Desma 10Design Culture - an Introduction

Meeting 9 (Dec. 5, 2014)

Alternative DesignDesign for Sustainable Development

Professor Erkki HuhtamoUCLA, Dept. of Design | Media Arts

Megastructure: ”A single, vast, unified structure, encompassing all areas of human activity”. Buckminster Fuller’s ”Old Man River’s City” (1971), Archigram-group (UK), Syd Mead: Megastructure (1969), etc.

Archigram (UK, 1961-74), was a radical group of urban designers and architects. Urban utopianism meets pop, play, cybernetics and social need: “Walking Cities”, “Plug-in Universities”, “Suits that are Homes.” Few of its ideas were built...

Paolo Soleri: Arcology, an alternative to Megastructure: dense, small model community modeled on Italian hill top city (Arcosanti in Arizona desert; still under construction!)

E. F. Schumacher’s The Small is Beautiful (1973) - an influential book.

The beginnings of ecologically conscious design: the use of recycled material, search for appropriate designs for the Third World (the ”bible”of the movement: Papanek’s Design for the Real World)

Alternative Design Ideas and Movements (1960s and 70s)

Drop City, an Utopian housing project and artist community, southern Colorado, 1965-1970s (last inhabitant left 1977). The houses were made of car tops bought from scrapyard and other recycled elements. Inspired by Buckminster Fuller (geodesic dome). An underground hippie commune that inspired other similar communities.

Design for Sustainable Development- An urgent issue in a deeply troubled world

Victor Papanek, a pioneer of sustainable design, designed for example juice can radios for the developing world where electricity and communication networks were scarse. These very simple device that recycled industrial waste were often decorated by the users themselves in conformity with local design traditions.

Such projects were developed further fore example by Freeplay Foundation’s Radio Lifeline, 2003- . Its portable radios were charged by solar power or by mechanical cranking. Distributed with the help of individual and institutional sponsors, and exchanged for firearms. Educational radio programs provided.

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Project (started in 2006 by Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of MIT’s Media Lab) aimed at providing chep custom-designed and built ‘100 dollar laptop’ laptops for poor children in the developing world, distributed to children in developing countries through governmental channels. The project is alive (a XO tablet as released last year), but has encountered many setbacks. See http://laptop.org, http://wiki.laptop-org

Body Shop, founded by Anita Roddick in 1976 anticipated the concept of ‘Green Design’. It started producing and selling toiletries and cosmetics while promoting ethical consumption, using natural products and re-fillable containers. Body Shop has not been able to entire avoid criticism of its practices and scandals have also taken place.

There is much talk about sustainable design, organic products etc., but everything is not always as honest as it may seem. There are companies abusing the buzz around these words and producing things that are not always what they claim to be. It is important to investigate and to be critical!

“These Come From Trees” Sticker Campaign. http://thesecomefromtrees.blogspot.com

Recycling Tin Cans and Bottles for Houses

John Habraken: prototype of WOBO (WOrld BOttle) house, early 1960s - Heineken’s bier bottles that could be used as bricks - idea for the Third World, not realized.

Tin-Can Villages (TCV) Project for AIDS Orphans in Lesotho, introduced at Hannover Expo 2000. German initiated project (by artist Michael Hönes) to build villages from littered cans. Initial project for 25 houses, four workshops, one kindergarden, one nursery, one clinic, one infrastructure. Idea of forming child-headed ‘families’ of Lesotho orphans, many by them orphaned by AIDS. Also tin can furniture and stoves.

Financed by private and corporate sponsors. Idea to have built by families themselves after being trained by Can-Products experts. Inhabitants will form an association to create sustainable income through running the nursery, kindergarten and sale of goods from the workshops. At the same time counseling and education of HIV/AIDS. Has had problems with building permits, etc., current state unknown.

Sabon Yelwa, Nigeria, 2011: houses made of plastic bottles filled with sand. 14,000 bottles per house.

In Nigeria, three millions plastic bottles thrown away every day; 160 million people in the country, many with poor housing.

A different idea of solliciting support for feeding the poor is Canstruction, founded in 1992 (based in Atlanta, Georgia). Donated cans full of food are used as spectacular public exhibits (in the manner of pop art), then the contents are distributed for the poor.

See www.canstruction.org

Supergas by Superflex (Denmark), 1997-

A cheap reactor & gas chamber combination designed to produce gas for cooking and lighting from animal waste, addressed to underdeveloped circumstances where energy supplies are scarse and expensive.

The project is alive, but has not reached a critical mass of installation. In 2011 a new model was introducuced for mass production in Mexico.

Creating functional international infrastructures for even great ideas like Supergas can be difficult. There are many political, economic and cultural hurtles that need to be overcome.

Olafur Eliasson’s Little Sun project (2013-) aims at providing cheap solar-powered lamps for the developing world. The lamps are small, rugged and bright, provided with solar panels. Buying these in the West also supports their cheaper distribution in developing countries. Olafur Eliasson is an internationally celebrated contemporary artist, who works with light as his medium.

see www.littlesun.com

Caribou Coffee - the Greening of the Coffee Chain

Logo 1992 - Feb. 28, 2010

“Coffee Bean Caribou” logo March 1, 2010 -

Second largest coffee shop chain in the US after Starbucks; rebranding done in 2010.

Part of the Rainforest Alliance, www.rainforest-alliance.orgPlan to offer only coffees that are composed of 100% Rainforest Alliance certified beans by the end of 2011.

Issey Miyake (1938-) Design and Innovation

Issey Miyake & Dai Fujiwara: A-POC (A Piece of Cloth), 1998-

Clothes produced as a continuous roll, then simply separated and cut into shape.

PLEATS PLEASE: innovative heat pressing method.

Miyake’s innovation where tradition means high technology and ecology:

“132 5” collection (2010)

1 - one piece of cloth3 - three-dimensionality2- return to two-dimensionality

5- jump to the unknown, over the fourth dimension; from production to wearing

The starting point: computer-produced digital origami (paper-folding) by computer scientist Jun Mitani. Turned into paper models and manipulated by Miyake’s Reality Lab team.

Three-dimensional shape flatted into 2-D, pleated and heat-pressed with a PLEATS PLEASE -like method.

Material: 100% recycled polyester (from drink bottles, disgarded fabrics, by the Teijin “Eco Circle” Method)

Second design line of “132 5”: IN-EI lamp shades (2011- )The stiff washi-paper needs no frame, and can be folded to different shapes (differs from Isamu Noguchi famous Akari light sculpture series).

Issey Miyake’s 21_21 Design Sight, a design center and museum, in Tokyo Midtown, Roppongi - a must!

Designed by Tadao Ando, it is dedicated to exploring radical design ideas and the borderline between art and design.

Study: http://www.2121designsight.jp/en/designsight/

Excursion: Design as a Weapon

- Design is often identified with commercial products. However, this is only one part of design culture.

- There are many radical design practices and philosophies, ideas about sustainable development, ecological design, alternative designs, guerrilla design, design meant to question the political and ideological hegemony of the western world, design for “fair trade”, design in the service of sexual minorities, etc.

- Graphic design can serve corporate identity and branding, but it also can be used as a weapon to fight against political corruption, racial and gender-based discrimination, economic exploitation, social injustice, pollution, war, AIDS...

- The possibilities are endless. The origins of many such strategies can be found from the 1960s...

• Ideological leader of Situationism was Guy Debord (1931-1994): books, articles, films (mostly using found footage)

• Main work The Society of the Spectacle (1967): “In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was lived has moved away into a representation.”

• The spectacle is a social relation between people, mediated by images: “The spectator feels at home nowhere because the spectacle is everywhere.” The typical condition in the society of spectacle is alienation.

• A society organized as appearance can be disrupted on the field of appearance.

Situationism - a huge Influence on radical Environment Design and Activism

• Situationism, which was an avarnt-garde group and movement founded in Paris in 1957, was looking for new perspectives to the dullness and alienation of everyday reality: “faced with the alternative of love or a garbage disposal unit, young people of all countries have chosen the garbage disposal unit.”

• Later aimed at creating a political theory and strategy against the “Society of the spectacle” (theorist: Guy Debord). Union of two earlier groups, Imaginist Bauhaus and Lettrist International (Isidore Isou). Ideas expressed in Internationale situationniste (journal), books, various art activities.

• “Purpose to create situations, constructed encounters and creatively lived moments in specific urban settings, instances of a critically transformed everyday life.” (Peter Wollen).

“It is forbidden to forbid” - situationist graffiti

Situationist Strategies

• Goal to create artistic / political strategies that would make it possible to reclaim individual autonomy for people living under the condition of spectacle (Debord).

• Main ideas: situations, psycho-geography, play as free and creative activity, dérive (”drift”) and détournement (”diversion”, “semantic shift”)

• Dérive is a way of re-defining and re-appropriating the city: “attempts to discover lost intimations of real life behind the perfectly composed face of modern society”. Can be expressed in charts of ‘psycho-geographies’

• Détournement: turning the signs of power against themselves; interfering with seemingly innocent everyday reality, revealing its alienating and subordinating structures

Situationist stickers by the Suburban Press, England, 1972-73)

Situationism, Counter-Design, and Culture Jamming Situationism was a huge influence on radical art and design practices.Has influenced radical street arts, and even media practices (punk rock and its image, particularly focused on the band The Sex Pistols).

Tradition continues: see http://wharferj.wordpress.com/2012/08/23/underground-guerilla-signs/

“Culture jamming” continues situationist strategies. The term coined by the San Francisco based audio-collage band Negativland in 1984. According to them, “The skillfully reworked billboard...directs the public viewer to a consideration of the original corporate strategy.” Uses détournement to attack and question the ideology of branding. Reveals the ‘real’ motivations behind the brand by turning the brand against itself. Manipulates billboards, street graphics favorite channels. Canadian Adbusters magazine a channel for culture jammers (www.adbusters.org)

Punk - social movement, fashion and design trend

- Emerged in the second half of the 1970s in England; spread to other countries

-Social and ideological factors: youth unemployment, frustration, an ”ideological void” after the collapse of 1960s idealism. Fear of nuclear holocaust - An ”ideology of the concrete”: it is better to do something than be idle: grass root level cultural activity

- Against bourgeois youth culture,personified as teen pop, glam rock, progressive rock; adopted the idea ”anyone can play a guitar”

- Experiment in ”total design”: from music to fashion, graphics, entire lifestyles...the appropriation of dominant media as a channel for spreading its message. Influenced by Situationism, a radical art movement of the 1950s and 60s. Jamie Reid created the graphic identity for the punk rock group Sex Pistols. Use of safety pins became one of the signs of identity in the punk community.

Punk: from Ideology to Fashion and Commercialism

- Symbolic strategies adopted from the Situationism, a radicalk art movement of the of 1950s and 60s; détournement (”reversal”) as a strategy: turning hegemonic signs against themselves

-appropriation of symbols of oppression (trademarks, Swastika), treated as deliberately ambiguous ’traces’

-”Epater le bourgeoisie” [shock the bourgeoisie] as a central goal. Problems of interpretation: was punk a symbolic creation ‘from below’ or a carefully orchestrated ideological and eventually commercial product?

-Vivienne Westwood turned punk into a fashion trend; Malcolm McLaren (the manager of the Sex Pistols) was inluenced by Situationism, had art school background; graphic designer Jamie Reid, formerly of Suburban Press, created influential punk designs.

Post-Punk, Neo-Punk

- Punk soon turned into a fashion, separated from its social goals. Punk and ‘new wave’ were transformed into a design trend: i-D magazine, UK 1980s.

- Boy George, Culture Club: punk turned into ‘new wave’ turned into a romantic pseudo-decadent commercial formula; the ‘punk outsider’ filtered and translated to the escapist yuppie ethos of the 1980s.

- ”Bricolage” became a fashion cultivated in a more slick style. - associated with ”decadent” features, connections with emergent ”Goth” lifestyle trends, neo-medievalism

- Punk-revivals have already happened, part of the nostalgia movement

- What has Green Day got to do with ‘original’ Punk? (Little!, says Prof. H.)

Wonderful exhibition about design that goes beyond postmodernism, to address real issue in the urban environment. Canadian Centre for

Architecture, 2009. check: http://cca-actions.org/

Actions: What You Can Do With The City

Parkour (“Freewalking”) is a way of counter-designing the city, giving it new functions, and turning it into an urban playground. Invented by Frenchmen David Belle and Sébastien Foucan, late 1980s.

Reclaiming the city and redefining it easily leads to the authorities’ counteractions, the installing of anti-sitting devices, skateboard stoppers, bird repellers. City is a highly controlled environment, full of both invisible and visible surveillance technology, as well as designs that try to enforce certain ways of behavior. More and more we are witnessing a fight about the nature of the urban environment and about the right to use and mold it.

Counteractions against counteractions are always possible...

“Hedonistic Sustainability” Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), Mountain Dwellings, Copenhagen, 2010

Parkour was used as a fashionable way of promoting new ‘hip’ urban architecture by BIC.

Cycling through the Danish Pavilion was used by BIG in the Shanghai Expo, 2010. It was a reference to the popularity of cycling in Denmark, but caused problems when brought to Shanghai where attitudes toward cycling are different. Access to cycling within the pavilion had to be restricted.

The Future of Cycling? The Copenhagen Wheel (invented at the MIT, 2013).

An amazing invention, but will it become commonplace? Will it cause problems of its own? How will the user make sure it will not be stolen (it is highly attractive)?

Urban Repair Squad (Toronto, 2005-) produces DIY bicycle lanes; they are painted by members disguised as municipal workers...

Radical Urban Counter-Designs

Sarah Ross, Los Angeles (2005): Foamy velour suits challenge authority.

Maider Lopez: soccer field painted on a public square in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates (2007). Integration of relaxation and sports.

Michael Rakowitz (Chicago, 2004-): (P)LOT. Car-shaped tents used to reclaim parking space for pedestrian camping grounds.

Gerhard Lang (Kassel, 1993): portable Zebra-crossing. In honor of professor Lucius Burckhardt, inventor of “Strollology” (walking science).

Hermann Knoflacher (Austria, 1975-); Gehzeug, or walkmobile. Gives pedestrians the same amount of space as cars have.

Joshua Allen Harris: Inflatable Bag Monsters. An amazing example of urban design and street art that uses very simple material and the existing urban infrastructure to create unusual experience. See examples from Youtube!

So Design Is Everywhere...

But don’t forget to ask:What kind design? For whom? For what purposes?Could it be made better?Could it be made to serve better goals?

And remember: Design is for us, humans!We make design, we use design!

It is up to all of us to make the world a better place, every day, every minute!

Have a Wonderful Weekend !