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Design Theory I: Fall 2013
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Here is a NY Times article from last year that helps unpack Roland Barthes, and his ironic theory of the contemporary as ironic myth-producer.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/27/magazine/how-roland-barthes-gave-us-the-tv-recap.html?_r=0
I just came across this Brian Massumi quote on nomad thought (which I mentioned last class) hidden in the Gonzales-Crisp reading, attributed to Putch Tu:
A concept is a brick. It can be used to build the courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window. What is the subject of the brick? The arm that throws it? The body connected to the arm? The brain encased in the body? The situation that brought brain and body to such a juncture? All and none of the above. What is its object? The window? The edifice? The laws the edifice shelters? The class and other power relations encrusted in the laws? All and none of the above. “What interests us are the circumstances.”19 Because the concept in its unrestrained usage is a set of circumstances, at a volatile juncture. It is a vector: the point of application of a force moving through a space at a given velocity in a given direction. The concept has no subject or object other than itself. It is an act.
This is interesting in relation to Lyotard’s Paradox of the Graphic Artist, in which he posits graphic design as an object of circumstances; the design object being inseparable from the context where the “thing” the object promotes happens. Concepts are responses to problems, created in order to free thought from the restrictive images of opinion, reactivity, and so forth. I would argue that this is (or should be) the aim of the design process, rather than the reductive, solutionist discourse that plagues much discussion in and of the field.
Last year I spoke at a lecture series in Toronto loosely on the topic of design process. For it, I interpreted this quote literally, with an demonstration following the transmutation and subsequent transmission of a brick through social media. To clarify what you’re looking at: I scanned in a brick and then recorded the 20 participants’ desktops as the image made its way around the Internet. The accompanying text is a bit rudimentary, and this version’s computer-narration is insufferable at times, but maybe useful regardless.
For some reason, I’m unable to embed a video, so here’s a link instead:
player.vimeo.com/video/38222679
I know a lot of this is obvious, but I think its worth laying out the obvious and building from there. What’s missing? What can be expanded or better construed?
1) accept graphic design as a academic discipline, and creative & intellectual community
2) develop sub-fields within the field, e.g.: histories and micro-histories, critical theories, research methods particularly geared towards design, ethnographies of forms of practice, kinds of analysis and criticism…
3) continually refine and redefine the criteria of critical and other methods and practices of design theory from within a community of engaged peers (within academic programs, insider journals, blogs, and elsewhere).
“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” -Ludwig Wittgenstein (who probably was the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, counter to what Latour had to say)
At some point and for only a couple minutes, our last class discussion started to enter into some deep waters when it comes to a language/logic (“L”)/grammar, and how “L” sets the parameters of possibility for any agent working within it. This got me thinking about computer languages, and the immense impact markup and programming languages have had on digital design. Quick note: what I’ve written below is not only sketchy, but tenuous and tentative, but I’m interested in whether other people are thinking about this and might have another perspective…
Within any logic, every syntactic element has a function, and some are placeholders for variables, which are in turn placeholders for semantic content. But if the semantic variables are left empty, neither the functions nor the content do anything. This micro-schema of syntax and meaning in these languages is meant as background for the simple fact that without culture, the logic is beyond useless. I’m not sure this rant has much to do with graphic design beyond “loosely topical” but when the question was raised (don’t remember the exact context) it triggered a floodgate personal irritations with SF/Silicon Valley’s neo- logical positivism, and frequent denials of cultural meanings as “unscientific” without noticing that the semantic value of a scientific fact and an aesthetic judgement are in many cases reduced to the same value in the world of “L”, and that this is not the case in natural language, and then asking hard questions about meaning and culture. In other words, this might be why that new app is ugly: it was designed by an engineer. (To be fair, while this is somewhat common, plenty of developers are on top of all this, though not so sure about the new Yahoo! logo…)
Is this a design issue? That many internet services are being designed by amateur designers steeped in code?
Finally, the “deep” thing we touched on was a chicken/egg question about syntax versus semantics. That is a serious philosophical question.
Given the readings we’re embarking on this week and next in class, two pieces in the New York Times today struck me. One is the obit for Marshall Berman, author of All That Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity from which we’re reading the introduction, “Modernity—Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow” (1982). The obituary notes about the book:
He heard song in conflict and argued that the stop-start stumble of modern life was, for all its inexplicability and despair, necessary and promising. Marx, he insisted counterintuitively, might admire the energy and diversity that capitalism has delivered to the United States even if he believed there was a better way. The Bronx, Times Square, all of New York in its many incarnations — from the seedy, bankrupt 1970s to the murderous 1980s to today’s urban boutique — was in his view alive and luminous in its recklessness and resilience.
The other Times review by Ben Brantley of the new play, “Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play” is one sense less optimistic (it’s story takes place in a post-apocolyptic scenario) but in another — the form — seems to every bit reflect Berman’s optimism toward the vitality of the avant garde. Notes Brantley about the distinction of this play from what he might describe as postmodern trivia:
The first characters we meet in “Mr. Burns” are clearly on the run from something like a plague, too (radioactivity, to be exact, after the mass failure of nuclear power plants across the country). Gathered around a fire in a woods, these random survivors — like the sequestered Florentines of “The Decameron” — are waiting out a nuclear winter by reimagining a great classic tale of their time. That would be an episode of “The Simpsons,” the “Cape Feare” episode, to be exact, in which young Bart — the son of Homer and Marge — is stalked by the murderous Sideshow Bob.
Let’s pause for a second and note that it might be helpful if you have a passing knowledge of “The Simpsons,” Matt Groening’s long-lived animated series that finds gloriously inventive form and function in the dysfunctional all-American family. You need to know at least that “The Simpsons” is the most inspired American cultural compactor of the past 50 years, which is saying something in an era in which most culture is a matter of recycling.
That “Cape Feare” segment that’s being reconstructed from memory at the beginning of “Mr. Burns”? It is partly a riff on the 1991 Martin Scorsese movie, “Cape Fear,” a remake of a 1962 film that starred Robert Mitchum, whose earlier role in “The Night of the Hunter” is also cited in “The Simpsons” episode under discussion, along with some Gilbert & Sullivan operettas.
So you see, what the characters in “Mr. Burns” are trying to recollect in the play’s first act is itself a recollection of many stories, variously told, that came before. And during the 80-some years covered in “Mr. Burns,” that tale made up of other tales will evolve into other shapes until, at the end, we have come full circle. And what we’re returning to is not that original “Simpsons” episode, but something far older and more primal.
…
That single “Simpsons” episode [Cape Feare] becomes a treasure-laden bridge, both to the past and into the future. And in tracing a story’s hold on the imaginations of different generations, the play is likely to make you think back — way back — to narratives that survive today from millenniums ago. Every age, it seems, has its Homers.
Why do I think this is worth mentioning? Because we’re going to be discussing modernism, post-modernism, and “now” hopefully with more complexity and critical questions. Kick ass for a future that matters!
4 What is Theory?/Why Theory
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One response to “In the news today: Berman dies; and theatre criticism speaks of role of popular culture in collective memory and meaning”
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Louise Sandhaus says:
Interesting reflection on Berman and his contribution, including All That’s Solid here: http://nplusonemag.com/on-marshall-berman
After our first class yesterday, I had lively chats with quite a few of you who had strong reactions to Oliver Klimpel’s presentation and his project. Apparently I wasn’t alone as word has it that other discussions perpetuated in the studios. It seems so many of us were trying to process what we heard: To understand what the project was (it didn’t seem entirely clear); why he made the conceptual and aesthetic choices that he did; did those choices made sense; and what did his approach to the project mean to our practices? — to our context and circumstances? These are just some of issues that seemed to constitute the banter, but they represent a need and a desire to process, weight and wrangle with what happens in the classroom.
One of my conversations following our class was with Rachel and Elliot, the Aesthetic & Politics Program students who have joined us. As participants in Design Theory I, I believe they’ll bring a different dimension to our conversation — in one sense because they’re accustomed to the culture of “intellectual inquiry.” We spoke of the need/hope/possibility of “off-line” discussion and thus the need for a blog as best form thorough which that might happen. So here it is.
Elliot and Rachel will kick us off, but all of you are invited, encouraged, and welcome to post and/or to comment. This is place to exercise your chops at articulating your thinking. Sometime you’ll stumble and fall and sometimes you’ll be brilliant and insightful. But you’ll have to take the risk at failure if you’re going to have any shot at saying something worthwhile. Do it!
4 Oliver Klimpel Visit J Oliver Klimpel
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9 responses to “Welcome to the Design Theory I Blog”
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I walked away from Oliver’s talk confused. I also felt that slightly it was self indulgent and exclusionary. That said i liked some of the work, and maybe i would have a better understanding if i had seen the curated spaces in more detail. I appreciate that this depth of dialogue exists within design, but am not sure his communication was effective. What do others think?
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Jessica Kao says:
Hello there, to be honest I was pretty confused too, until the later part of the lecture. For me I saw his graphic design kept shifting roles between being a communication tool and the representation of the issue itself, and I think this is a nice trial as well as the part that can lead to ambiguity and confusion.
After the lecture I mentioned this to him, but he did not give a clear answer or further explanation (he does point out most of the details were under well consideration). And I myself are still thinking about the possibilities of graphic design as the issue itself and that can speak to audience “directly”, as opposed to being the end product conveying meaningful text. What do others think?? It is possible? Or is this an issue? -
Brooke Irish says:
I shared some of the experiences expressed by Hayden and Jessica. I felt like Oliver’s design (the displays for the exhibitions and the books themselves) did alternate between a tool for communication and a representation of issues. Perhaps, in that way, Oliver was more of an artist participating in the exhibition than a designer acting as a mediator between the work and the audience. However, I think there were elements of the design that did clue the audience into certain aspects of the exhibition. The best examples I have are the three displays: one inspired by art nouveau and what was describes as nostalgic typography, one inspired by Neville Brody and the punk/DIY/new wave aesthetic of the fairly recent past, and one relating to more recent trends and what Oliver called neo-liberal typography. I may be projecting my own desire for a pattern here, but the collection of those three displays helped me to understand the scope of the exhibition—that the works spanned from the past to the future, reaching into many different locations, histories, issues and experiences throughout Europe, and that the exhibition was not bound together by any one idea, style, experience, location or agenda. So, in that way, I feel like there was an attempt to connect to the audience directly and allow a connection to the work in the exhibition. It is unclear if I would have reached the same conclusions about the design if I had seen it without the advantage of Oliver’s presentation. I am curious if others read the design of the displays differently.
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Thanks for these responses, Hayden, Jessica, and Brooke! You’ve hit some significant issues about the presentation and I appreciate the speculations about what he was trying to do given somewhat scant information.
A few texts were sent to me yesterday by Oliver and written by him. They do help to explain his thinking and rationale for the design approach to Europe-n as well as what were the components of the program. These document do make it a little (if not a lot) more clear, although he’s quite verbose and I got a bit tired of reading them. But all-in-all good in that he really probes (theorizes!) how to approach a difficult challenge and, I believe most significantly, illuminates issues of contemporary branding.
I’ll send the texts via e-mail and/or Canvas.
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Below I attempted to respond to the PDFs Louise forwarded today from Klimpel, and the Harvey reading for this week. I still find this work overly complex, and hope we can discuss further.
“ Every company has an identity today: every art space, every initiative, every project,
commercialor alternative, non-profit or not. So what could branding mean for a heavily contested and ambiguous and multifaceted entity, or political monstrosity?” –Oliver KlimpelTwo themes that are consistent in both Klimpel’s presentation and the texts he’s since sent on for us are fluidity and plurality. What seemed anachronistic before the vantage of the new PDFs I can now appreciate as a designed opening for experiment. Klimpel’s design appears as a meeting point between organic (process) and democratic product – a parliament of styles is exhibited, though they don’t always meet with visual grace.
However, this combative relationship amongst his graphics apparently represents the contemporary market and political competition. He intentionally contradicts the idea that as the market expands (globally), the consistency and simplicity of the brand is that much more urgent. Instead a complex and allusive brand, defined by radically divergent historic trends and varied locales, is even further complicated by asking non-regional questions to regional representatives (the curators). I’ve found it difficult not to digest what I’ve seen of this work as applying the following logical structure or procession:
Theory > concept > form > social value (function) > theory
That is,
Postmodern aesthetics > Europe > Europe(n) > experiment/experience > postmodern aesthetics*For example, Klimpel writes: “The Graphic Scenarios themselves represent the testing ground for visual ideologies related to Europe– the monstrosity and the mystical hope in equal terms– and how these are fairing in our specific context.” This idea, that the graphic “scenarios” model visual ideologies (styles) that, as manifested in Europe(n), are also vessels of hope, harkens the thought of Modern critic Walter Benjamin. Benjamin theorized that through reviving the ruins or remnants of the past we profoundly come to understand the present, from which we can move from static hope to optimistic action. Benjamin’s proposition of hope could potentially be read as central to Klimpel’s explanation of his Graphic Scenarios. But this is only one of many references that seems to play out in Klimpel’s experiment, which is why “postmodern” is both too perfect and too easy a way to meditate on the aesthetics of Europe(n).
While there is real fluidity between concept and product, local and global, etc., the theory underlying the visual decisions dominates from every side. For me, the theoretical dimension of the work bookends my experiencing of the work itself. Finally I’m left with big old postmodern questions. Is Europe(n) a heterotopia? Is its message in some ways suggesting that Europe has or should become a heterotopia? Can a political economy and heterotopia coexist, as design?
And a more general, situated question: What criteria can we use to measure this work in terms of success and failure?
*By postmodern aesthetics, I defer to the Harvey reading. It seems that Klimpel has, within the project’s underlying theory, collaged a variety of postmodern “tropes” together, which is in itself…
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Jacob Halpern says:
Part of what confused me about Oliver’s presentation was that he did not seem to identify a specific problem or reason for for embarking on the project before delving into some of its more nuanced, theoretical aspects. Perhaps he had assumed that his audience had more of a context than we actually did. However, after reading the excerpts from the “Scenario-Book” (which I would have loved to have read before his lecture) his vision and jumping off points are a bit clearer to me. It seems that Oliver uses the European media’s often skewed coverage of recent “hysterically narrated episodes” of European politics as an illustration of a problem that needs solving, potentially with the help of design. He identifies the core issue as one of a misrepresentation of proportion that continuously results in equally disproportionate responses, certainly a valid issue that deserves addressing, in my opinion. In his writings he begins to touch on how “Europe-n” uses art and design to challenge these generally accepted and widespread practices of skewed representation but I am again perhaps lacking the context to make any real connections between the little work I can see and remember from his presentation and those written ideas. While I don’t think Oliver’s explicit goal with project was to incite some sort of socio-political response from his audience, I did find his anecdote about the museum staff refusing to wear his custom “Europa” shirts as a sort of insight as to the kind of questioning he was hoping to invoke (i.e. “Why should I wear this shirt that has no clear meaning to me?”, “what are my feelings, as a European, about the current state of Europe”). What was a little more clear to me in terms of intention and desired result was the branding aspect of the project. I found the questions interesting: how does an aesthetic/style emerge and how does it then become connected to a certain ideology? To what degree does a visual identity of a nation/corporation (he also touches on how the lines are somewhat blurred between these two things) manifest itself in political responses and in creating (perhaps false) notions of nationalism and unity? I think by using a sort of anti-aesthetic (“neo-liberal design?”) as the chosen style for the branding, Oliver forces the audience to consider the semiotic implications of branding and what effect that has on politics, society, business, etc. Alternatively, after reading Rachel’s response which I only saw towards the very end of my writing this response, all of this could be lost on me.
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Thanks Rachel and Elliot for doing some additional processing of Oliver’s documents. It seems that what he was after was to create an “effect” through the graphic and conceptual strategies. That effect was a struggle by the audience to make sense of the approach. Hmmm. I understand that he was trying to deal with an exhibition about the impossibility of reconciling various conceptions of Europe but, yes, we’re left with the dilemma as to whether the struggle represents success or failure of the design. For me the graphic outcomes seem to mimic current graphic trends and I really have to wonder whether the signification of “currentness” superseded any other reading or effect.
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Just wanted to chime in before our class, in the hope of summarizing my own thoughts on this massive undertaking. There’s a lot to say, but as Rachel mentioned, I hope we’ll have an opportunity to discuss this further.
I set out to formulate a cursory evaluation of the question I had after our initial glance at the project last week—how do these “testing ground[s] for visual ideologies” negotiate the complex ideological history and relationship Europe has with images?
There’s a few points to address beforehand: I’m sure we can all recognize that, using Arial as prominently as Oliver has, was implemented with hip- and current-ness in mind. That said, from within the contemporary graphic design epoch, the “branding” project itself seems to be a real reflection of ways in which neoliberal and “post-ideological” politics have impacted the horizons of our thinking.
Although the “Glyphs of Network-Power” scenario is what he was referring to as neoliberal, it seems to me as if the entire project—the “Flags” aspect, the Europe(n) brand—follow this logic. The individualized, decentralized production techniques (the flags being produced as “an original variety within a seemingly restricted system,” for example); the high-gloss marketing tactility of the books; the goal of “a visual identity for an art project that is both non-representational and speculative”; even the refusal of museum staff to wear branded t-shirts is indicative of the increasingly service-based economy that communication designers (and other immaterial labourers) find themselves in.
At the same time, his claim that “the dependency on visual signs and narratives has not been reduced but significantly increased” is only a small indication of the larger role signs and symbols play, especially in Nye’s concept of soft power. As Oliver points out in his rationale behind the “Glyphs of Network-Power” scenario, our public(s) are becoming more diffuse and spectacular—not only does this just “have consequences for visual relationships”—the visual relationship becomes the primary one: the stock market relies not on what a company is actually “doing,” but on perceptions and speculations; policing strategies focus on visible crime, not its underlying causes; tax dollars are systematically devoted to attaining symbolic achievement over real achievement, etc. As Oliver seeks to “decipher the whole,” I think he misses the main point: that this “competition between different graphic fictions” is what produces the reality in the first place.
The main question I’m left with is similar to Rachel’s, in terms of defining “success”: Is this use of the “elasticity of signs and symbols” effective in demonstrating the present crisis in visual identity, specifically through graphic design? Or does it suffer from THE constitutive element of ideology: Marx’s “they do not know it, but they are doing it”? Even if that is the case, what criteria can we use to judge the project?
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This is a test of the comment notifications. Can you forward the notification email to brookeirish@alum.calarts.edu if you have received it? Thanks.
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| September 26, 2013 |
The logical limits of Languages?Rachel Kennedy |
5 b |
| September 26, 2013 |
List of ideas towards a working definition of graphic design theoryRachel Kennedy |
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| September 28, 2013 |
Concepts as bricksElliot Vredenburg |
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| October 28, 2013 |
Barthes TodayRachel Kennedy |
4 posts
admin
Welcome to the Design Theory I Blog September 4, 2013 9 b
After our first class yesterday, I had lively chats with quite a few of you who had strong reactions to Oliver Klimpel’s presentation and his project. Apparently I wasn’t alone as word has it that other discussions perpetuated in the studios. It seems so many of us were trying to process what we heard: To understand what the project was (it didn’t seem entirely clear); why he made the conceptual and aesthetic choices that he did; did those choices made sense; and what did his approach to the project mean to our practices? — to our context and circumstances? These are just some of issues that seemed to constitute the banter, but they represent a need and a desire to process, weight and wrangle with what happens in the classroom.
One of my conversations following our class was with Rachel and Elliot, the Aesthetic & Politics Program students who have joined us. As participants in Design Theory I, I believe they’ll bring a different dimension to our conversation — in one sense because they’re accustomed to the culture of “intellectual inquiry.” We spoke of the need/hope/possibility of “off-line” discussion and thus the need for a blog as best form thorough which that might happen. So here it is.
Elliot and Rachel will kick us off, but all of you are invited, encouraged, and welcome to post and/or to comment. This is place to exercise your chops at articulating your thinking. Sometime you’ll stumble and fall and sometimes you’ll be brilliant and insightful. But you’ll have to take the risk at failure if you’re going to have any shot at saying something worthwhile. Do it!
Elliot Vredenburg
Concepts as bricks September 28, 2013
I just came across this Brian Massumi quote on nomad thought (which I mentioned last class) hidden in the Gonzales-Crisp reading, attributed to Putch Tu:
A concept is a brick. It can be used to build the courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window. What is the subject of the brick? The arm that throws it? The body connected to the arm? The brain encased in the body? The situation that brought brain and body to such a juncture? All and none of the above. What is its object? The window? The edifice? The laws the edifice shelters? The class and other power relations encrusted in the laws? All and none of the above. “What interests us are the circumstances.”19 Because the concept in its unrestrained usage is a set of circumstances, at a volatile juncture. It is a vector: the point of application of a force moving through a space at a given velocity in a given direction. The concept has no subject or object other than itself. It is an act.
This is interesting in relation to Lyotard’s Paradox of the Graphic Artist, in which he posits graphic design as an object of circumstances; the design object being inseparable from the context where the “thing” the object promotes happens. Concepts are responses to problems, created in order to free thought from the restrictive images of opinion, reactivity, and so forth. I would argue that this is (or should be) the aim of the design process, rather than the reductive, solutionist discourse that plagues much discussion in and of the field.
Last year I spoke at a lecture series in Toronto loosely on the topic of design process. For it, I interpreted this quote literally, with an demonstration following the transmutation and subsequent transmission of a brick through social media. To clarify what you’re looking at: I scanned in a brick and then recorded the 20 participants’ desktops as the image made its way around the Internet. The accompanying text is a bit rudimentary, and this version’s computer-narration is insufferable at times, but maybe useful regardless.
For some reason, I’m unable to embed a video, so here’s a link instead:
player.vimeo.com/video/38222679
Rachel Kennedy
Barthes Today October 28, 2013
Here is a NY Times article from last year that helps unpack Roland Barthes, and his ironic theory of the contemporary as ironic myth-producer.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/27/magazine/how-roland-barthes-gave-us-the-tv-recap.html?_r=0
Louise Sandhaus
In the news today: Berman dies; and theatre criticism speaks of role of popular culture in collective memory and meaning September 16, 2013 1 b
Given the readings we’re embarking on this week and next in class, two pieces in the New York Times today struck me. One is the obit for Marshall Berman, author of All That Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity from which we’re reading the introduction, “Modernity—Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow” (1982). The obituary notes about the book:
He heard song in conflict and argued that the stop-start stumble of modern life was, for all its inexplicability and despair, necessary and promising. Marx, he insisted counterintuitively, might admire the energy and diversity that capitalism has delivered to the United States even if he believed there was a better way. The Bronx, Times Square, all of New York in its many incarnations — from the seedy, bankrupt 1970s to the murderous 1980s to today’s urban boutique — was in his view alive and luminous in its recklessness and resilience.
The other Times review by Ben Brantley of the new play, “Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play” is one sense less optimistic (it’s story takes place in a post-apocolyptic scenario) but in another — the form — seems to every bit reflect Berman’s optimism toward the vitality of the avant garde. Notes Brantley about the distinction of this play from what he might describe as postmodern trivia:
The first characters we meet in “Mr. Burns” are clearly on the run from something like a plague, too (radioactivity, to be exact, after the mass failure of nuclear power plants across the country). Gathered around a fire in a woods, these random survivors — like the sequestered Florentines of “The Decameron” — are waiting out a nuclear winter by reimagining a great classic tale of their time. That would be an episode of “The Simpsons,” the “Cape Feare” episode, to be exact, in which young Bart — the son of Homer and Marge — is stalked by the murderous Sideshow Bob.
Let’s pause for a second and note that it might be helpful if you have a passing knowledge of “The Simpsons,” Matt Groening’s long-lived animated series that finds gloriously inventive form and function in the dysfunctional all-American family. You need to know at least that “The Simpsons” is the most inspired American cultural compactor of the past 50 years, which is saying something in an era in which most culture is a matter of recycling.
That “Cape Feare” segment that’s being reconstructed from memory at the beginning of “Mr. Burns”? It is partly a riff on the 1991 Martin Scorsese movie, “Cape Fear,” a remake of a 1962 film that starred Robert Mitchum, whose earlier role in “The Night of the Hunter” is also cited in “The Simpsons” episode under discussion, along with some Gilbert & Sullivan operettas.
So you see, what the characters in “Mr. Burns” are trying to recollect in the play’s first act is itself a recollection of many stories, variously told, that came before. And during the 80-some years covered in “Mr. Burns,” that tale made up of other tales will evolve into other shapes until, at the end, we have come full circle. And what we’re returning to is not that original “Simpsons” episode, but something far older and more primal.
…
That single “Simpsons” episode [Cape Feare] becomes a treasure-laden bridge, both to the past and into the future. And in tracing a story’s hold on the imaginations of different generations, the play is likely to make you think back — way back — to narratives that survive today from millenniums ago. Every age, it seems, has its Homers.
Why do I think this is worth mentioning? Because we’re going to be discussing modernism, post-modernism, and “now” hopefully with more complexity and critical questions. Kick ass for a future that matters!
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Whoa, Rachel! I need a horse to ride this one. Can you parse what you’re thinking a bit — a version for dummies? And to switch metaphors, there are a number of interesting threads, but perhaps so many that it’s hard to follow one.
I just wanted to send a few references your way. Two thoughtful and curious individuals who happen to be designers. They might be useful thinkers for in regards to some of your threads
One is Steve Wilcox, who is a product designer. He too, would likely agree that Wittgenstein was the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. He would definitely credit W with providing him the intellectual tools to make successful design — in Steve’s case, life-and-death medical instruments and devices. Steve’s site is here: dscience.com and an article of potential interest, “The Problem with Transparency is that it’s not Conspicuous Enough,” can be found here: http://dscience.com/wp-content/uploads/Wilcox_Transparency.pdf (sorry for the lack of HTML!)
Hugh Dubberly is another potentially like-minded soul. Check out his many articles on this page: http://www.dubberly.com/articles
Hi Louise, thanks for these references. Yes, perhaps I should have waited until the morning to post this, as some things ought to be slept on. :\
But let me at least try to clarify. You sent links for designers applying concepts from both linguistics and the philosophy of language to their practices, and seemingly exploring profound questions about language while solving powerful design problems. This idea of “design science” is very interesting, as is Wilcox’s discussion of “technological determinism” — looking forward to learning more. This is definitely a Positive direction that could be extracted from my “ahhh Silicon Valley and logic with inchoate ranting” post.
The Negative direction is that the logic of computer languages that are typically used for designing internet services are very simple compared with the cultural logics and natural languages people use. Which should be a case for skilled designers who are not only experts in formalisms, but also skilled in adapting complex cultural features of a product’s ideal user-base to simpler forms, to render the products transparent for users. Which certainly doesn’t always mean Apple’s user-friendly approach, but that is one powerful example.
Yahoo! is a case where this did not happen (new logo is only the tip of the iceburg). Engineers are not designers, and the logic of software engineering could very well be what’s confusedly expressed there, and in many products that don’t take that next step and hire an expert. As someone mentioned in class, many of the services pouring out the venture capital-backed startup world don’t have great designs (not for lack of funding), from concept to visual-interactive inception.
This is what I was thinking about and failed to provide context for before going into what I take to be a common “technological determinism” treatment of culture by engineers who are also designing the public-facing aspects of their products I wanted to link the problems of the philosophical movement logical positivism to some of the design fails we observe on the internet service market today. Developers who are often at least without design backgrounds and often without broad cultural awareness and comprehension seem to consider computer logic as hegemonic, and devalue cultural logics as well as design as a distinct discipline. I believe I’ve observed quite a few app producers so attached to the programming and markup languages they use for building that they forget the natural language world is not so easily reduced to syntactic variables and functions.
I hope this unpacked the rant at least somewhat, and thanks again for the links. Looks like I might be able to borrow from these designer’s more developed conceptions of two separate issues: 1) philosophy of language as a design science tool, and 2) technological determinism in internet service design
Thank you!
Thanks for revisiting, unpacking, and clarifying your thoughts, Rachel! “The Negative direction is that the logic of computer languages that are typically used for designing internet services are very simple compared with the cultural logics and natural languages people use. ” Indeed!
You absolutely should read (if you haven’t already) Digital_Humanities by Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld , Todd Presner, Jeffrey Schnapp. I believe you’ll find some interesting thinking and possible directions concerning the issues you’re concerned with (although I’m not sure about the way you’ve summarized them in ways that I can understand).
Also, you might want to follow @derrickschultz and his cohort as I believe their discussion may be of interest. Derrick worked with me for a few years. He super intelligent and can program with equal sophistication as he can design. When in came time for him to go to grad school, we realized there wasn’t a program that was suitable for him to be able to develop there different intelligences — which may indicate the root of issues that you indicate. (Although, Johanna Drucker did offer to take him into her Program.)
Lastly, I’m wondering who you’re interested in addressing? Who would you be trying to convince of the significance of your point of view?
Hope these thoughts are of some help for you!
After reading, just wanted to quickly point to Jan Van Toorn’s position on this issue: Due to this collapse of form/function from separate commercial/aesthetic/linguistic areas, to a definition in relation of their social significance, he strongly advocates for elements of the aesthetic level (syntax) to be extended to the level of meaning (semantics), as this is where “the spectacle falsifies the reality of life.”
Perhaps I’m misreading you, but this is really important now—engineers doing product and graphic design definitely frequently leads to poor results, in either immensely complicating things for the user or in a lack of visual clarity, but it seems this is the flip-side of the coin which Apple so handsomely demonstrates. Although the pursuit of radically user-centred design is a noble one, and a product frequently becomes more usable with this strategy employed, it’s also hiding increasingly complex architectures from view. Challenging this approach of extensive oversimplification is of utmost importance, as it comes down to an ethical question of design itself—are easy-to-use crystal prisons/walled gardens/malls/amusement parks the pinnacle of user-centred design?