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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Reflections after the 2009 Stockholm Furniture Fair

Those of you that are obsessed with furniture fairs, and have missed the Stockholm one that took place recently, can sit back and relax. Call it the crises or a design-bottleneck, what I have seen during my recent visit to the Stockholm Furniture Fair was not so satisfactory. However, a couple of projects I stumbled upon at the fair helped confirm an emerging trend I have been observing in a number of design fields. It is a trend I call by the name "mass-production of design ideas"--artefacts that are executed within a very limited timeframe—where, this very characteristic of the artefact's design process is also being used as a way to promote it.

One example to this trend comes from the Israeli design studio Godspeed, who exhibited at the fair a furniture series by the name "speed-furniture". To describe briefly, the material used to make these pieces is waste wood that had been reclaimed from Tel Aviv carpenters. How this project specifically relates to our trend is that all "speed-furniture" is produced from scratch within a time limit of one hour.

Another example from the fair to what I call "mass-production of design ideas" was a project carried out in University of Gävle's 'Design and Wood Technology Programme'. Here, participants of a ten-day workshop produced unique pieces within this limited timeframe. Similar to Godspeed's case, they had defined material limitations too, using only lycra and birch.


Of course, these two examples do not stand alone to represent the trend we have been discussing. Another example that comes to mind from the field of furniture design is the "100 Chairs in 100 Days" project by Gamper Martino. For the sake of diversity, another example I'd like to give is from a graphic designer named Serifcan Ozcan, who has created a ten-hour portfolio of ten works, by generating a new project each hour-- and, afterwards, ironically sold one of those projects to a client. I would prefer not going into further detail about these since both projects could be studied in detail via the hyperlinks I've provided. I would rather use the rest of this entry to give my own viewpoint on this emerging trend in design.

According to my interpretation this phenomenon has several sides to it. First of all, designers have been realizing, for a good while now, that they are not only designing for mass-production, but also mass-consumption. With the ongoing crises, designers are very well aware of the fact that they have long been operating along the paradigm of the throwaway culture. Therefore this approach to design might as well be their reaction to this very paradigm.

A more cynical view might suggest that an increasing number of designers are aware of the prestige that is attached to the 'designed' object. They might as well be exploiting this opportunity, much like star designers have in the past two decades, though this time in an underground fashion, with a 'designed sloppiness' approach.

A view based on the labor and economics side of things, which is not very far away from what we have discussed in the above paragraphs, could provide another interpretation. As manufacturing processes become more automatized and globalization of capital is on the rise, the traditional definitions of blue- and white-collar labor are going through a major shift. The flexible markets and the conditions brought up by globalization are pushing forward for a shift in the division and distribution of white-collar jobs. Today businesses talk about the outsourcing of consultancy work, such as design—just like they were starting to talk, a few decades ago, about the outsourcing of manufacturing (blue-collar). Design is increasingly being given as a by-product of the whole consultancy package provided by companies. This is especially evident in the services offered by competent businesses from developing countries.

The examples we have discussed above, might be considered as one type of reaction to these recent phenomena. Can there be another way to react? Ronald Jones suggests the "experience design approach" as another way, where designers develop their skills in an interdisciplinary manner, and move away from an object-oriented practice towards one that focuses on creating intangible commodities. In his article "Are You Experienced?" he provides more insight to this :

its [experience design as a 'business art'] emergence will quicken as China and India begin acting on the obvious, giving design away for free because their economic advantage is with mass-manufacturing, not designing prototypes for mobile phones. China and India’s efficiency at mass-producing physical commodities frees up small but growing sectors of the Western design community to create and distribute intangible commodities, including experiences.

In the wake of these recent phenomena, what is your take on the future? Will we see a furniture fair where exhibited pieces are being designed and executed in real-time? How about an 'experience fair' of "intangible commodities"?

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