nonameism - Tumblr blog

nonameism · 11 years ago

Text

Design Manifesto

JUNE WEST

MANIFESTO[1]: “SLOW LIFE”

In a world that is becoming highly-populated, ultra-urbanized, faster, and super-technological, I commit myself to living and designing for “slow life.” This idea is meant to counter many of the complex issues that arise for the modern role of the designer. The principles in which I plan to orchestrate my career in design include slowness, humanness, simplicity, looking to nature, flux, creative exploration and an open mind. By committing to these characteristics, I can better shape my perceptions and actions when society’s problems and their solutions have never been less clear.

SLOWNESS

What does it mean to live a slow life? It means that one’s life and design principles do not move at the same pace as the rapid systemic and technological developments in modern society. Instead, “slowness” implies a careful, qualitative and hands-on approach to the complexities of daily life. This mission does not stray too far from the principles of the Slow Food Movement, started in 1989 Italy as a way to counter the prevalence of Fast Food and fast lifestyles. In the movement’s mission, they emphasize the importance of “linking the pleasure of good food with a commitment to the community and the environment.” Generally, I am encouraging a resistance or a critical interpretation of social and cultural norms we may take for reality, especially when they deprive us of other realities (e.g. experiences without technology).

HUMANNESS

In a future where the line between human and machine, intelligence and artificial intelligence disintegrates, I hope that humans never forget what it means to be human. “Being human” means having face-to-face interactions with other humans and making a conscious effort to be independent from technology. This is not to deprive all technology from daily life, but merely finding a balance. More does not always mean better, even if that is driven into the consumer subconscious through endless marketing. Technology is not the answer to the problems of the future, beyond a certain threshold, it is superfluous, and perhaps it becomes the problem. Computer Scientist Bill Joy warns us to question new technologies and truly examine our relationship with technological development—do we still objectify technology or does it now objectify us?[2]

Every once and a while, gadgets should be turned off, a disconnection from virtual life is encouraged. It is in the virtual realities of Facebook and other social media that our perceptions of the individual change, “degrade” even, according to Jaron Lanier.[3] There is nothing wrong with the “symbolic worlds” of which we have created, it is only when we let these worlds control us (instead of us controlling them) that we must reevaluate what it means to be human in the centuries to come.[4]

SIMPLICITY

In an expanding realm of complex technologies, I find real beauty in many simple technologies, which often lift the veil between the consumer and production. People can easily understand how the mechanisms operate, therefore they can better know how to fix them and how to improve them. Societally, it is inevitable that technologies will be ever-“improving.” I urge us all to question, how much is really necessary to live well? Where did those standards come from?

There are some intelligent responses to this deepening issue of how to reconcile our relationship to high technology. Matthew Crawford identifies the importance of craftsmanship, especially in the way that it challenges our consumerist ideals, driving us to cherish our possessions rather than discard them.[5] Another way of approaching the struggle is to revert back to the idea of slowness, by amending the world through not just materials, but time and labor (Solnit).[6]

LOOK TO NATURE

In this same vein, we must reflect on what it means to be human outside of social contexts, and take time to be in nature to ponder other realities that are otherwise forgotten. Get outside, walk through forests, swim in lakes, take hikes, camp out! It is too easy to get wrapped up in city life and forget about the important moments that happen in the stillness of nature. Thoreau is famously known for looking to nature for truth and inspiration[7], as nature might reveal things about ourselves and the world that we may have not otherwise realized. Biomimicry[8] is a good example of how we might use nature to inspire innovative solutions to complex problems.

Since the planet Earth has limited and depleting resources, it also probes us to recognize issues of sustainability. In an economy that functions based on unsustainable growth models that seek profit at any cost, design must work towards environmental sustainability and minimizing the waste of consumption habits. Sustainability begins with awareness of our habits, but must be carried out with real actions that reflect this mission in order to preserve the resources of the Earth and have a significant impact for the generations to come.

FLUXUS

In a culture that values individualism, I must probe people to think about community more than their own individual consumer habits. I can achieve this by cultivating interconnectivity in meaningful ways, which means going beyond making a Facebook group, and identifying physical networks and communities where exciting work is happening on its own. Modern technology has enhanced connectivity and communication within these communities, but I must emphasize the importance of their physical context and locality, a principle reinforced by John Thackara when talking about social innovation.

The Fluxus movement is a collective of artists whose manifesto inspired me to write my own a few years ago. This network of artists have worked between multivarious medias and disciplines since the 1960s, perpetuating “anti-art” ideals, essentially using art as a tool to question art. It also claimed to identify something that already existed, rather than assuming the responsibility for its existence. Artist Dick Higgins noted, “Fluxus started with the work, and then came together, applying the name Fluxus to work which already existed. It was as if it started in the middle of the situation, rather than at the beginning.” (Higgins)

John Chris Jones reinforces this idea of “flux”: “So…building is a form of living and living is a form of building. That’s one way of realizing that there are no products, no fixities, only continuous flux.” (67 Jones in Mitchell) These perspectives on art and design resonate strongly with how I see my design practice in the future--it is about letting things happen as they will and significant change can be made from being able to recognize the existing potential of people and things. If we are able to make connections between people, disciplines, and ideas, we can develop even better ideas about how to improve the world and see through our mistakes.

Supporting this concept is the incentive to design with people and not for them. Jamer Hunt’s comments on design ethnography in his article “Prototyping the Social” are incredibly insightful about the flux of the role of the designer. He asserts that we must take the hands-on approach of a designer in combination with the thoughtful examination of an ethnographer in order to design in an increasingly complex world.[9]

CREATIVE EXPLORATION

In every sense, to make our systems work and to adapt to the continuous flux of the world, we have to be creative and willing to explore new options. We must encourage people to be more creative in their lives, a means of achieving this is through exposure and creation of art. Thackara puts this in a design context very eloquently:

“The context where we eat and talk can be enhanced by artful means. Music, the visual arts, and especially time-based or performance art can powerfully enhance our capacity to understand processes and systems. When added to the designer’s powerful representations, the artist’s critical intuition—especially when used to trigger our own insight—can shift our focus away from the material world and its visual artifacts toward a deeper understanding of natural processes and social relationships” (181 Thackara).

In a market that undervalues artists, I must try to create a sustainable economy for creative work. This means finding alternatives to mainstream models in the current economic system so that people may see financial returns or better recognition for their art-making. This idea is based on a fervent philosophy that people should never lose a connection with creativity, particularly with visual art, poetry, and music. All of these hands-on and performative creative activities engage people in a unique way while they are creating, as well as while they are sharing. It is a beautiful connection that I hope people never lose, even if it can no longer provide sustainable income.

Ultimately, I hope designers will be creative and think more about quality of experiences rather than quality of the marketplace. As a member of this society, I can’t ignore systems of money, but I can avoid infatuation and greed. I must detach myself from cultural mores that makes me worry about trivialities that have no serious effect on my life (i.e. whether I got the best deal on car insurance). It is more important that the work that I do is meaningful and has a positive impact on the future.

OPEN MINDS

The future does not mean losing sight of what exists in the eternal now. Philosopher Alan Watts said, “Life is like music for its own sake. We are living in an eternal now, and when we listen to music we are not listening to the past, we are not listening to the future, we are listening to an expanded present.” As eastern philosophy and Zen Buddhism has given me insight in the past[10], I hope that it also expands my thoughts and actions as a designer. I hope that Westerners (and everyone) will open up their minds to understand a totally different way of looking at life, different to the dominant capitalist, religious, or philosophical mindsets.

The power to transcend paradigms is the level at which true shifts can take place, something Donella Meadows refers to as the most effective leverage point when intervening in a system. It is a seemingly impossible task for all societies to achieve this, but I can start as an individual, with awareness, as pointed out by C. Thomas Mitchell.[11]

I would love for designers to see:

“…Designing as the process of devising not individual products but whole systems or environments…design as participation, the involvement of the public in the decision making process; design as creativity, which is supposed to be potentially present in everyone; design as an educational discipline that unites arts and sciences and perhaps can go further than either; and now the idea of designing without a product, as a process or way of living in itself… (a way out of consumerism?)” (64 Jones in Mitchell)

I believe that much of what Jones identifies can be achieved by trying to live a slow life.

CITATIONS:

Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soul Craft. (New York: Penguin Press, 2009).

Dick Higgins, interview by author, Copenhagen, Denmark, 1986.

Jamer Hunt, “Prototyping the Social: Temporality and Speculative Futures at the Intersection of Design and Culture” in Design Anthropology: Object Culture in the 21st Century, ed. Alison J. Clarke (Vienna: University of Applied Arts Vienna, 2011), 33.

John Chris Jones, "Design Methods," (1970), quoted in C. Thomas Mitchell, Redefining Designing: From Form to Experience (New York: International Thomson Publishing, 1993), 64.

Bill Joy, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” Wired, April 4, 2000, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html.

“Biomimicry” Wikipedia, accessed October 30, 2013, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomimicry.

Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget (New York: Vintage Books, 2010), x.

Donella Meadows, “Leverage Points,” The Sustainability Institute (1999): 3.

C. Thomas Mitchell, Redefining Designing: From Form to Experience (New York: International Thomson Publishing, 1993), 64.

Douglas Rushkoff, Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age (Berkeley: Soft Skull Press, 2010), 84.

Rebecca Solnit, “Diary,” London Review of Books 35:16 (2013).

“Slow Food: About Us,” Slow Food Movement International, accessed Oct 20, 2013, http://www.slowfood.com/international/1/about-us, paragraph 1.

John Thackara, In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institutite of Technology, 2005).

Henry David Thoreau, Walden (Oxford University Press: 1997).

[1] This is a manifesto for my own life and work as a designer. My aim is not to tell you as the reader how to live your life properly, but rather to make you aware of these ideas that become less intuitive as society progresses. Only with awareness of your own actions can you consider whether these are values you feel you should incorporate into your own life.

[2] “Given the incredible power of these new technologies, shouldn’t we be asking how we can best coexist with them? And if our own extinction is a likely, or even possible, outcome of our technological development, shouldn’t we proceed with great caution?” (8 Joy).

[3] “[Lanier] argues that certain specific, popular internet designs of the moment—not the internet as a whole—tend to pull us into life patterns that gradually degrade the ways in which each of us exists as an individual…Deemphasizing personhood, and the intrinsic value of an individual’s unique internal experience and creativity, leads to all sorts of maladies…” (x Lanier)

[4] “What the postmodernists may have underestimated, however, was the degree to which the tools through which these symbolic worlds are created—and ways in which they might be applied—would remain accessible to all of us…Just as the framers of the Constitution and the Talmudic scribes before them understood, abstract codes of laws are fine—so long as we’re the ones writing them.” (84 Rushkoff)

[5] “Because craftsmanship refers to objective standards that do not issue from the self and its desires, it poses a challenge to the ethic of consumerism…The craftsman is proud of what he has made, and cherishes it, while the consumer discards things that are perfectly serviceable in his restless pursuit of the new.” (Crawford)

[6] “The young are disappearing down the rabbit hole of total immersion in the networked world, and struggling to get out of it. Getting out of it is about slowness, and about finding alternatives to the alienation that accompanies a sweater knitted by a machine in a sweatshop in a country you know nothing about, or jam made by a giant corporation that has terrible environmental and labour practices and might be tied to the death of honeybees or the poisoning of farmworkers. It’s an attempt to put the world back together again, in its materials but also its time and labour.” (Solnit)

[7] “We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.” (Thoreau)

[8] “The imitation of the models, systems, and elements of nature for the purpose of solving complex human problems.” (Wikipedia)

[9] “We can no longer be content with anthropology’s ‘hands-off’ sensibility and design’s ‘more is more’ mentality. There are simply too many complex, large-scale problems that now pressure our very existence to relegate these potential change agents into their past, more marginal roles.” (34 Hunt)

[10] I bring up Zen Buddhism not assuming that its beliefs are the most “correct,” but rather that it provides a refreshing alternative to how we as humans may interpret the world and life on it. Regardless of what we believe, the point is really to have an open mind in the many senses of the phrase.

[11] “As in Yoga itself, a central theme for the new definitions of design is awareness—the awareness of the processes, implications, and outcomes of designing—design users and contexts included.” (68 Mitchell)

#junewest #manifesto #design manifesto #parsons school of design

2 notes · View notes