Designing Memory: What prevents past tragedies from recurring—objects or ideas?

This post is a quick English translation of an article I originally wrote in Turkish, which was published by Radikal Newspaper's monthly Design supplement on 28 February 2010.

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Last January witnessed hundreds of people gather in front of the Agos Newspaper headquarters for the third anniversary of Hrant Dink's assassination. The slain journalist's son Arat Dink delivered an impromptu speech to those who gathered in memory of his father. Halfway through his public address, he pointed toward the Agos offices and said the following: "Placed inside is a memorial bust depicting my father. I want to demolish it. I like people, not busts." These words, which may first come across as a sentimental outcry, in effect indicate an important call for designers. They may even be perceived as a contemporary design critique regarding the problematic relationship between 'memory', and artifacts that are designed to keep it alive.

If the essential purpose is to remember and commemorate past tragedies, and perhaps to also prevent their recurrence, how effectively this purpose is served by object-oriented design 'solutions' is highly questionable. Be it a bust or a museum, it is possible to argue that more than keeping the memory of past tragedies alive, these 'objects,' on the contrary, bury them forever in the depths of history. Recent history is teeming with case examples whereby such tragedies end up being instrumentalized in order to serve a number of very different purposes. Relatively more innocent forms of such instrumentalization are embodied by the phenomenon of dark tourism. Yet worst cases occur when such objects are employed as props in rituals, which then lead to the mobilization of masses that often create new tragedies. Here, it would be apt to tune into Kemal, who is the main character of Orhan Pamuk's last novel Museum of Innocence. How does he elaborate on his idea of founding a museum in memory of his lost love?

"I want to teach not only the Turkish people but the world at large how to take pride in life. I have traveled, and seen for myself: Western peoples know well how to take pride, while others live in shame. But when things we are ashamed of in life are exhibited in museums, they instantly turn into things that are to be taken pride in" (2008. İstanbul: İletişim Yayıncılık A.Ş. Pages 571-2).

Nükhet İpekçi showing her father's bloody shirt to TV cameras

Another recent event that helped museum discussions in Turkey gain momentum was the 30th anniversary of Abdi İpekçi's assassination. The slain newspaper editor's daughter Nükhet İpekçi exhibited to TV cameras his father's bloody shirt in demand for justice. By doing so, she kickstarted discussions of founding a museum in memory of slain journalists like İpekçi and Dink. An idea that quickly gained popularity was that this museum should display objects which used to belong to those journalists. But perhaps the most interesting remark as part of this larger debate came from another assassinated journalist Uğur Mumcu's daughter Özge Mumcu. She said that such museum should display not only objects, but also ideas.

The notion of 'ideas' that Mumcu put forth vis-à-vis that of 'objects' points toward new horizons for design's relationship to memory. In fact, the past few years have witnessed works of design that adopt novel approaches regarding this relationship. These works focus on representing ideas and helping them to be openly articulated. A recent example to those works is Rafael Lozano Hemmer's "Voz Alta" (Loud Voice) project, which was installed in Mexico City in 2008. Hemmer says he was briefed to design a piece in memory of the 40th anniversary of the Tlatelolco student massacre. What the Mexican artist did was not to generate yet another object-oriented 'solution,' but instead allow people to voice their opinions through a system that consisted of a few components. As these people were sharing their statements with the wider public, they also practically controlled a 10 kW projector, which the artist installed at the "Plaza de las Tres Culturas" square where the massacre had taken place. What is more, the intensity of the light sent out by this projector would change according to that of the soundwaves transmitted through the megaphone. If the megaphone was silent, the projector did not send out any light. When the light at the square was dimmed, then the three projectors across the square at the rooftop of the Cultural Center would start to work. These projectors would turn into light the sounds of the interviews with survivors, old radio recordings and popular songs from the time of the massacre. By doing so, this work was able to blend together memories from a past tragedy and the everyday reality of the present. And, in case anyone was curious about what was actually being said into the megaphone, all statements that went into the system were broadcast through a local radio station called UNAM. The "Voz Alta" project witnessed thousands of people participate without any moderation or censorship. Naturally, the messages transmitted through the megaphone ranged from marriage proposals to statements coming from survivors of the massacre.

View from Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's "Voz Alta" project.
(Photo: Antimodular Research and Alejandro Blázquez)

Last year's urban riots in Greece witnessed young protesters utilize, in a rather unforeseen way, a monument depicting one of the most respected heroes of the country. What the protesters did was to take down the bust of the anti-Nazi hero Kostas Perrikos, in order to use it as a building block in their barricades against the police force. This unique choice was put under scrutiny by old revolutionaries, who accused the youth of being ignorant toward history, and of disrespecting past heroes. However, may we not suggest that the young protesters in Greece, just like Arat Dink, realized what purpose is really served by busts? As far as design is concerned, recent history suggests that such objects do not 'perform' so successfully in preventing the recurrence of past tragedies. Therefore, what 'users' could better do is perhaps to attribute new roles to those stagnant objects; to somehow give life to them by demolishing the myths that they have long been in the center of. And, designers' contribution may happen by producing dynamic mediators that will help ideas and emotions to be freely communicated.

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Fast-realized design ideas challenge mass-produced industrial designs

This post is a quick English translation of an article I originally wrote in Turkish, which was published by Radikal Newspaper's monthly Design supplement on 31 January 2010.

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"Always go to your customer with at least three alternatives" is perhaps the most well-known advice given to design students as they prepare to embark on their professional career. The initial stages of a typical design process indeed witness a quantitative variety in alternatives. But as the process draws to a close, the number of ideas in consideration gradually decreases, eventually falling to one. Quite naturally, this decrease is quantity assumed to give birth to an increase in quality: after all, the commercial world's first and foremost expectation from designers is unique and flawless designs that are apt for being manufactured by the error-intolerant process of mass-production.

While a typical design process displays the above characteristics, a number of recent examples of practice suggest that some designers choose to maintain a contrary approach. These designers are not interested in providing the 'customer' with a single flawless design idea that is to be mass-produced. Instead, they are in pursuit of realizing as many of their design ideas as possible, with or without flaws. This is precisely why they strive to finalize their design processes as quickly as possible. They steal the notion of 'rapidity' away from the industrial context, where it typically connotes a 'systematic efficiency' and 'perfection.' Fostering an affection for intuitiveness, they bestow this notion to the studio-workshop realm. Thus they shift focus away from working for industrial mass-production toward fast-realizing their design ideas.

The first project which I believe exemplifies this recent trend is ”speed-furniture” by the Israel-based design studio Godspeed. These designers conceive and finalize each of their furniture designs within a duration of only one hour. They use scrap pieces of wood reclaimed from carpenters in Tel Aviv as raw material for their designs. A similar example from the field of furniture design is Martino Gamper's "100 Chairs in 100 Days." The London-based Italian designer maintains an approach akin to that of Godspeed to create brand new chairs using material he locally reclaims. As part of his design process he uses some pieces just as they are, while he subjects others to radical changes according to new roles he conceives for them.

The cover of Şerifcan Özcan's Ten Plus One project portfolio

For diversity's sake I now want to mention an example from graphic design: The New York based designer Şerifcan Özcan's ”Ten Plus One.” The project comprises eleven different design ideas, realized from scratch in eleven hours. Özcan says what led to this project was nothing but the pressure exerted by a school deadline. Upon realizing that he was short of projects for a thick enough portfolio, the designer came up with the idea for ”Ten Plus One.” Ironically, the designer was even contacted by one customer who was interested in buying one of his 'one-hour' designs.

As suggested by the above examples, the approach that I have called 'fast-realized design ideas' follows a process which ensures the full execution of design works within a short and/or limited time frame. As part of such process, the traditionally distinct phases of 'design' and 'production' merge into one another, blurring the distinction between the notions of 'prototype' and 'end-product.' It can easily be argued that these works compromise on the characteristic of 'flawlessness,' which is essentially assumed of the end-products of a conventional design process. In fact, the very flaws caused by these unique fast design processes often serve as a positive quality; an 'added-value' of sorts. It is this phenomenon that places such works somewhere in the intersecting worlds of arts, craft and design.

A packaging design from Şerifcan Özcan's Ten Plus One project portfolio

Are these designers influenced in any way by a specific stream of critical thought? At first glance we can suggest that designers have, with the aid of the recent crisis, finally acknowledged their historical role as consumerism's driving force. In the light of the above examples, could we not suggest that designers have realized that the relentless demand imposed on them by the industry for creating 'flawless' and 'unique' designs has turned their creative process into a vicious cycle? It is possible to argue that by hacking those two key notions of 'flawlessness' and 'uniqueness', these designers aim to break the creative bottleneck and the above mentioned vicious cycle. More cynical views may suggest that these designers instrumentalize the prestige often attributed to 'designed' objects. Some may go even further to argue that they exploit this prestige, not unlike what their 'star designer' colleagues have done throughout the last few decades, this time through a more underground manner; with a touch of 'planned imperfectness.' Whatever perspective we may maintain as we look at this trend, what all of its examples boldly underline is that we are witnessing a reversal of the traditional hegemony of 'product' over 'process,' whereby the latter is on the rise as the more valuable asset compared to the former.

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Generative Design: Toward a World of 'Unique Copies'

This post is the English translation of an article I wrote in Turkish, which was published by Radikal Newspaper's monthly Design supplement on 29 November 2009. Images are taken from Kram/Weisshaar's website.

Breeding Table No. 7 (Photo: Frank Stolle)

Art critic Rosalind Krauss was posing the following questions almost a quarter century ago: "What would it look like not to repress the concept of the copy? What would it look like to produce a work that acted out of the discourse of reproductions without originals?"* A contemporary approach named 'generative design' is creating the very culture of 'reproductions without originals' Krauss was envisioning.

Recent technological advances provide designers with the possibility of modeling not only the form but also the 'DNA' of artifacts. This is precisely what is of primary concern to 'generative design': how to design not only the artifacts themselves but, more importantly, the processes that will produce those artifacts. Therefore, what 'generative design' actually designs--thanks to software such as Processing and Mathematica--are algorithmic processes, which then result in the production of unique products.

Stockholm based design studio Kram/Weisshaar's project ‘Breeding Tables’ is one of the best examples to generative design. Clemens Weisshaar and Reed Kram intend to revert the conventional idea that has long since lain at the heart of industrial product design profession: coming up with 'original' designs for mass-production. Their goal instead is to be able to create an infinite number of unique products--in the case of this specific project, tables. In order to do so, the duo turn to contemporary manufacturing technologies. Eventually what they design is a process, which is based on a computer code developed specifically for this project. Forms that are distinct from one another are physically manufactured by laser-cutting and steel-bending machines which are again controlled entirely by computers. To be more clear, each process results in table legs that each have a unique geometry.

The diagram showing parameters set by the Breeding Tables software

(Image: KRAM/WEISSHAAR)

It is important to examine in further detail the impact brought about by 'generative design' with respect to the ethical and legal issues that evolve around the concept of intellectual property. The notion of 'the copy' continues to have nightmarish connotations for designers in newly industrialized societies, due for the most part to the loopholes in intellectual property law and/or the application thereof. (An example is Turkey where professional designers are currently lobbying in order to fill such loopholes. Their effort resulted in a draft law that was presented to the Parliament last February, which suggested that all designs, officially patented or not, should be protected by law.) However, there is another side of the coin: the fundamental shift brought about by the Information Society paradigm opens up for debate the very established notions such as 'intellectual property.' A popular example to such debate evolves around the 'open-source' phenomenon, which has enabled individuals to share the fruits of their creative processes with one another with almost no legal protection. As a result, especially in the post-industrial West, conventional design processes that focus entirely on the 'end-product' are increasingly abandoned. The pioneers of 'generative design' also hint at a future where designers adopt process-oriented approaches: exploit possibilities presented by the latest technology, and work with time as their new medium--and information, their new material. Furthermore, advances in manufacturing technologies reduce the cost differences between mass-producing the same product, and fast-producing unique products--in other words, "rapid prototyping". As Kram/Weisshaar’s 'Breeding Tables' shows, generative design does not aim to produce an infinite number of copies based a single, unique design but rather pursues to create infinitely many originals without being based on an initial prototype. This is precisely why the validity of the notion 'end-product' is threatened by such projects: in the last analysis, the commercial value/intellectual property to be protected by law is not the 'end-product' but rather the design process (including the software and algorithm) that allows designers to create those products.

Generative design stands out also as a strong alternative to the recent method of 'mass-customization', which is often preferred by designers who aim to provide a diversity of alternatives to the end-user. The sneaker giants such as Nike and Converse, who popularly prefer to use such method establish platforms on their websites with the claim of allowing users design their own unique sneakers. Here, their aim seems to be to increase the number of unique options for end-users and perhaps include them in the design process. However, to what extent this aim is accomplished is rather questionable. As many color, texture, pattern options as 'mass-production' can claim to provide, the number of truly unique products defines a limited domain. Additionally, it could be suggested that such method delegates a good portion of design tasks to users, which in turn consumes their time and energy. Given that generative design invalidates the very notions of 'originality' and 'copy' by allowing the production of an infinite number of unique copies, it would not be unfair to suggest that it will soon surpass methods like 'mass-customization'. Finally, the world of "unique copies" Krauss was talking about twenty years ago, seems to have been realized by 'generative design'--and in a rather legal and ethical way, too.

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*Krauss, Rosalind E. 1986. The Originality of the Avant-garde and Other Modernist Myths. MA: The MIT Press.

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On Alchohol Consumption and Automotive Design

A recent pattern of innovation I've been recognizing is related to businesses' attempts to prevent undesirable use scenarios of their products/services, caused by users under the influence of alcohol. Among several examples are new cellphones developed by LG, Samsung and Nokia, that aim to prevent drunk phone calls. Another recent example comes from the online giant Google, whose e-mailing service Googlemail now has a feature called Mail Goggles to "prevent many of you out there from sending messages you wish you hadn't".

These new product and service features are well-celebrated by online communities and have discovered a channel of innovation that could potentially spread amongst other businesses. I myself have to admit that I find these new features very interesting, but unfortunately, at the same time, trivial.

While drunk-phoning and e-mailing could potentially cause regrettable consequences, there is another area of products/services where preventing these consequences could be even more crucial. If you wonder what that area is, I guess, the phrase "drunk-driving" would be enough to strike a chord--in my opinion, the sociography that has evolved around automobiles desperately awaits a similar kind of innovation to be translated into a mainstream practice.

Donald A. Norman coins the term "forcing functions" to indicate certain functions that are inscribed in a product, which prevent undesirable shifts of direction in the use-scenario of that product ["The Design of Everyday Things." (Basic Books, New York, 1988). Pages 132-40.] A simple example he uses is on the types of cars whose door can only be locked by using the car-key, as opposed to a car that locks itself automatically, which would result in forgetful drivers getting locked out.

One cannot help but wonder why similar kinds of features are not studied and developed by the car industry. Hopefully design has a couple more tricks--than just styling--up its sleeve. Could adding a couple of relevant "forcing functions" result in the reduction of accidents caused by drunk-driving?

But, then again, as a civilization, we would be running other risks; like losing the profits generated by the hospitalization of accident victims, car repairs and purchase of new cars. Right?

`Smash up your car, the insurance will do the rest!' Indeed, the car is without doubt one of the main foci of daily and long-term waste, both private and collective. Not only is it so by its systematically reduced use-value, its systematically increased prestige and fashion coefficient, and the outrageous sums invested in it, but -- without doubt much more deeply than this -- by the spectacular collective sacrifice of sheet-metal, machinery and human lives in the Accident. The Accident: that gigantic `happening', the finest offered by consumer society, through which society affords itself in the ritual destruction of materials and life the proof of its excessive affluence (a proof a contrario, but one that is much more effective in the depths of the imagination than the direct proof by accumulation). [Jean Baudrillard. "The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures." (Sage, London, England, 1998). Page 48.]

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Nokia New Phone Concept & dyeing one’s whiskers green

A daily digest I received from a design mailgroup highly praised a new phone concept that's recently been developed by the mobile giant Nokia. The introductory post went into further detail to prove how breakthrough the concept was: "works with solar energy, calculates the hazardous substances on the apple you're going to eat, never gets dirty and cleans the dirt around it, the Nokia of the future..."

"Calculates the hazardous substances on the apple you're going to eat"? With all due respect to the hard work being put into nanotechnology and similar scientific developments, I find it impossible not to stand aghast at the way they're being used by the industry. It reveals a good deal about the pathetic situation our civilization— and, in particular, the design profession — is in.

I'm sure that at some point any designer has been told they're problem solvers. How about a different perception of this notion? In the light of this Nokia example, it's time to face the fact that what we do is to create solutions to create further problems. Rachel Carson's inspirational text Silent Spring tells us about Lewis Carroll's metaphor for such an attitude:

This system, however—deliberately poisoning our food, then policing the result—is too reminiscent of Lewis Carroll’s White Knight who thought of ‘a plan to dye one’s whiskers green, and always use so large a fan that they could not be seen’. The ultimate answer is to use less toxic chemicals so that the public hazard from their misuse is greatly reduced.

It's already time we start taking a holistic approach to the problems our civilization has caused. Wouldn't it be a more "breakthrough concept" if, for example, Nokia started a fund to prevent pollution or use of chemicals in agriculture, etc.

Click here to watch the introductory video for Morph—Nokia's New Phone Concept.

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