Re: [-empyre-] Hactivating Design
Brooke, Ricardo, and everyone, Thanks for your interesting points regarding notions of design, designing, and designers. This has also been on my mind recently, especially as a result of my position within a traditional human-computer interaction program. Here there is no questioning the role of the designer: the designer is to be subservient to the needs of the user, where the user is defined as that constructed by corporations and the market. Researchers actively seek out relationships with corporate sponsors and corporate research labs. As a result, there is no discussion regarding broader societal issues, excepting where they intersect with present corporate priorities, as in the rhetoric of sustainability---and of course there the limits of the conversation are already set, again by the market. This situation caused me to write a polemical paper for the main conference in HCI, ACM SIGCHI, called HCI for the Real World (http://zeitkunst.org/publications/hci-real-world). In it, and this is the main point of my post, I draw heavily on on the work of Victor Papanek, an industrial designer who wrote, for me, a very influential book originally published in 1970 entitled _Design for the Real World_. He focuses on the role of the designer, not only in the composition of the products made, but prior to that, in the very selection of projects to work on: ...I must agree that the designer bears a responsibility for the way the products he designs are received at the market place. But this is still a narrow and parochial view. The designer’s responsibility must go far beyond these considerations. His social and moral judgment must be brought into place long before he begins to design, since he has to make a judgment, and a prior judgment at that, as to whether the products he is asked to design or redesign merit his attention at all. In other words, will his design be on the side of the social good or not (66). This is one of the key, but unasked, questions within HCI. There is a general agreement on the relationship of HCI to corporations, the market, and users, yet there is no questioning of the very assumptions that underlie that agreement, and thus what are the important problems that students and faculty spend their time on. Of course there are complicated interrelationships here between funding agencies, professional societies, methods of reward, the system of publication (in HCI, emphasis on yearly conference papers versus less-frequent, but more in-depth, journal articles or monographs), and so on. Yet these are the very conditions that should be at the forefront of debate, especially in a discipline that is relatively young like HCI---but they are not. Returning to someone like Papanek, writing a similar polemic for industrial design and at the height of an earlier ecological movement, is key to foreground the continuities between different aspects of design, different time periods...and to suggest transdisciplinary connections. Design can be more than ICT for development, more than sustainable consumerism, but only if designers take responsibility for their choices of what to research and what to design (and where they can have a decent amount of control over that choice, such as in the academy), and if they instill in their students a similar ethic. Designers in academia would have to push against the notion that they have to teach their students marketable skills. (And, I would argue, that if the designers really wanted to teach skills that would improve the bottom line of companies they would allow for much more creative activity on the part of their student-designers, but that is the topic for a longer post on the interrelationship of interrelationship of contemporary cognitive capitalism and modern technological development.) Undertaking projects such as Brooke's hactivating design and undesigning and Ricardo's garageScience opens up spaces to address these questions and suggest possible alternatives. Nevertheless, I want to additionally point to the ways in which Papanek's project is an explicit critique and condemnation of contemporary (both then and now) processes of consumerist capitalism. Thus this approach is not to encourage design to necessarily create new, more hackable products, but rather to question the very system of consumption and the manufacture of desire that creates a system of products. This is the potentially radical implications of following in the wake of Papanek: of using design not to create a more just capitalism, but rather to create the conditions of possibility of real alternatives through an engagement and reconfiguration of our material world, of understanding how design methodology can construct different ontological realities (following the work of someone like John Law in _After Method_) with different political implications. nick Ricardo Dominguez wrote: Hola all and Brooke, I really enjoyed undesigning poster Brooke and it would be
Re: [-empyre-] Demand Nothing, Occupy Everything?
And on this point, a text by a group at Berkeley on The Necrosocial: http://anticapitalprojects.wordpress.com/2009/11/19/the-necrosocial/ Their interrogation of the role of high theory, capital, and the University qua Institution is extremely cogent at this moment. nick Marco Deseriis wrote: Hi Micha, yes, thank you for sharing those precious links. At UCSD, very few students, faculty and staff that I've talked to knew about or support the strike do. Myself and a handful of other faculty, staff and students are striking, but is the very idea of a strike not viral but more based in monolothic constituencies and factory models of labor? No, I just think that after 3-4 decades of resting on dreams of unabated growth Americans (and Californians in particular) need to be re-educated and reawakened as to what it means to lose one's job, as to what it means to fight for it, and what it means to risk of losing your job for defending it. So thank you for taking on this rather humongous task ;-) To me it is not a matter of virality but of culture. People in Latin America, Asia, Europe and all over the world keep going on strike for defending their jobs, demanding higher wages, security on the workplace, etc. It is only in this country that three decades of brainwashing have led to the obliteration of historic memory (the cancellation of May1st being the most notable example), and to the perception that going on strike is somehow out of fashion. In actual fact, there exists a growing global movement to defend public education, and to build an entirely different model of knowledge sharing. You are probably familiar with this site: http://www.edu-factory.org which reports the news of 15 arrests at UCLA: http://www.edu-factory.org/edu15/index.php?option=com_contentview=articleid=240:students-arrested-at-uclacatid=34:strugglesItemid=53 and whose picture eloquently show the response of public authorities to this growing mobilization. Perhaps the spreading occupations are more viral? I wonder about this as I start going on strike tomorrow and join actions at UCSD... Well, it is not up to me to say that strikes and occupations are just two sides of the same coin. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Demand Nothing, Occupy Everything? California is burning ....
Hi Marco, Micha, everyone The irony implicit in your statement re: this situation begs for further explication + analysis: It is only in this country that three decades of brainwashing have led to the obliteration of historic memory (the cancellation of May1st being the most notable example), and to the perception that going on strike is somehow out of fashion. And ... to add to the circulating narratives and links - I found it curious that the Chronicle for HE published this - http://chronicle.com/blogPost/California-Is-Burning/8915/?sid=atutm_source=atutm_medium=en Chris On Nov 19, 2009, at 8:34 AM, Marco Deseriis wrote: Hi Micha, yes, thank you for sharing those precious links. At UCSD, very few students, faculty and staff that I've talked to knew about or support the strike do. Myself and a handful of other faculty, staff and students are striking, but is the very idea of a strike not viral but more based in monolothic constituencies and factory models of labor? No, I just think that after 3-4 decades of resting on dreams of unabated growth Americans (and Californians in particular) need to be re- educated and reawakened as to what it means to lose one's job, as to what it means to fight for it, and what it means to risk of losing your job for defending it. So thank you for taking on this rather humongous task ;-) To me it is not a matter of virality but of culture. People in Latin America, Asia, Europe and all over the world keep going on strike for defending their jobs, demanding higher wages, security on the workplace, etc. It is only in this country that three decades of brainwashing have led to the obliteration of historic memory (the cancellation of May1st being the most notable example), and to the perception that going on strike is somehow out of fashion. In actual fact, there exists a growing global movement to defend public education, and to build an entirely different model of knowledge sharing. You are probably familiar with this site: http://www.edu-factory.org which reports the news of 15 arrests at UCLA: http://www.edu-factory.org/edu15/index.php?option=com_contentview=articleid=240:students-arrested-at-uclacatid=34:strugglesItemid=53 and whose picture eloquently show the response of public authorities to this growing mobilization. Perhaps the spreading occupations are more viral? I wonder about this as I start going on strike tomorrow and join actions at UCSD... Well, it is not up to me to say that strikes and occupations are just two sides of the same coin. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre C h r i s t i a n e R o b b i n s - J E T Z T Z E I T S T U D I O S - ... the space between zero and one ... Walter Benjamin LOS ANGELESISAN FRANCISCO The present age prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, fancy to reality, the appearance to the essence for in these days illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Ludwig Feuerbach, 1804-1872 ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Demand Nothing, Occupy Everything? California is burning ....
Good morning from Berkeley, I wasn't participating in yesterday's discussion about viral networks/UC protests because I was standing in the rain with close to 2,000 Berkeley protesters while we waited outside of Wheeler Hall as friends and colleagues occupied the building. So, please forgive me if I am returning to an already closed conversation, but allow me to indulge in a reflection on yesterday's successful and widespread strike activities. At Berkeley there are four groups representing different populations of the campus. As far as I know, there are two faculty groups, one graduate student group and one undergraduate group. With representatives from each group serving on all other committees, these four groups are in close communication and have used what is being referred to here as grassroots activism to successfully hold a 5,000 person walk-out in September, several events in October and a three day strike this week. Starting from the four groups email is used to communicate with departmental representatives who then communicate with departments. Whether organization is departmental, building wide, or committee based, the word hasn't stopped there. The fact that the students involved in yesterday's building occupation were communicating with fellow organizers and activists via email, twitter and facebook seems significant. Of course there are debates regarding whether or not viral networks and online activism have replaced the need for physical protest. It is, after all, easier to sign an online petition (of which there have been many connected to the UC Strikes) than it is steer clear of office resources for three days, or stand in the rain for hours on end. I am sure that we are all well aware of examples supporting both sides of that argument. Still, twitter and facebook updates kept a good deal of protesters mobilized yesterday. Consistent updates from the inside of Wheeler assured a wet crowd that their support was indeed necessary, building occupiers' view from the top floors of Wheeler Hall were shared through twitter accounts to help students spread evenly around the building to block police movement, and facebook updates alerted crowds immediately when arrests were taking place and how to best continue supporting the occupation efforts. Just like anything else it seems that they way a viral network is organized and implemented corresponds directly to its efficacy. I think here of Zach's proposed GRID project. The movement from one GRID to the next produces new GRIDs. It is the movement between networks that produces the change. It seems that in the case of the UC protests the efficacy of the system depends on successful movements between different networks. It is the movements between online networks such as email lists to online petitions, between different physical networks such as departmental meetings to banners hanging outside of buildings, and between online and physical networks such as buildings occupiers to their twitter followers. This is what has felt like the viral aspect of the system. In solidarity, Ashley On Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 10:32 AM, Christiane Robbins c...@mindspring.comwrote: Hi Marco, Micha, everyone The irony implicit in your statement re: this situation begs for further explication + analysis: It is only in this country that three decades of brainwashing have led to the obliteration of historic memory (the cancellation of May1st being the most notable example), and to the perception that going on strike is somehow out of fashion. And ... to add to the circulating narratives and links - I found it curious that the Chronicle for HE published this - http://chronicle.com/blogPost/California-Is-Burning/8915/?sid=atutm_source=atutm_medium=en Chris On Nov 19, 2009, at 8:34 AM, Marco Deseriis wrote: Hi Micha, yes, thank you for sharing those precious links. At UCSD, very few students, faculty and staff that I've talked to knew about or support the strike do. Myself and a handful of other faculty, staff and students are striking, but is the very idea of a strike not viral but more based in monolothic constituencies and factory models of labor? No, I just think that after 3-4 decades of resting on dreams of unabated growth Americans (and Californians in particular) need to be re-educated and reawakened as to what it means to lose one's job, as to what it means to fight for it, and what it means to risk of losing your job for defending it. So thank you for taking on this rather humongous task ;-) To me it is not a matter of virality but of culture. People in Latin America, Asia, Europe and all over the world keep going on strike for defending their jobs, demanding higher wages, security on the workplace, etc. It is only in this country that three decades of brainwashing have led to the obliteration of historic memory (the cancellation of May1st being the most notable example), and to the perception that going on
Re: [-empyre-] Demand Nothing, Occupy Everything?
Thank you to everyone for the comments and news on the strikes on the UC campuses. For the last several years, besides attending live events here in Milwaukee, I've found that increasingly effective is the online sharing and signing of petitions; many of these work, or, beginning by spreading slowly through time, have and of create generative updated versions of the petitions and gain ever more force as more and more people see that they are actually effective and begin signing themselves. I think since Reagan’s first term and almost first action as president—smashing the air controllers’ union—unions have become not just physically badly damaged in the USA, but the word itself has been distorted thro8ugh nonstop propaganda and become now a “dirty” word and concept for a great many persons. The back and forth supporting movement of smashing unions physically and economically—by physically I mean subversion by firing union workers and hiring much cheaper and less trained non union workers—this movement is supported at the same time by the attack on the language which makes unions appealing and strong sounding and converting the word into something smacking of both the ridiculous and the defeatist, something anachronistic and “a failure.” “Everyone knows they don’t work-=-just look how they are disappearing!” The words are supported by the actions and ice vers. I mentioned ridicule—one of the most effective tactics that Regan introduced was ridicule and cerataintn tones of voice which are like patronizing stabs in the back masked by a nice paternalist flashing Hollywood teeth. Since Reagan began this trend, ridicule has increasingly been used to drive out of “being with it” just about any “lefty” term you can think of. (For example one day i came back rfrom work, turned on the news and found Reagan beeing asked about the musrooming budget deficit-- what did mr president think of this-- was he worried abt it? Reagan flashed his warm patronizing smile and said i think the budget deficit is big enough to take care of itself--don't you?--) Another factor has been that since 9/11 I’ve noticed that academics as well as many others in different jobs and work sectors—are afraid to sing petitions because it might affect their jobs. One might be easily gotten rid of by a petition being used to show that Professor or student so –and-so is a “Jihad sympathizer” or “critical of Israel” or critical of the US policies aboard whether they be torture, rendition flights, drone bombings, support of Apartheid, and so forth. Now that the economic crises has made jobs even more precious, one may see even more of a drop off of certain sectors being willing to risk anything by singing a petition which can be pulled out and used as “evidence” at any time. The flipside of the viral techniques has been demontsrated by the Israeli State’s policy announced first last November and then stated more firmly and with greater scope in February of this year by then Foreign Minister tip Livni. This policy is what Minister Livni called “an assault” on Facebook my space you tube, the blogosphere –an assault on any sites which seem to be “critical of Israel” or remotely sympathetic to the Palestinian people’s cause. The idea is to wipe out such sites, or, to censor their statements, videos, and fotos and replace them with heavily pro-Israeli images, slogans, propaganda, posters and altered maps. This is viral “striking’ in the “assault” sense of the term for sure—and conducted by a State with the fourth largest military in the world to back it up if need be. The flip side of this tactic is to also cut off the electricity of the “other side’ so that they cannot conduct any sort of retaliatory campaign of their own. Increasing an anti-viral tactic has been just this—to turn off, cut off, bomb out, the electricity grids of large areas, and in this “deleted zone” undertake step two of the “extinguishing of light” which is the mass slaughter of civilians when they are “blacked out” from the gaze of the world. Rwanda was the first such example undertaken—before the massacres, the area designated for them was stripped of any communication with the outside world. All electronic contacts were severed, al telephone grids, electric grids etc were chopped apart and then in the deleted zones, the human beings were chopped down and deleted from existence on the ground. This tactic has been used to varying degrees in the former Yugoslavia, Iraq and Lebanon and Palestine, specifically Gaza, most recently to a greater extent than ever during the several years now siege by the assaults on the ground and electronically via deletion in January of this year. In the USA, this tact has been and is being used against the American Indians on the great majority of extremely poor rezervations. The living conditions and medical care of the American Indians is now tied with Haiti as the worst in the Western hemisphere. One
Re: [-empyre-] Hactivating Design
Wow, great to mention Victor Papanek. I knew him back when I was a student at the Kansas city art institute. I remember his bouyant personality and very dry wit. We have his little book -- containing really the seeds of everything important about design as a generative radical discipline. Terry and I try to teach from this ground every day. It is fantastic to learn how Brooke is taking this on.. On the level of pragmatics much like Papanek. Exciting discussion Christina Sent from my iPhone On Nov 20, 2009, at 12:38 PM, nicholas knouf na...@cornell.edu wrote: Brooke, Ricardo, and everyone, Thanks for your interesting points regarding notions of design, designing, and designers. This has also been on my mind recently, especially as a result of my position within a traditional human-computer interaction program. Here there is no questioning the role of the designer: the designer is to be subservient to the needs of the user, where the user is defined as that constructed by corporations and the market. Researchers actively seek out relationships with corporate sponsors and corporate research labs. As a result, there is no discussion regarding broader societal issues, excepting where they intersect with present corporate priorities, as in the rhetoric of sustainability---and of course there the limits of the conversation are already set, again by the market. This situation caused me to write a polemical paper for the main conference in HCI, ACM SIGCHI, called HCI for the Real World (http://zeitkunst.org/publications/hci-real-world). In it, and this is the main point of my post, I draw heavily on on the work of Victor Papanek, an industrial designer who wrote, for me, a very influential book originally published in 1970 entitled _Design for the Real World_. He focuses on the role of the designer, not only in the composition of the products made, but prior to that, in the very selection of projects to work on: ...I must agree that the designer bears a responsibility for the way the products he designs are received at the market place. But this is still a narrow and parochial view. The designer’s responsibility mus t go far beyond these considerations. His social and moral judgment must be brought into place long before he begins to design, since he has to make a judgment, and a prior judgment at that, as to whether the products he is asked to design or redesign merit his attention at all. In other words, will his design be on the side of the social good or not (66). This is one of the key, but unasked, questions within HCI. There is a general agreement on the relationship of HCI to corporations, the market, and users, yet there is no questioning of the very assumptions that underlie that agreement, and thus what are the important problems that students and faculty spend their time on. Of course there are complicated interrelationships here between funding agencies, professional societies, methods of reward, the system of publication (in HCI, emphasis on yearly conference papers versus less-frequent, but more in-depth, journal articles or monographs), and so on. Yet these are the very conditions that should be at the forefront of debate, especially in a discipline that is relatively young like HCI---but they are not. Returning to someone like Papanek, writing a similar polemic for industrial design and at the height of an earlier ecological movement, is key to foreground the continuities between different aspects of design, different time periods...and to suggest transdisciplinary connections. Design can be more than ICT for development, more than sustainable consumerism, but only if designers take responsibility for their choices of what to research and what to design (and where they can have a decent amount of control over that choice, such as in the academy), and if they instill in their students a similar ethic. Designers in academia would have to push against the notion that they have to teach their students marketable skills. (And, I would argue, that if the designers really wanted to teach skills that would improve the bottom line of companies they would allow for much more creative activity on the part of their student-designers, but that is the topic for a longer post on the interrelationship of interrelationship of contemporary cognitive capitalism and modern technological development.) Undertaking projects such as Brooke's hactivating design and undesigning and Ricardo's garageScience opens up spaces to address these questions and suggest possible alternatives. Nevertheless, I want to additionally point to the ways in which Papanek's project is an explicit critique and condemnation of contemporary (both then and now) processes of consumerist capitalism. Thus this approach is not to encourage design to necessarily create new, more hackable
Re: [-empyre-] Demand Nothing, Occupy Everything?
I think its curious how all of these websites, like the Tarnac 9, the invisible committee calling for uc occupations and the necrosocial all have the same wordpress theme... 2009/11/20 nicholas knouf na...@cornell.edu: And on this point, a text by a group at Berkeley on The Necrosocial: http://anticapitalprojects.wordpress.com/2009/11/19/the-necrosocial/ Their interrogation of the role of high theory, capital, and the University qua Institution is extremely cogent at this moment. nick Marco Deseriis wrote: Hi Micha, yes, thank you for sharing those precious links. At UCSD, very few students, faculty and staff that I've talked to knew about or support the strike do. Myself and a handful of other faculty, staff and students are striking, but is the very idea of a strike not viral but more based in monolothic constituencies and factory models of labor? No, I just think that after 3-4 decades of resting on dreams of unabated growth Americans (and Californians in particular) need to be re-educated and reawakened as to what it means to lose one's job, as to what it means to fight for it, and what it means to risk of losing your job for defending it. So thank you for taking on this rather humongous task ;-) To me it is not a matter of virality but of culture. People in Latin America, Asia, Europe and all over the world keep going on strike for defending their jobs, demanding higher wages, security on the workplace, etc. It is only in this country that three decades of brainwashing have led to the obliteration of historic memory (the cancellation of May1st being the most notable example), and to the perception that going on strike is somehow out of fashion. In actual fact, there exists a growing global movement to defend public education, and to build an entirely different model of knowledge sharing. You are probably familiar with this site: http://www.edu-factory.org which reports the news of 15 arrests at UCLA: http://www.edu-factory.org/edu15/index.php?option=com_contentview=articleid=240:students-arrested-at-uclacatid=34:strugglesItemid=53 and whose picture eloquently show the response of public authorities to this growing mobilization. Perhaps the spreading occupations are more viral? I wonder about this as I start going on strike tomorrow and join actions at UCSD... Well, it is not up to me to say that strikes and occupations are just two sides of the same coin. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- micha cárdenas / azdel slade Artist/Researcher, Experimental Game Lab, http://experimentalgamelab.net Calit2 Researcher, http://bang.calit2.net blog: http://transreal.org ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Hactivating Design
Glad to see the HCI discussion come up here, and in the context of questions about Design in education. Perhaps I'm just pessimistic, but I don't think we have long before today's New Media programs are squeezed out of fine arts curricula by HCI and its cousins in Industrial Design and Graphic Design. HCI is hard to distinguish for many an upper-level administrator from the Digital Media / New Media programs born in the last ten years. The confusion is understandable from a distance, as HCI borrows increasingly from New Media and Computer Arts for methods, media, and even critical language - all to the consumerist ends outlined by Nick. It's easy for students to distinguish between the two, however, given the easy product tie-ins of HCI and other design education. Much current design education is, as Nick implies, essentially an exercise in meta-shopping. (Who's a better shopper than the one who hangs around the factory line?) I fully expect that the sort of hires that resulted in our current, even mildly-critical digital arts programs will not come again, except perhaps for in the most elite and high- price-tag programs of the world. So what are we to do, if we care about exercising a role as educators and researchers beyond the provision of politicized recess for students who won't need to work for a living after school? 1 - Make hay (or raise Cain?) while the sun shines - this seems to be the bang.lab approach, as far as I can tell ( I can't imagine that Calit2 will support these projects for long-term? If so, then great!) T.A.Z., tactics over strategies, all that temporary stuff is always possible, and maybe the only way. (I also think here of Wodizcko, trained as an Industrial Designer, but taking Papandek's ideas and moving right out of that field in the 60s/70s.) 2 - Prepare for the inevitable change in our institutional waters, by acquainting ourselves with the methods of our future partners/bosses/ overlords, making ready to live in their world as critical members who ask tough, informed questions. 3 - Identify our current work as preservable, something to be protected in the name of knowledge, like the older arts of traditional glass and ceramics. 4 - Depart from the arts and sciences altogether, to identify ourselves with media studies in the humanities. (Christiane, can you speak to this option?) Bank on the whole practice-based research trend, keeping a wary eye on the Social Sciences as possible, occasional, collaborator. I'm trying a little bit of all these things myself, with increasing hope for option #4. In addition to skepticism about the consumerist ends of design and arts education, I'm also looking to steer clear of the technocratic, ahistorical progress machine of modern science (sustainability as economic catalyst). Any thoughts? Maybe a public listserv isn't the safest place to have this conversation? Kevin Hamilton On Nov 20, 2009, at 2:38 PM, nicholas knouf wrote: Brooke, Ricardo, and everyone, Thanks for your interesting points regarding notions of design, designing, and designers. This has also been on my mind recently, especially as a result of my position within a traditional human-computer interaction program. Here there is no questioning the role of the designer: the designer is to be subservient to the needs of the user, where the user is defined as that constructed by corporations and the market. Researchers actively seek out relationships with corporate sponsors and corporate research labs. As a result, there is no discussion regarding broader societal issues, excepting where they intersect with present corporate priorities, as in the rhetoric of sustainability---and of course there the limits of the conversation are already set, again by the market. This situation caused me to write a polemical paper for the main conference in HCI, ACM SIGCHI, called HCI for the Real World (http://zeitkunst.org/publications/hci-real-world). In it, and this is the main point of my post, I draw heavily on on the work of Victor Papanek, an industrial designer who wrote, for me, a very influential book originally published in 1970 entitled _Design for the Real World_. He focuses on the role of the designer, not only in the composition of the products made, but prior to that, in the very selection of projects to work on: ...I must agree that the designer bears a responsibility for the way the products he designs are received at the market place. But this is still a narrow and parochial view. The designer’s responsibility must go far beyond these considerations. His social and moral judgment must be brought into place long before he begins to design, since he has to make a judgment, and a prior judgment at that, as to whether the products he is asked to design or redesign merit his attention at all. In other words, will his design be on the
Re: [-empyre-] Hactivating Design
Dear Kevin, Ricardo, Nick and Brooke, I think we are okay to talk about this stuff online. I'm hoping those in Administrative posts will use our think tank as a way to enlighten themselves about other alternatives. For me option 4 is mighty tempting but structurally within many Visual Arts departments seems impossible. Anyone else have any great ideas? Renate Glad to see the HCI discussion come up here, and in the context of questions about Design in education. Perhaps I'm just pessimistic, but I don't think we have long before today's New Media programs are squeezed out of fine arts curricula by HCI and its cousins in Industrial Design and Graphic Design. HCI is hard to distinguish for many an upper-level administrator from the Digital Media / New Media programs born in the last ten years. The confusion is understandable from a distance, as HCI borrows increasingly from New Media and Computer Arts for methods, media, and even critical language - all to the consumerist ends outlined by Nick. It's easy for students to distinguish between the two, however, given the easy product tie-ins of HCI and other design education. Much current design education is, as Nick implies, essentially an exercise in meta-shopping. (Who's a better shopper than the one who hangs around the factory line?) I fully expect that the sort of hires that resulted in our current, even mildly-critical digital arts programs will not come again, except perhaps for in the most elite and high- price-tag programs of the world. So what are we to do, if we care about exercising a role as educators and researchers beyond the provision of politicized recess for students who won't need to work for a living after school? 1 - Make hay (or raise Cain?) while the sun shines - this seems to be the bang.lab approach, as far as I can tell ( I can't imagine that Calit2 will support these projects for long-term? If so, then great!) T.A.Z., tactics over strategies, all that temporary stuff is always possible, and maybe the only way. (I also think here of Wodizcko, trained as an Industrial Designer, but taking Papandek's ideas and moving right out of that field in the 60s/70s.) 2 - Prepare for the inevitable change in our institutional waters, by acquainting ourselves with the methods of our future partners/bosses/ overlords, making ready to live in their world as critical members who ask tough, informed questions. 3 - Identify our current work as preservable, something to be protected in the name of knowledge, like the older arts of traditional glass and ceramics. 4 - Depart from the arts and sciences altogether, to identify ourselves with media studies in the humanities. (Christiane, can you speak to this option?) Bank on the whole practice-based research trend, keeping a wary eye on the Social Sciences as possible, occasional, collaborator. I'm trying a little bit of all these things myself, with increasing hope for option #4. In addition to skepticism about the consumerist ends of design and arts education, I'm also looking to steer clear of the technocratic, ahistorical progress machine of modern science (sustainability as economic catalyst). Any thoughts? Maybe a public listserv isn't the safest place to have this conversation? Kevin Hamilton On Nov 20, 2009, at 2:38 PM, nicholas knouf wrote: Brooke, Ricardo, and everyone, Thanks for your interesting points regarding notions of design, designing, and designers. This has also been on my mind recently, especially as a result of my position within a traditional human-computer interaction program. Here there is no questioning the role of the designer: the designer is to be subservient to the needs of the user, where the user is defined as that constructed by corporations and the market. Researchers actively seek out relationships with corporate sponsors and corporate research labs. As a result, there is no discussion regarding broader societal issues, excepting where they intersect with present corporate priorities, as in the rhetoric of sustainability---and of course there the limits of the conversation are already set, again by the market. This situation caused me to write a polemical paper for the main conference in HCI, ACM SIGCHI, called HCI for the Real World (http://zeitkunst.org/publications/hci-real-world). In it, and this is the main point of my post, I draw heavily on on the work of Victor Papanek, an industrial designer who wrote, for me, a very influential book originally published in 1970 entitled _Design for the Real World_. He focuses on the role of the designer, not only in the composition of the products made, but prior to that, in the very selection of projects to work on: ...I must agree that the designer bears a responsibility for the way the products he designs are received at the market place. But this is still a narrow and parochial view. The designers responsibility must
