexivity
✅ melancholia
via @aubreymcfato
"I've always considered myself a freelancer, even when I was an art director at Pirelli, because I've always been a free man in my life."
– Bob Noorda
– Bob Noorda
As other professions, design actively tries to preserve its place in society. But, unlike them, the design field is particularly subject to professional pluralism, the proliferation of conflicting views of the discipline's aims, methods and goals.
Draft of chapter ready (~5000 words). In case anyone is curious to give it a read and send feedback, I'd love that. DMs are open :)
"isolated in their own objects [architects] design their own minds" - Marta Lonzi, 2006
"How and to what extent modernity's promise of designability of one's own life has been fulfilled is obviously an open question." - Manzini, 2015
(Altough en passant, Manzini really nails it. This the question to tackle, and not just in general, but also within design: what is the horizon of designability of one's own design practice?)
"The field’s most pressing imperative today is no longer professionalization; it’s to make design practice a responsible part of building equitable, sustainable futures." - Toppins, 2021 eyeondesign.aiga.org/we-need-graphi…
[The field’s most pressing imperative today is no longer professionalization also because maintaining the high professional status that graphic design achieved after WWII is increasingly hard.]
the professional status of graphic design in one slide
Eric Hu, 2021 creativeboom.com/features/eric-…
How do you call it when design media acritically celebrate graphic design heroes?
HAGIOGRAPHIC DESIGN
HAGIOGRAPHIC DESIGN
"Although 83% of respondents said they would recommend a career in graphic design, only 55% of respondents expressed satisfaction with their career – and 23% were actively dissatisfied." *Graphic Designers Surveyed*, 2015
"[…] while designers are an independent, opinionated (and, dare I say it, mouthy) bunch when it comes to how we feel about our practice and our chosen field, this strong will doesn't always translate into higher wages or shorter hours." Stefanie Posavec, 2015
cursed statistics (on soft-skilling), Graphic Designers Surveyed, 2015
related to above tweet: "modern society is de-skilling people in practicing cooperation", Sennett 2012
(hence, the demand of networking as a skill, which is perverse cooperation, relationship as experience, I-it in Buber's terms…)
(hence, the demand of networking as a skill, which is perverse cooperation, relationship as experience, I-it in Buber's terms…)
PARK advanced design management, commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Desi…
Bonsiepe on Papanek: "The pale crusade of the petit-bourgeois is manifested in the fact that there is never any mention of the organization of the relations of production and the role of the productive forces…
… especially that of the working class, whose participation is an indispensable prerequisite for any change in the praxis of design."
more Bonsiepe on Papanek: "As a generic, [the designer according to Papanek] has turned his lack of specialization into a specialty."
ok last Bonsiepe (worth of a t-shirt): "The designer, according to the author, would come to be tasked with 'contributing to the formulation of goals for society as a whole.' But this doesn't require a designer, it requires a revolution."
design hero storytelling = professionalist nostalgia
file under: dilution
ontological design theorists be like
A few stats from Flavia Lunardi's survey on Italian graphic design studios "Grafica Italia 2018".
- What was more educational? (52.8 work, 17.9 edu)
- Are you satisfied by the role of the graphic designer in Italy? (71.9 n, 5.6 y)
- Would you like to change job? (86.9 n, 3 y)
- What was more educational? (52.8 work, 17.9 edu)
- Are you satisfied by the role of the graphic designer in Italy? (71.9 n, 5.6 y)
- Would you like to change job? (86.9 n, 3 y)
"[Designers] cannot consider well their position or formulate their credo without considering both cultural and economic trends, and the shaping of the total society in which these are occurring." - C. Wright Mills 1958
Saul Bass to design students in 1958: “Why do we have to assess capitalism? We’re just trying to stage a design conference.”
Design students in 2021:
Design students in 2021:
"I would argue that design is one of the terms that has replaced the word 'revolution'! To say that everything has to be designed and redesigned (including nature), we imply something of the sort: 'it will neither be revolutionized, nor will it be modernized'". Latour, 2008
"It seems to me that to say you plan to design something, does not carry the same risk of hubris as saying one is going to build something" said Latour in 2008.
Now, either the times have changed a lot, or Latour wasn't so familiar with the design field.
Now, either the times have changed a lot, or Latour wasn't so familiar with the design field.
"It has become an orthodoxy to talk of the growing complexity of design in our 'complex world'." Julier, 2017
Don't blame the person, blame the conditions, which are in a nutshell:
- status insecurity
- higher pos. of critical theory in edu
- liaison w/ contemporary art & thus also w/ its tragically blurry artspeak
- ornamental content
- strategic keywordism
- status insecurity
- higher pos. of critical theory in edu
- liaison w/ contemporary art & thus also w/ its tragically blurry artspeak
- ornamental content
- strategic keywordism
https://twitter.com/urboib/status/1412834172469583874
:(
- Melissa Korn and Andrea Fuller, 2021 wsj.com/amp/articles/f…
"And just as it is only the burning awareness of what we cannot be that guarantees the truth of what we are, so it is only the lucid vision of what we cannot, or can not, do that gives consistency to our actions." Agamben, 2011
Idealist or materialist? There is no such divide: emerging from material conditions, aspirations might perversely reproduce those very conditions. In this sense, aspirations are the distorted reflection of material conditions.
"[During the 80s] The professional environment and aspirations of design mirrored the increased flexibility and speed afforded by the Big Bang for the financial sector." Julier, 2017
"The evasion of normative procedures and professional identities by the design industry is in no small part the result of its constant adherence to 'following the money' by inventing new specialisms to exploit technological and business opportunities" - Julier, 2017
Our current spherical, there-is-no-ouside, Sloterdijkian idea of design has several parallels with the history of technology. Take, for instance, this description of tech by Ursula Franklin.
Franklin pointed out that tech is "both fish and water". That's where the limit of design discourse often lies: conflating water and fish, system and agents.
Whereas in the past, the designer's crippling frustration derived from the realization of being a cog in the cultural and economic machine, now the frustration has to do with being a cog _outside_ the machine, i.e. being less and less able to shape the workings of such machine.
Agamben, 2011
"Creativity is performed for client benefit and reassurance, even where a long-term client relationship already exists." Julier, 2017
How not to be fascinated by the idea of design of management gurus, of businesspeople, of bureaucrats? Somehow, this is how I interpret Tim Brown's statement "design is too important to be left to designers".
Take, for instance, Tom Peter's Re-Imagine!, a sort of McLuhan-Fiore artist's book – but for neoliberal managerialism. IMO, a classic.
bio-performativity
mills's take
from the intro
the main category of designing is neither synthesis nor autonomy, nor reason, but compromise
"We hear little of the designers who continue working the long hours for relatively low financial reward or those, indeed, who after a decade of so leave design altogether to do something else." - Julier, 2017
major take-away
Architect Marta Lonzi uses a wonderful word: compromissione, which in English would be something like compromission. What I like about it is that the "mission" part reveals an agency, an intention, a struggle. Thus, I prefer it to interdependence, which focuses only on need.
it shouldn't come as a surprise that Marta Lonzi is the sister of Carla Lonzi, feminist writer and author of LET'S SPIT ON HEGEL
Stacie Woolsey, 2021 makeyourownmasters.com
Design is terrified by what it is unable to change. It represses any manifestation of its impotence. The unchangeable is design's taboo.
a graphic design meme ~2 ppl will get
The cult of design heroes survives, but a sense of bitterness pervades the crowd as the kind of hagiographic praise and unanimous approval that makes a hero doesn't match the times. Design heroes, even those who are alive and well, resemble relics of a dying religion.
Federico Antonini, 2017 instagram.com/p/BdLH1j7jeId/
Alix Gallet, 2021 instagram.com/p/CRyVvEUF7OJ/
"had to suck a dick to earn this / never study graphic design"
https://twitter.com/spanishoflate/status/1421052700142313474
Contra the pseudo-scientific explanation of a project's rationale (e.g. the project as a result of logical, ineluctable process), one must opt for the political one, which has nothing to do with activism, but with the manifestation of the compromise between conflicting forces.
POV: you're a designer in their 20s in the audience of a conference on design ethics
cursed
no synthesis
just compromise
just compromise
State of the art TOC of Design & Disillusion 🥶
design finally got its seat at the table
Papanek's argument for designers actually having control: the fact that there are a bunch of entrepreneurs among them
I can finally give a concise summary of my attempt with D&D, which is paradoxical at best: rethinking design through and within chaos
"We live in a world where no one is 'in charge'. No one organisation or institution has the legitimacy, power, authority, or intelligence to act alone on important public issues and still make substantial headway against the problems that threaten us all" Bryson and Crosby, 1992
D&D wip
"[design's] emphasis on process and collaboration, its customer experience mapping or its frequent use of workshops, hackathons and jams makes it appear to contribute to a kind of virtualism where things are made real but not actual" Julier, 2017
Perfect summary of the linear, modernist idea of design power still permeating the field. Then, the non-linear, sturdy messiness of the world kicks in provoking surprise, disappointment and finally resentment ("the world must be wrong").
"But is there still room for design? Frankly, it is very small." – Tomás Maldonado, 1970
neither great power
nor great responsibilities
nor great responsibilities
Of the article that sparked the d0n-n0rmangate this feels the crucial line to me. IBM, like Google, wants to disrupt education, and they have good chance of doing so, given that traditional education is costly and its ROI decreasing…
design power is presumed and prosumed
"With a mythological reference, it is Sisyphus in our opinion who would provide the exact allegorical depiction of the hopeless designer." Tomás Maldonado, 1970
"[…] one wonders what are [...] the necessary requirements to transform Design into Revolution; what are the power structures, existing or future, …
… that must delegate to designers the responsibility of radically changing all the technical structures of the human environment, in a planetary scale operation." Maldonado, 1970
little anticipation of the chapter on power + non-floss typographic test
"When it happens that a designer, such as an architect, is persuaded that he can contribute, _as a designer_, to the transformation of society, he can only do so to the extent that he believes in a relative innovative autonomy of his work." Maldonado, 1970
"If we end the story with decay, we abandon all hope—or turn our attention to other sites of promise and ruin, promise and ruin." Tsing, 2015
Daniel van der Velden, 2021
Joshua Citarella, 2021
Lisbon friends, on the 27th I'll be (IRL!) at MAAT museum w. @modescriticism to present my current work on design and power. Would be nice to meet :) maat.pt/en/event/silvi… (illustration by @JooBilly)
Freire, 1975
dank.lloyd.wright, 2021
starting to get this kind of emails :/
"Being at the centre of the sales curve, it is logical that many graphic designers develop a ‘cynical relationship to both consumerism and capitalism’, writes Boehnert. Designers are frustrated with the discipline, but see no other ways of making money." Pater, 2021
"Today’s online advertising is no longer dictated by art directors, but by people with a PhD in mathematics and data science who spend all day thinking how to make people click on ads." Pater, 2021
[This speaks both of design as a automated function and the engineering rule]
[This speaks both of design as a automated function and the engineering rule]
More thoughts while reading CAPS LOCK. Here, the emphasis on the consumer role is both accurate and tragic for the designer, as it indirectly reveals that not much distinguishes them from the consumer *in general*, their expertise being less relevant than their purchasing power.
I'm finally starting to publish little bits of writing related to this thread. Here's the first part of the chapter on power. Make sure to subscribe to @owjournal to get more! buttondown.email/otherworlds/ar…
"The computer has changed design, but it has also changed our process of thinking and making. Formats and systems govern everything from our weaponry systems to our guidelines for citizenship." Giampietro, 2003
not endorsement
Microsoft, 2019
For the designer, technology is at once something to fear, something to use and something to chase.
revisiting that time that I inadvertently injected this line of thinking in the Adobe blog xd.adobe.com/ideas/principl…
collage of the day
Adelia Lim, 2018 adelia-lim.info/Promotional-Mi…
"And, yes, if you consider yourself a top-tier designer, the times are only going to get better for you." Kosmayer, 2018
"In the way that we conduct ourselves as designers, we are as free as the marketplace allows us to be." Shaughnessy, 2005
Revisiting the Unprofessionalism short essay by Rock, I realize what most critics of professionalism miss: the fact that you can get rid of it only once you are considered a professional.
"In both arts and design and in academic research, there is a lack of courage for *not* doing something because it either lacks urgency or addresses an issue in a structurally wrong way." Florian Cramer, 2021
When structural problems (reality) are met with gestural solutions (expectations), disillusion can only grow, both as resentment and lucidity. The lucidity having to do with the recognition that the gestural is above all else a product of the structural.
Prem Krishnamurthy, 2021 (right now, actually)
Chris Ashworth, 2021
What's behind the desire to articulate? A professional struggle. Merely solving the problem is a form of execution. Articulation is, instead, cultural production. It's the job of intellectuals. Being an intellectual, that's the designer class desire.
What's behind the desire to articulate? A professional struggle. Merely solving the problem is a form of execution. Articulation is, instead, cultural production. It's the job of intellectuals. Being an intellectual, that's the designer class desire.
"The underlying problem is that designers sometimes see their work as being separate from their personal circumstances and privilege." Pater, 2021
[Pater is criticizing social design, but the same can be said for the disassociation of designers ignoring their own disadvantages.]
[Pater is criticizing social design, but the same can be said for the disassociation of designers ignoring their own disadvantages.]
finally a tiny bit of time to go back to writing
"Critical design examples often skirt the twin issues of making specific claims for change and of clearly identifying how the change benefits a wronged or excluded group. Instead they show design’s efforts to change or challenge cultural discourse." Thorpe, 2011
While the designer becomes a process, artificial intelligence is turned into a person.
The lesson to be learned from The Grid is not just that full automation, in the field of design, is difficult and maybe impossible to achieve but that it nonetheless reinforces social expectations and desires…
People want to believe that designers, like any other gatekeeper, are replaceable by a docile machine, as this has partly already happened with the personal computer…
Whereas the desktop publishing revolution offered static presets, AI makes them dynamic, updating them on the basis of new collected information–an ever-evolving defaultism.
Perhaps design disillusion has to do with it inhabiting two phases of modernity at once, being both in the deluded modernity of enlightenment and disenchanted modernity aka postmodernity.
Design seems to be left with only one option: staring chaos in the eyes, admit that it goes beyond the somewhat reassuring notion of “complexity”. Things do not only appear intricate: they feel meaningless, alien to us.
here we go w/ branching threads
https://twitter.com/silvi0L0russo/status/1455960748895649803
"Design is a part, not the whole." designerswrite.org/essays/against…
Giddens, 1991
4 adaptive reactions to modernity (Giddens) applied to design
- pragmatic acceptance (designers focusing on everyday work)
- sustained optimism (predominant in the cultural circuit of design)
- cynical pessimism (design shitposting)
- radical engagement (a few collectives)
- pragmatic acceptance (designers focusing on everyday work)
- sustained optimism (predominant in the cultural circuit of design)
- cynical pessimism (design shitposting)
- radical engagement (a few collectives)
"Particularly in the hourglass shaped economy that has emerged since the 1970s, professional credentialing is perhaps the primary method for placing oneself on the right side of the economic divide.", Metha
"while it is fairly easy to accept that doctors, lawyers, and professors have esoteric knowledge not possessed by the general public, whether the same is true of journalists, business school graduates, and real estate agents is harder to definitively establish." Metha
"No matter how well a system is designed and no matter how efficient its operators, the consequences of its introduction and functioning, in the contexts of the operation of other systems and of human activity in general, cannot be wholly predicted." Giddens, 1991
"The reality of power is above the reality of man." Schmitt, 1954
The New Design Congress presents: everything you always wanted to know about this thread (but were afraid to ask). Halfway between an AMA and a research unboxing, this convo w/ @hecceite and @helveticade will touch upon design disillusion, professionalization, power & more!
After reading Schmitt, i'm ending up rewriting my essay on design and power from scratch. THANKS CARL 🥴 buttondown.email/otherworlds/ar…
While @neuroticarsehol starts to get "canceled" (cynical, destructive, negative), I find their shitposting v relevant. There's a growing hiatus between cultural production & consumption: design currents seem an educational phenomenon blind to the everyday.
https://twitter.com/neuroticarsehol/status/1459792212921929736
@neuroticarsehol In the eyes of the everyday designer there is not so much difference between the tacky social design and the hip undisciplined design, they both manifests as products of a cultural circuit inaccessible to most highly educated designers.
Similar manifestation of this hiatus take place in other fields like architecture (Dank Lloyd Wright) or at a different scale (school-specific meme pages like wdka.teachermemes). The dialectic at play is the same as the one happening in society at large: the people vs the elite.
However, design populism is peculiar, because "the people" and "the elite" have similar levels of education.
In this context, "the elite" is made of those able to capitalize on their culture while "the people" are the ones who don't manage: an elite of cultural producers versus the people of cultural consumption. That's the true dilemma of higher education.
from this pov, the value of a design current for a practitioner is as much in its ideas and principles as in the actual possibility to become for them a kind of professional badge, a sort of unofficial license
things get messy when a design current is connected to notions of justice and activism because it becomes difficult to decouple the inherent logic of social capitalization to the moral issue, possibly ending up with a self-proclaimed just elite against a cynical people
Gathered yesterday's tweets and posted some "notes on design populism" here: networkcultures.org/entreprecariat…
elliotisacoolguy, 2021
For an upcoming presentation I'm translating from ita some Maldonado contra Fuller. Pretty sure some ppl here will dig
"Currently the formula of Art and Design schools is rampant, a formula, born in America, which believes to model itself on the Bauhaus and adheres instead to the system of styling." Giovanni Anceschi, 2008
thinking of writing a Maldonado-inspired text entitled "The Designer as Not-so-technical Intellectual", which would basically be a translation of this ita article silviolorusso.com/publication/il…
In short, Maldonado claimed that:
1. humanistic and scientific culture should be considered a single culture
2. the various design disciplines should not be ancillary to a dominant one like architecture
Both of these points, albeit honorable, don't reflect the social reality.
1. humanistic and scientific culture should be considered a single culture
2. the various design disciplines should not be ancillary to a dominant one like architecture
Both of these points, albeit honorable, don't reflect the social reality.
re: point 2, I believe that in most cases, the dominant discipline is currently engineering (think of A/B testing, AI, and various other forms of automation)
art & design school:
formal horizontalism of the classroom ("everyone is a teacher" and other bs like that)
vs
substantial verticality of class
formal horizontalism of the classroom ("everyone is a teacher" and other bs like that)
vs
substantial verticality of class
"The real problem for students is not so much to gain economic security, but rather to clarify the goals of their function, the reasons why they should take it on, the ways in which they can perform it." De Carlo, 1968
to understand the masses, one needs a sociology of the elites
"During the strikes and occupations of '62 and '63, [architecture] students began to reflect on this unfortunate situation and on the fate that would be reserved for them once they left school, with no skill nor purpose in an indecipherable world." De Carlo, 73
[this is the most lucid and precise description of *the problem* I've found, and it's from 1968. Unfortunately, much is lost in translation: "senza arte né parte" would be something like "with no craft nor role"]
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