'Designing for what?' rather than 'designing what?'; or The Designer's Disciplinary Anxiety

This post is the English translation of an article I wrote in Turkish, which was published by Radikal Newspaper's monthly Design supplement on 27 December 2009.

Cover of I.D. Magazine's June 2009 issue. (Copyright: Kenzo Minami.)

The last month of the year witnessed I.D. Magazine (USA’s oldest product design magazine) cease publication after 55 years. The fall of such a symbolic institution took the product design world--especially, its young and aspiring design students--by storm. Most reactions on the web portray anticipatory lamentation with a touch of anxiety, best captured by a blogger who says he is "scared for the future of design in the US." I, on the contrary, suggest that this development can be interpreted as one of the first calls for an inevitable transformation towards a brighter future for design, let alone as a sign for a darker one. Let me explain.

Last September, Jon Kolko from the San Francisco based studio Frog Design told of his impressions after the IDSA Miami Conference: "the IDSA is now essentially irrelevant." In order to lay the grounds for his argument, he pointed to a number of developments concerning design's position in the developed West: First, product-oriented design services, which have been provided largely by 'Western' designers up until today, are now demanded by the industry from designers in the developing world (especially Asia). To be sure, the primary reason for this shift has to do with the fact that the costs for the latter's services are much less than that of the former's. Second, the professional expertise necessary to handle industrial processes with confidence is increasing in depth. Subjects like materials science and manufacturing technologies, which were until recently considered to be well within the professional scope of designers, now require high levels of specialization, transcending the range of a conventional product designer's competencies. Add to those the rapid advances in digital components and networked services, which has already led to their enormous expansion to include the traditional commodity "product" as a detail, a prop. The question that sums up all these observations is "does the conventional role of designers (in the developed world) who entirely rely their practices on specific branches of the industry (hence, categorized as 'industrial designers') really continue to hold any relevance at all, let alone that of their professional organization? Product-oriented 'solutions' that used to lie at the core of their profession are fast fleeing to India and China; the increasing digitalization in their own culture is shifting the focus of the practice from material to immaterial value creation; the scientific knowledge presented as part of their design education is limited to the traditional frame marked by "wood, metals, plastics and composites"... If that be the case; if designing products/graphics/textiles is losing relevance in the West, what is replacing it?

A view from the IDSA Miami conference, entitled 'Project Infusion' (Copyright IDSA)

Before jumping to any conclusions, we first need to ask the right question: that is, 'designing for what?' rather than 'designing what?' It was precisely the former question posed by Bruce and Stephanie M. Tharp, in an article they wrote last February, entitled "The 4 Fields of Industrial Design: (No, not furniture, trans, consumer electronics, & toys)." For reasons not unlike those put forth by Jan Kolko, they suggest "commercial design," "responsible design," "discursive design," and "experimental design" as the four new fields. What they boldly underline in their article is that today's designers should focus on not only what the end-result/product of the design process will be (e.g. product, graphics, textile), but more importantly, for what primary purpose it will actually be used (e.g. to create commercial value, to improve lives of the underprivileged, to experiment with materials, to start a discussion). And so should design education and its institutions, by reforming their curricula according to recent shifts in global culture.

To be sure, new proposals toward a taxonomic and/or academic reform do not only come from design spheres. Another example comes from Mark C. Taylor, professor of religion at Columbia University, who wrote an Op-Ed article last April for the New York Times. In his article he proposes a six-step action plan for transforming higher education into one that fosters innovative and agile individuals who could address crucial needs emerging from contemporary issues. In the second step--perhaps the most relevant one to our discussion--he suggests the following:

Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem-focused programs. These constantly evolving programs would have sunset clauses, and every seven years each one should be evaluated and either abolished, continued or significantly changed. It is possible to imagine a broad range of topics around which such zones of inquiry could be organized: Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and Water.

Assuming that Taylor's groundbreaking action plan will soon be realized in all areas of higher education may sound a little too idealistic. However, why should we not be able to start pursuing such idealism in the relatively narrower realm of design education? Even the very idea itself is extremely exciting: Imagine that four-year long, conventional product/graphic/textile design departments give way to brisk and temporary ones focused on crucial issues such as 'drought in Konya Basin,' 'floods in Istanbul's outskirts,' 'communication problems between government officers and locals due to regional language differences'... Does design not have any words to say, or any 'added-value' to create, regarding such matters?

Read more!

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.

---

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

Read more!

I come from "The Idiot Factory"

Life in Stockholm is pretty easy to get by for the most part, it is rare that one experiences social tension or feels unsafe in public. However, as I walked through the doors of the Central Train Station several days ago, I felt a weight of unease fall down on me. My reason for being there was to do some fieldwork for one of the courses I am taking, as a part of which my group and I are to propose a new media art/design project for the Central Station. I was going to take a bunch of photos/videos, interview people, and who knows, maybe even do some situationist private detecting if I had enough motivation to. You might think that it was natural for me to feel uneasy being involved in such 'suspicious-looking' activities, in a major public space, with a Turkish passport, in the wake of 9/11 or 7/7 or 11/26, etc. Surprisingly enough, it was not my nationality, but rather the school I attend, that gave me the shivers. Let me explain why.


About three weeks ago, Anna Odell, a 35-year-old student from Konstfack faked to commit suicide by trying to jump off a bridge in Stockholm. Let's tune in to thelocal.se for the rest of the story:

As a part of her final project before graduation, Odell pretended she was going to jump off a bridge to commit suicide. Horrified witnesses called police, who then tried to restrain the kicking and screaming Odell. After arriving at the hospital’s psychiatric ward, Odell proceeded to scream at the medical staff who attempted to help her, even spitting in the faces of several nurses. She was eventually restrained on a gurney and given drugs to calm her down, remaining in the hospital overnight as doctors attempted to diagnose her psychiatric condition.

The whole thing caused a big public outburst with citizens saying that they cannot possibly believe that this is a part of an academically-approved project, which means it is being funded by Swedish taxpayers' money. Views ranged from inquisitions saying why art students cannot just paint nice pictures instead of doing such crazy things to doctors saying that the artist is "welcome to come back so I can give her a shot of Haloperidol, and then we’ll see how much fun she has. That would make a great installation.” All in all, this hot issue evolving around Konstfack was beginning to cool down, just when a second 'incident' took place to set things off once again.

Last week, Sweden's minister of culture Lena Elisabeth Adelsohn Liljeroth visited an exhibition in central Stockholm to witness an artwork that was apparently not her cup of tea. The work was a performance video that showed the artist--in disguise under the nickname 'NUG'--breaking train windows and tagging in the subway. She went on further with her fury to ask the gallery owner for more details about the creator of this work, upon which she was informed that it was another Konstfack student behind 'the heinous act'.

Now, SL, the urban transport authority in Stockholm, claims that travelers and customers feel offended, and asks for a compensation 100000 SEK (approx. 10000 euros) for both the moral and the material damages this act has caused. Dr. Ivar Björkman, president of Konstfack airs on major TV channels to answer questions, and school is visited by reporters. One of the viewer comments on the Dagens Nyheter--a major daily Swedish newspaper--website, calls Konstfack "The Idiot Factory".

Considering the fact that the Konstfack campus is an old telephone factory, the second half of that analogy might not be so irrelevant after all. And my group and me will try to do our best to substantiate the first half of the analogy.

Read more!

Extension of Life or Extension of Business-as-usual?

While I am pro-technology, in the sense that I keep an optimism towards its potential contribution to the planet's well-being, I have recently come across a perspective that I could not avoid to contradict.


I have to note that I fully respect the scientific developments and believe that they should be used in order to enrich the quality of human life—which will eventually cause its extension on average. The fact that, in the last 5 or 6 decades, space technology has adopted the mission of leading all those scientific developments, makes that particular field a very important one.

Besides all this, I am a true believer in the inspirationality of that significant moment in the history of humankind when a member of our species set foot on the moon, and named, for the first time,—not his city, country or continent but instead;—the whole Earth as 'home'. I was first introduced to this fact while reading The Revenge of Gaia, by James Lovelock, who acknowledges that this dramatic change in the perception of 'home' has contributed dearly to the green cause on a subconscious level.

However, while I was carrying out a little research about these two topics of enormous importance, I came across the video below, which is a live recording of Peter Diamandis' speech. His perception of space missions, extension of life, affluence of the mankind, and especially, "the things we hold value on this planet" were not a match with those of mine. Please watch the video and see for yourself.

Read more!