Experimenta’s ten-year synthesis of the state we’re in
Experimenta, the Lisbon design biennale, dubbed EXD’09, feels relatively free of the hostilities and anxieties that characterise similar meetings of the transnational design élite. Am I in or am I out? Am I clever enough? Is our show as good as their show? Under the leadership of co-founder Guta Moura-Guedes – beguiling, intense and impressively networked – the multidimensional tenth anniversary edition (themed “It’s About Time“) included a star-lit and -studded dinner in a ruined abbey on Saturday night graced by the Mayor of Lisbon and the Portugese Minister for Culture.
Paola Antonelli’s Open Talk, New Forms of Design, on Friday was an accomplished encapsulation of the state we’re in with design, analogous to the pre-industrial era when design hadn’t and didn’t need definition. At least this is how it looks from the perspective of high-technology, represented by, for example, Neri Oxman of MIT. An advance glance revealed her Material Ecology website to be more or less incomprehensible and it didn’t start well when she said she hoped what she’d said about thinking about the process of process helped us to understand what she meant by the Second Derivative. But in the end I was quite won by her descriptions of how design might synthesise structural and environmental performance by looking at how things like plant structures and butterfly wings configure their stiff and soft “monocoque“parts. She ended with a magnificent elision of being and process the likes of which I’ve never heard: ” Technology is only destructive in the hands of people who don’t know they are the same process as the universe”. Wow!
On to Oren Catts, he of victimless leather and disembodied cuisine notoriety. His tissue culture project at the University of Western Australia has ambitions to change the culture from manufacturing to growing; applying the engineers’ logic to biology, he says, is what allowed the Surrealists’ dream to come alive. His tales of foetal calf serum and frog steaks grown in his own lab are hair-raising but I wouldn’t argue with his point that society is good at hiding the victims of consumption. As the growth of MacDonalds co-incides with the decline of the bullfight in modern Spain, one kind of violence substitutes for an other. Brrrr!
So by now I’m wondering what all this means if you don’t work in an institute of technology but in, say, Hackney Housing or the West Yorkshire Police. With practised congeniality, Paola saw this coming, and threw something a bit more analogue into the “minestrone” that is design today; more social than technocratic. Next up was Kevin Slavin, games designer-turned-urban-consultant, trying to make us see how games are merely systems with people at the centre; that the software of cities is what runs on the hardware of buildings and roads; that Urban Sport is something real. Get this: the postindustrial condition is the mutation that results from a cycle of monoculture, isolation and incest. And this is really good: “the challenge to designers is to build the systems that will propagate and feed us, not things we will consume”.
About town: the collection of commissions by Clare Cumberlidge, Catherine Ince and Alison Moloney for the British Council in the Timeless exhibition were luminous interpretations of EXD’s exhortation that we must not make more, but more with less. Thus Linda Brothwell repaired public benches around Lisbon with new wooden thwarts, painstakingly inlaid; Fabien Cappello investigated what could be made by manufacturers in the uncharted outer reaches of Lisbon and came up with encoded ceramics; and Anthony Burrill gave the people of Lisbon their own proverbial utterings, in their own stencil type, on silk screen posters wheatpasted about the streets.
Emily King’s exhibition Quick, Quick, Slow is a complex consideration of word, image and time in design. A graphic design exhibition starting with the early 20th century avant garde’s attempts to convey space, time and motion on the page (for “a page represents a passage of time”) and ending with insights into the exponential growth of the fourth dimension that electronic technology has made possible. And finally some great films which you have to guess are the tip of a very large iceberg and to that extent a slightly puzzling selection, but which also make you realise that you’ve absorbed all this time in design without a second thought. Emily King has given it a thorough workout, reminding us at the deepest point that time is in fact political: “to be in control of time is to be free”.
Emily King and I interviewed Peter Saville together about time and design for the Lisbon Conferences – a gratuitous provision, perhaps, for an interviewee whose eloquent narratives of “mimetic-moment”, “the over-occupied landscape” and “post-pop commodity parody” require minimal prompting. The double-Emily conceit ran and ran – or I, at least, was congratulated several times on her exhibition.
And who knows, perhaps some mistook me for Emily King as I joined the panel for the Swedish IAPSIS event, Design Act, on Friday evening. Along with the elegant and persuasive Joseph Grima from Storefront in New York, I had the honour of commenting on the critical roles for design in society; following an afternoon of presentations by architectural interventionist Ana Betancourt, fashion “hacktivist” Otto van Busch, historian/theorist Helena Mattsson and inter-breeder of architecture and performance Tor Lindstrand. Matsson said that my briefly-stated design-as-resourcefulness thesis was reminiscent of the way the Swedish government promoted design in the 1930s. Unfortunately I’d missed her presentation so I couldn’t tell if this was good or bad – she said neither; simply a reflection. Hmm…
Our own project, Action for Age, was a bilateral evolution of the original Design Directions student brief we developed with Gulbenkian last year. Three of our UK finalists – Vincenzo di Maria, Ayda Anlagan and Katy Shields, worked fast and furious with six Portugese design students to create a spectacular event – a sort of story-telling street party – with the elderly community of Lisbon’s Graça neighbourhood. Under the leadership of Susanna Antonio, Rita Filipe and our own service impressarios thinkpublic! (Ian Drysdale, Alice Osborne and Deborah Szebeko), and in the space of about five days, the team brought all they know about visual communication, user research, manufacturing and production, electronic technology, and social networking to bear on the production of a celebratory community spectacle. One of the characteristics of service design is to reconfigure existing resources. In this instance, the knowledge and experience of the longest-serving residents of Graça were transformed into a new kind of social currency. Full-house for the conference at the Fundaçäo Gulbenkian on Saturday evening.
You know more than you think you do
On Thursday we launched the RSA’s new Design & Society programme. We gave away copies of this poster we made with Anthony Burrill and Adams of Rye and here’s what I said.
This country is awash with great designers; has been for years. But as citizens we’re showing limited ability to design our own future. There’s a big gap between the professional provision of the design industry and our common competence and readiness to solve the problems around us – our environment, our health, the education of our children, our imagining and realisation of a good, shared future.
We all know exactly how the gap happened. In last century designers achieved such sublime exercises of skill and judgement right across the gamut of need – from the toys and baubles of private luxury to housing and transport and labour-saving devices for everyone, and iPods – such sublime exercises of skill and judgement that of course the rest of us are cowed into assuming we leave design to the professionals. The twentieth-century triumphs of designers have led everyone else to forget how much they know.
We want designers to see themselves in a different role, and everybody else to stop assuming it’s only designers who do the design. We’re not talking about lowering the threshold of skill and judgement that defines a designer – the sublime exercises need to go on, in fact we need more of them in the public realm. This is not about everyone becoming a designer, but everybody does need a bit of what designers have got.
That thing that designers have got – the best of them anyway – is resourcefulness. They know how the detail and the whole fit together – whether the whole is an object or an idea – they don’t run from complexity and disorder, and they’re not shy about prototyping and improvising and visualising what a solution might look like
We’re going right into that space between the designer and the citizen and trying to find a new accommodation between them. Instead of simply making beautiful resources – which we know designers can do – can they redefine themselves as helping everyone become more resourceful?
These days there’s a design specialist for your brand, your building, your bridge, your packaging, your public space, your website, your wardrobe, your wedding… And some of this design is very civic-minded – from time to time we do get better public buildings and bridges and hospital receptions and classroom furniture. That’s all good, it’s wonderful, but it falls into the classic definition of design as problem-solving.
What if, instead of taking the problem away, design showed you how a problem might be solved so you could do it for yourself? What if product design showed you how something was made so you could repair or customise it? What if designers left the job half-done so you could use your own intrinsic design sense to finish it off. Because I bet you know more than you think you do.
This is the RSA Design & Society space. We know it’s incomplete and raises a lot more questions than answers but we’re going into it knowing that plenty of you out there agree and that the world already has a small number of outstanding protagonists. Here are a handful: The Open Architecture Network, Aravegna’s Quinta Monroy housing development, JoinedUpDesignForSchools and Pascal Anson’s home decorating films on YouTube. Jane Fulton Suri of IDEO said in Objectified that the most exciting thing about design right now is how it can make everyone more creative.
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