«Ci concimiamo a vicenda»: building support structures as part of design practice (original) (raw)

Going Real: The Value of Design in the Era of PostCapitalism

GOING REAL, 2019

In the age of post-capitalism, what is the value of design? Is value defined by economic potential? Or is it something far less tangible? Now more than ever design has the ability to engage us in economic, political and cultural debate, to actively resist the monotony of daily life, and to counteract the precarious situation on which modern society seems to rest. Positioning itself as a lens through which to view the world, design allows us, and in some cases, even forces us to reflect on the many aspects of the societies in which we live. Divided into three chapters, GOING REAL positions itself in relation to the works of Marc Jongen, Maurizio Lazzarato, Adam Greenfield and Tiziana Terranova, among others. However, unlike the abovementioned authors, this book draws on the works of selected designers and artists to reflect on the economic, political and cultural aspects of our post-capitalist societies. Beginning with an in-depth case study of Detroit during the downfall of the industrial era, this volume moves on to a timely and provocative insight into the human crises surrounding current migration trends with a particular focus on Calais. Finally, in the third chapter, the human body itself is laid bare as the authors analyse how and why the most personal of ‘spaces’ became not only the ultimate marketplace for businesses but also an object of control for governments.

Designers’ inquiry: Mapping the socio-economic conditions of designers in Italy (2014)

This paper reflects on the process, outcomes and next steps of an inquiry on the socio-economic conditions of designers in Italy that we co-produced with the “Cantiere per pratiche non-affermative” between 2012 and 2013. Co-authored with Caterina Giuliani and based on the presentation we did in May 2013 at the Ephemera conference on “The Politics of Workers’ Inquiry” at Essex University (see pdf on academia.eu).

Design(ers) Beyond Precarity: proposals for everyday action (2021)

Design Struggles: Intersecting Histories, Pedagogies, and Perspectives, 2021

How to create the social and material conditions that make critical, transformative design practice possible? This question continues to drive us in our work, especially because we are convinced that if we want design skills to be used for the creation of a world into which many worlds fit, then lots of people interested in doing such transformative work need to be enabled to do it repeatedly and in the long-run.

RESISTANCE OR REACTION: THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF DESIGN

Architecture and Behavior Magazine

History is not neutral. It is the site of a power struggle between competing social and cultural groups who wish to see their own version of historical events become the accepted everyday version, the better to validate their own position in the hierarchy of social relationships we call society. This essay is largely about the recent history of design theory, and places the events that have happened since the 1960's into a social, political, economic and ideological context. This for several reasons. First, it is a history that has never been told from quite this point of view - a point of view which critically apprehends the education of professional designers and the role they inadvertently play in practice to support asymmetrical relationships of power and resource distribution. But there is another reason for writing this history. I hope to clarify some of the misunderstandings and misconceptions which have recently developed within design theory itself. Postmodernism is either embraced or vilified by members of the design community, but few seem to be fully aware of its deeper ideological significance and emancipatory potential. The meaning and social role of design have been contested since distinctions were first made between architecture and building, between art and craft, between design and manufacture. These distinctions express a struggle which continues down to the present to shape the thing we call "design" and express deeper social distinctions which operate on the basis of class, gender and ethnicity. The design disciplines have historically enjoyed the privilege of a social distinction which allowed them special status within the wider field of social relations mediated by the division of labour. They particularly enjoy the mythology that they contribute to the overall public good by virtue of their "purity" with respect to politics and ideology. This mythology is reinforced by recent theories of postmodernism which are prevalent in design practice, which express an essentially conservative ideology which seeks to sustain existing social hierarchies. In architecture for instance, postmodern design theorists have developed structures of understanding which reinstate design practice as a depoliticized sub-category of fine art production, which takes as its sine qua non the building-as-beautiful-object, founded upon what are reputed to be universally accepted aesthetic norms. In so doing they have at the same time divorced form from its social, cultural and political roots, and have presented it as a value free commodity, the embodiment of the postmodern conception of the "free-floating-signifier" to be bartered and traded in an ever-escalating attempt to transform the use value of buildings into the exchange value of speculative, designed environment. In this process, notions of how the shaping of the built environment might reflect and reproduce asymmetrical arrangements of power which benefit these theorists themselves have been entirely elided from the theoretical discourse. These theories are paradoxically represented as value-free, while at the same time their ideological roots have been masked in logical mystifications which inhibit critical interrogation. They have played a crucial part in bringing about the abandonment of scientific rationality as a mediating factor of architectural design, and their ideology now stands as the dominant belief system to a whole new generation of design students. Yet postmodern theory has been applied in the design disciplines in a partial and selective manner calculated to prescribe the ways in which the professional designer might operate as a public intellectual. Its proponents in the design professions seek to preserve a sacrosanct domain of professional expertise, based upon normative theories of aesthetics, through which the designer might exercise control over what stands for quality in the built environment. At the same time that this has been happening in architecture proper, a similar process has been occurring in the domain of Environmental Design. Environmental Design (as embodied in organizations such as the Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA), together with its Australasian and European affiliates (PAPER and IAPS) was originally conceived around the need to ground design in a rational methodology, and to eliminate the apparent arbitrariness of formalism. While not denying the legitimacy of formalism per se, Environmental Design has been viewed as a rationalist supplement to traditional conceptions of design, seeking the integration of Environment/Behavior information systems into the everyday knowledge base of the design professions. This model has worked with reasonable efficiency until recently, when, with the advent of Postmodernism and Deconstructivism in design, a new form of radical expressionism appeared, undermining the veracity of all forms of rationalism save those dedicated to the ethic of efficiency, performativity and maximum short term economic return. In response to this tendency, many environmental designers have themselves repudiated the principles of Postmodernism seeing it as the affirmation of irrationality in the designed world (Harris and Lipman, 1989, 68). In what follows, I will show how and why postmodernism has been conservatively taken up by designers, and will suggest an alternative model of the designer as public intellectual. This model will move beyond the selectivity and partiality of existing postmodern theories of design, and will take seriously many of the precepts of postmodern philosophy to re-insert the social and political into the theoretical discourse of design practice, design education and environmental design research. 2. WHAT IS POSTMODERNISM? Most recent critical authors (Debord, 1968; Bell, 1973; Mandel, 1975; Lyotard, 1984; Harvey, 1989) agree that the last twenty years have ushered in a set of unique social, cultural, industrial and political circumstances commonly called "postmodern". This is variously understood to imply a radical departure from what is termed Modernism, which is itself taken to be an aspect of the Eighteenth Century Enlightenment Project - the application of instrumental rationality to the social world, ushered in by the industrial revolution, and transforming permanently the pre-industrial feudal society which had dominated life for the preceding two thousand years. According to Enlightenment philosophers, rationalism was to liberate humankind from the servitude of inherited privilege, and to ensure that resources were socially distributed according to individual ability (Ward, 1991). Postmodern critics maintain that any social emancipation has been at the cost of a decrease in the quality of life brought about by precisely that modernist rationality which promised freedom. The "progress" normally associated with Modernism and science is partial. Hayter (1982, 16-17) notes that a very large proportion of the world's population is significantly worse off now than before the Enlightenment with 16% of the population receiving 63% of the world's income, and the rest doomed to dependency. At the same time, within the industrial nations, the number of middle income earners is contracting, with a minority moving up the economic ladder and the vast majority moving down. (Parenti, 1988, 10-11; Harrington, 1984, 149) Furthermore, the situation is getting progressively worse, and this is true both nationally, as well as internationally. Modernism, with its scientific rationality has, according to writers like Lyotard, acted as a kind of cultural imperialism for which "progress" operates as a code word for oppression. One of the significant aspects of Postmodernism, then, is relationship to this process. Modernism in design has a rather different meaning, usually being applied to a style of building which occurred during that period following the Russian revolution of 1917 and including as its primary influence the work in the 1920's and 1930's emanating from the Bauhaus (Blake, 1974). Postmodernism, in this more restricted sense is seen as a repudiation of many of the principles of this style, and the ideology which produced it (centralized socialist programs, factory housing production, an abandonment of ornament, etc). Wolfe, along with others notes that the high ideals of architectural Modernism, based originally upon the principle of universal worker housing have been an abysmal failure. (Wolfe 1981; Jencks, 1984, 1987; Venturi, 1977), and other postmodern design theorists have suggested that Modernism, with its emphasis upon principles of universal emancipation, is dead. Jencks, particularly, has rather dramatically pin-pointed the death of Modernism , "at 3.32 p.m. on the 15th July 1972" when the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex in St. Louis, Missouri (a prize-winning design based upon Corbusian principles) was demolished as unliv¬able. In fact, the failure of Pruitt-Igoe has been recently shown to result not from design deficiencies arising from modernist principles, so much as from a dearth of capital financing, and a severe cutback of the maintenance programs of the St. Louis Housing Authority (Bristol, 1991, 163). For Jencks and Venturi, Postmodernism is a new formal style of architecture in which playfulness, and ornament have been reinstated. The style is characterized by a separation of form from content and by giving preference to the former over the latter. It is characteristic of such critics that they perceive the built environment as stripped of its social, political and economic reality, and see its social failure as a failure of form

Paper: (Re)Productions A Marxist Perspective on Design and Everyday Life

Of late, everyday life has emerged as a significant issue for a diverse range of fields and practices. The quotidian – usually characterized as the ordinary, the unremarked and the ubiquitous – has become a gravitational centre around which various disciplines – each with particular claims upon and ways of investigating the everyday – have found themselves drawn together. For design, the everyday has loomed ever larger, becoming increasingly woven into the fabric of a broader but related series of transformations that emphasize research, humancentredness and the cultural contexts of consumption and use. The myriad interactions between design, anthropology, psychology and qualitative social science, are all – in part at least – testament to the subject’s attempts to address and make sense of everyday life. Within mainstream design and design research discourse, these developments are usually presented unproblematically; as indicators of a growing disciplinary confidence and maturity. In this paper, however, I argue that the relationship between design and everyday life is only partially articulated, and that this partiality masks important aspects of the socio-political function of design in the contemporary world. In particular I argue that, as it is currently used and understood, the concept of everyday life obscures a particular political agenda; the reproduction of capitalist social relations through an ever increasing commodification of more and more areas of our social and personal lives. Seen in this light, recurrent themes within contemporary design – for example, human-centredness, innovation, emotional design, socio-cultural research – themes that are, like the everyday itself, treated as self-evident and obvious, open themselves to critique, revealing as they do so contradictions and conflicts between form and content, intent and outcome, rhetoric and reality. The main aim of this paper is to explore these contradictions and in doing so, suggest ways of clarifying the complex and veiled relationships that connect design and everyday life with the broader social reality of which they are part. To achieve this I make use of ideas, approaches and concepts drawn from Marxism, in particular, Marx’s own work and dialectical method, and that of the neo-Marxist philosopher of everyday life, Henri Lefebvre. The resulting critique sets out to provoke discussion and debate about an aspect of design discourse that is currently conspicuous by its absence; politics.

This is Not a Manifesto: Towards an Anarcho-design Practice

If graphic design is understood as the expression and reflection of a particular set of values, systems and interests, then most artistic practice today tends to express the interests of the class that controls and profits from society. It is these interests that dominate the standards of value in design, defines its emphasis, and excludes its more subversive, egalitarian alternatives. As a result, graphic design is the tool that communicates, beautifies and commodifies the interests of those in power. Its communicative strength is overwhelmingly used in an economic/commercial senseconsciously or unconsciously used to exploit; to raise profit margins and material wealth for the benefit of a select clientele. While graphic design sometimes lends its talents outside of the commercial realm in the form of an informative and communicative visual language, and in academic, self-authored, or research-based practices, the primary role of graphic design is that of the visual instrument of the powerful-the seller of sales, the convincer of consumers. Its strengths are employed by the corporate body (or state-sanctioned by capitalist/socialist totalitarian governments) in order to reinforce their position of power. And while design academia can wax poetic about the virtues of graphic design and its specialised visual language (conveniently side-stepping more tangible issues) the design industry practitioner, whether one chooses to acknowledge his/her role or not, must realise that their labour is nothing more than the harbinger of consumerism, used in the service of monolithic capitalism and all of its ails. Without

O papel estratégico do design: o caso italiano

2021

Almost all the histories of Italian design tell us that design culture was born in a close relation between professionals and SMEs. Looking at this relation, we can read the story of the relation between design and strategy from a pretty peculiar perspective. Starting from those sectors today we would normally call “design-oriented”, Italian SMEs historically develop a symbiotic relationship with design, which becomes the engine of innovation: a driver which gives the opportunity to build their identity, and emerge in the domestic and in the international markets. This relation is almost always characterized by a direct link between entrepreneur and designer, in which the designer is not only asked to give shape to ideas, but rather to understand and interpret the needs, to anticipate desires, to build a “frame of meaning” around the market offer. The Italian entrepreneur is used to discuss with the designer the development of new products, defining market opportunities, and the pos...