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MAKING/CRAFTING/DESIGNING: PERSPECTIVES ON DESIGN AS A HUMAN ACTIVITY Design Theory Symposium, 10–12 February 2011

STEPHEN DUNCOMBE New York UniversityArt of the Impossible: The Politics of Designing UtopiaA growing minority of critically engaged activists, artists, and designers have been abandoning the unveiling, revealing, and truth-telling function of political art and protest for a boldly utopian practice. These artists understand that the political crises of today’s world stem not from lack of access to the truth, nor will they be resolved by more criticism. The political problem par excellence is one of atrophied imagination. But what is so interesting about these artists’ imaginative designs is the nature of their utopias: they are patently and consciously absurd. They propose to make things that can never be made. But it is in this very absurdity that the political power lies. This creative practice opens up space for the viewer to question the present, without then short-circuiting this moment of democratic imagination with a realizable blueprint of the future. Simply, the design asks: What If?, without answering: This is What! Drawing upon a range of art and media examples from Thomas More’s 16th century utopia to absurd designs for urban futures to the Yes Men’s recent “Special Edition” of the New York Times, Duncombe will critically explore the creative terrain of impossible utopias that constitute a type of dreampolitik.

LUCY KIMBELL University of Oxford / Fieldstudio, London

Designing Future Practices

What is it that designers are designing when they do design? This paper tries to answer this question by reviewing developments in design theory and practice and combining them with work in the social sciences that attends to practices. In recent years, histories and theories of design have exhibited a social turn, at the same time that professional designers have moved into designing services, systems and interactions within commercial and public contexts. Within the emerging field of professional service design, for example, designers attend to the arrangements of material, digital, and people-based “touchpoints” with which consumers and customers engage as part of services that are orchestrated by organizations. Some designers are involved with helping redesign public services such as healthcare and education and within contexts such as international peace and security. A debate remains, however, about whether designers are still primarily concerned with designing “stuff,” what designers do that is different to what managers do, and whether both designers and managers are ready to understand the roles they and their designs play in constituting social worlds, at a time when climate change is forcing us to ask questions about how designers have contributed to particular kinds of consumption activity (Fry 1999, 2009). To explore these questions, the paper shifts the conversation away from oppositions between the material and the non-material to consideration of practices. Theories of practice (eg Schatzki 2001; Reckwitz 2002) avoid such dualisms by understanding social worlds as created through interactions between minds, bodies, things, structure, agency, and process. The opportunity for designers is to understand that what they are designing as future practices, which include arrangements of things, people, and symbolic structures, and within which both the things and the people play important roles in constituting the meaning and effects of designs. Drawing on work by Suchman (2003), Tonkinwise (2003), and others, the paper proposes key concepts to help orient understanding of practices including relationality, temporality, and accountability. This expanded notion of design has implications for design practice, research, and education.

Fry, Tony. 1999. A New Design Philosophy. An Introduction to Defuturing. Sydney: UNSW Press. Fry, Tony. 2009. Design Futuring: Sustainability, Ethics and New Practice. Oxford: Berg. Reckwitz, Andreas. 2002. Towards a Theory of Social Practices: A Development in Culturalist Theorizing. European Journal of Social Theory 5, no. 2: 243–63. Schatzki, Theodore R. 2001. Introduction: Practice Theory. In The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory, ed. Theodore E. Schatzki, Karin Knorr Cetina, and Eike von Savigny. London: Routledge. Suchman, Lucy. 2003. Located Accountabilities in Technology Production, Lancaster: Centre for Science Studies, Lancaster University. Tonkinwise, Cameron. 2003. Interminable Design: Techne and Time in the Design of Sustainable Service Systems. Paper presented at the 5th European Academy of Design Conference, Barcelona.

http://www.makingcraftingdesigning.com/reviews.htm 

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https://conservationmachines.wordpress.com/ 

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stage-002 (breathing)

Kunst Institute - Basel

Art Institute HGK FHNW explores and interrogates art practices in their social context and imagine how they might be structured in the future, thus finding and developing new methods. The Art Institute is a place where practice determines our thinking, processes, and discussions about what “making” means for art.

https://institut-kunst.ch/

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stage-001 (breathing)

The Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection is based on the following premises: An exclusive focus on contemporary art, with particular emphasis on postconceptual art from the 1990s to the present and a keen interest in multimedia and time-based works, spatialized 3-D sound, environments, and large-scale sculptural installations. Ongoing engagement with “new geographies” such as Eastern Europe, Latin America, the Indian Subcontinent, and Iceland. A commitment to pivotal works that negotiate sociopolitical questions and identity politics and that pursue lines of inquiry across various disciplines and fields of knowledge production, such as architecture, sound, and science. 

https://www.tba21.org/#item--collection--1605

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television medium for subversion

Reference: GALA Committee, Safety Sheets, 1996

TV is used as medium that raises important issues: gender, violence, infectious diseases. Melrose Place as stage. Set design TV disruption. 

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the intelligent optimist

Reference: The intelligent optimist, 19 Sept-17 Oct 2015, Lethaby Gallery Central Saint Martins, London  

‘The fixers directly engage with physical and social context , seeing them not so much as problems-because seeing the world as a setof problems is rather miserable and so counter-intuitive to the intelligent optimist- but as a situations to make productive sense of. The fixers requires critical ability, awareness and lateral thinking in order to establish that there might be a situation to be fixed in the first place. They then identify the situation as an opportunity and find an ingenious solution that expands the opportunity , finding something in it that that others might have overlooked.  The fixers are both deeply practical and very lateral, seeing things from the side in order to get fresh vistas. (...) Using design to find new potential in what might at the first sight seem intractable’  

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Soheila Sokhanvari

Political commentary.  Symbolic totem

Magic realism in which reality is punctured with fantastical events, revealing meaning more profound. 

She point to the use of the form as method by which artists have been able to ‘create’ an open-ended narrative to promote or resist a totalitarian politic system. 

Reference: Soheila Sokhanvari, Moje Sabz, 2011. 

‘Champagne life’ exhibition, Saatchi Gallery, 13 Jan-9 March 2016, London. 

http://www.saatchigallery.com/artists/champagne-life/ 

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Maurizio Cattelan

Reference: Maurizio Cattelan, Love Saves Life, 1995

Reference: Maurizio Cattelan, Love Lasts forever, 1997

“stuffed rooster, cat, dog and donkey is based on the fairytale by the Brothers Grimm, ‘The Bremen Town Musicians”, in which the animals each escape an owner who was threatening to kill them because they were getting old and useless.”

“Clown, jester who entertains through calculated buffoonery” (...) Your self derision or exaggerated humility, whether ironic or not, aligns your project with a tradition of clowning which has a particular resonance in Italian culture”. 

“Comedians manipulate and make fun of reality, whereas I actually think that reality isfar more provocative than my art” (...) “I’m always borrowing pieces of everyday reality. If you think that my work is very provocative, It means that reality is extremely provocative, and we just don’t react to it” (...) Maybe we no longer pay attention to the way we live in the world. We are increasingly...how do you say? ‘don’t feel any pain?’...we are anaesthetized”. 

“Bloody Wops”

Reference: Maurizio Cattelan, Bidibidobidiboo, 1996

“I thought about magics words like ‘bibeddy bobbedy boo”, which COULD TRANSFORM SOMETHING, MAKE SOMETHING BETTER” 

“It represents an energy that you can’t utilize. It represent FROZEN ENERGY”

“Actually, we are stealing right now, here in your office. How? What we are stealing? Time”. “Your work exist in the interstices between objects and actions. It enters the art institution only to disrupt it”

“Maybe I’m just saying that we are all corrupted in a way; life itself is corrupted, and that’s the way we like it.”

“This was an early project for me. At that time I really liked the idea of involving one hundred people, contacting each of them to raise funds. So I start to make a list of possible people who might help with this project. It was not so easy. You really have to have the balls to make such calls to private people. So I spent four to five hours a day on the phone, saying ‘Hi do you know me?’ I had to get their attention and then say,’Could you please give me $100 for this project?” Reference: Maurizio Cattelan, Oblomov Foundation, 1992

Other Reference: Maurizio Cattelan, Tourist, 1997, Venice Biennale

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Reference: Atelier Van Lieshout, 1998

“Life task. Survival strategy. (...) ‘I’ll try to expand a bit. (...) outsider view’. (...) he’s not bothered about beauty, at least it’s not a priority’. Van Lieshout obiviously doesn’t trust contemporary society. (...) But it’s certainly an art to avoid damaging others on the exercise of power. (...) Ready-to-shoot weapons as displayed by Atelier Van Lieshout are illegal. (...) What I am saying is that AVL with his weapons, however reasonable and however logical they may be, goes radically against the prevailing legal order, the statutory laws and the current administration of justice. (...) Their depiction simply acts as warning . Watch out, reader. 

Reference: AVL, The Good, The Bad + The Ugly, 1998

(...) Sepulchral monument in the empty space. (...) ACTIVE INDIFFERENCE. (...) SHATTER EXPECTATIONS (Ref: Bataille). (...) This provoked a storm of protest.” 

The exhibition ‘The Good, The Bad + The Ugly’ opened in Rabastans on 5 June 1998. Three days later the mayor closed the show by decree, mantaining that it would act as a provocation to the French people and form a new catalyst for youth criminality. 

Reference: Atelier Van Lieshout, 1998

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The World Goes Pop, Tate Museum, London, 2015

Reference: Isabel Oliver Cosmética (from the series La Mujer) 1971

‘The exhibition will reveal how pop was never just a celebration of western consumer culture, but was often a subversive international language of protest – a language that is more relevant today than ever.’ ‘(...) pop is one of the first manifestations of postmodernism.’

http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/ey-exhibition-world-goes-po

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Disobedient Objects, V&A Exhibition, London, 2014

‘This exhibition was the first to examine the powerful role of objects in movements for social change. It demonstrated how political activism drives a wealth of design ingenuity and collective creativity that defy standard definitions of art and design’

http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/exhibitions/disobedient-objects/disobedient-objects-about-the-exhibition/

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The architect becomes a jester

(...) The architecture of persuasion. (...) communicating a complexity of meaning through hundreds of associations in few seconds. 

Reference: Peter Blake, from the God’s own Junkyard, 1964

(...)’Not innovating willfulness but reverence for the archetype’ (Ref: Herman Melville). 

(...) heroic and original, or ugly and ordinary. (...) Manifestation of ugly. (...) Distortion of normal.  (...) Symbolic and abstract meaning. (...) Eclecticism. (...) Vernacular. (...) Vehicle. (...) Iconic power. 

(...) it can also come through an adjusting of the scale or context of familiar and conventional elements to produce unusual meanings. Pop artist used unusual juxtaposition of everyday objects in tense and vivid plays between old and new associations to flout the everyday interdependence of context and meaning, giving us a new interpretation of twentyth-century cultural artifacts. The familiar that is a little off has a strange and revealing power. (...) ironic richness of banality. 

I AM A MONUMENT, Robert Venturi

(...) ambiguity. (...) plastic. (...) unconventional meaning. 

(...) ‘Total design’ comes to mean ‘total control’. 

(...) architectural imagination is required. (...) the propagandistic use of architecture to promote revolutionary aims. (...) the use of a joke to get to the seriousness, the weapons of artist of nonauthoritarian temperament in social situations that do not agree with them. The architect becomes a jester. Irony may be the tool. 

(...) unexplicated iconographic. (...) manifest through a language -several language- of forms. 

(...) the architecture (or media and spectacle) is the decoration of construction (Ref: John Ruskin). (...) Warning: ‘Never construct decoration’ (Ref: Pugin). 

Reference: Robert Venturi, Complexity and contradiction in architecture, 1966

Reference: Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, 1972, MIT press. 

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Non conformist observation. A provocation drives a wealth of design ingenuity that defy standard definitions of art and design.

This is that, artisanal firewood, 2015

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Political engagement, activism

Ai Weiwei’s investigation on chinese government corruption. After 2008 Sichuan earthquake  in his pieces he reported chinese government scandals. 

Reference: Straight by Ai Weiwei, 2013. Biennale di Venezia

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSu5DP4EQA8

Reference:  Ai Weiwei exhibition Royal Academy of Arts, 19 Sep -13 Dec 2015

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Automaton, moving mechanical model

Mechanical interactive, Cabaret mechanical theatre 

References: Heat Robinson, Tim Hunkin, Rowland Emett

Chitty chitty bang bang movie

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBJGpNTP_lY

Reference: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, 1968 by  Roald Dahl and Ken Hughes. Movie based on the novel of Ian Fleming

Reference: David Macaulay, The way things work, 2004

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“‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore, (...) we’re an empire now, and when we act we create reality’. ( Ref: Ron Suskind, ‘Without a doubt’) (...) Fantasy and spectacle have been property of Fascism, totalitarian Communism. (...) Yet both Fascism and commercialism share core characteristics of spectacle: looking beyond reason, rationality and self-evident truth and making use of story, myth, fantasy and imagination to further their respective agendas. (...) We live in a ‘society of spectacle’as the french theorist-provocateur Guy Debord declared back in 1967. (...) information overload. (...) Pentagon understood that people often prefer a simple, dramatic story to the complicated truth. (...) the political elite are able to guide the direction of public opinion. (...) Manufacture of Consent (Ref: Walter Lippmann, ‘Public Opinion’). (...) If progressive are to engage, rather then ignore, the phantasmagoric terrain of politics, we need to learn from those who do spectacle best: the architects of Las Vegas. (...) ‘How do you do this starting from scratch, with no organisation, no money, nothing? Well, the answer is that you create a myth’ (Ref: Abbie Hoffman). (...) the whole affair was a manufactured spectacle. (...)‘Triumph of the will’ (Ref: Leni Riefenstal, 1934). (...) There is the possibility that spectacle can honor progressive ideals. Ironically, it is Las Vegas-Sin City itself-that might help us begin to formulate such an ethical spectacle. (...) Aesthetic postmodernism. (...) Satirical media campaign called ‘Billionaires for Bush’ (2000): ‘ Buy your own president!’. (...) Progressives have traditionally looked at advertising with disgust, for good reason: they create unreal expectations and convince us to buy what we don’t really need. They’re symbol of the waste-and bad taste-of consumer capitalism. (...) ‘We must cultivate defenses against the Seduction of Eloquence’ (Ref: Neil Postman). (...) McDonald’s Ad (...) so successful. (...) Be careful or you’ll end up reproducing the Third Reich. (...) Sit back, laugh and be entertained. (...) Ads Personalised. (...) WE LIVE IN AN AGE WHERE SPECTACLES MAKE US STUPID; WE CAN ENGINEER THEM TO MAKE US SMARTER. (...) In Mein Kampf Adolf Hitler wrote, ‘the recetpvity of great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous’. (...) Jean Baudrillard. (...) ‘Progress has stopped, perfection has been reached, it is the end of the story’ (Ref: ‘Actually existing socialism’, as Joseph Stalin had the audacy to proclaim). (...) What they have done, and have done very effectively, is convince most people that there is no alternatives. Ethical Spectacle. (...) Progressive fear. (...) Dream are powerful. (...) they also inspire us to imagine that things could be radically different that they are today, and then believe we can progress toward that imaginary world.(...) we learn to share a political aesthetic that makes us peace with the irrational, honors desire, and embrace spectacle.” 

Reference: Stephen Duncombe, Dream, re-imaging progressive politics in an age of fantasy, 2007. 

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Heretical Master of Ethics / Maestro Eretico di Etica

“(...) Mendini non è stato solo il creatore di molti oggetti, ma anche un ideatore culturale e un intellettuale che ha creato nuove forme commentando criticamente le sue condizioni sociali e facendo riferimenti estetici al deterioramento della cultura massificata che l’industria dell’Impero Bis-Moderno aveva generato. L’unicità di Mendini consisteva nell’esprimersi come Eroe Etico che, in modo apparentemente contraddittorio, proponeva idee e immagini senza contenuto moralistico. (...) velo evanescente di ironia. (...) Mendini fu espulso dall’Istituto Imperiale degli architetti per avere negato che il solo scopo dell’architettura fosse quello di creare spazi funzionali. (...) c’era una profondità insondabile nella apparente banalità delle sue produzioni. (...) richiamare l’attenzione sulle superfici esistenti e cercando di esaltarle. Per lui nella superficie banale giace l’essenza di tutte le sostanze che devono ancora ricevere forma. (...) Ai suoi critici più sagaci non sfuggì che dall’approcio neodadaista per scioccare la borghesia era passato a una procedura ancora più profondamente radicale per cercare di sconvolgere le convinzioni più intime del ceto medio celebrando, con grandi Osanna, le glorie degli oggetti che tanto apprezzavano. Era come se li sollevasse per le scarpe e, mostrando loro i cieli, li tenesse a testa in giù. (...) Lo definirono ambiguo non rendendosi conto che, cosi facendo, lo consacravano con gli oli sacri della poesia. (...) battaglia dell’Utensile contro il Totem. (...) cercare di sovvertire i valori stabiliti. (...) Dichiarare apertamente la mancanza di significato di tutto creando oggetti apparentemente insensati che tuttavia scolpivano una traccia indelebile nella nostra percezione, negando così la credenze che professavano, era il modo in cui Mendini osava sfidare gli Dei. Ben cosciente che qualsiasi sfida è vana, sapeva anche che l’uomo non poteva far altro che provarci.. (...) Sovversive”

Reference: Emilio Ambasz, Una fiaba: Alessandro J. Medini regista straordinario e profeta malgrado se stesso

Kitsch: “(…) esaltazione paradossale delle convezioni, (…) disponibilità ad una finzione estetica corrispondente alla finzione della vita quotidiana.”  

Reference: Atelier Mendini: una utopia visiva, a cura di Raffaella Poletto, 1994.