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Author
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Topic: Massive Change: The Future of Global Design
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Boinker
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 664
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posted 24 March 2005 09:44 AM
Massive Change Exhibit
I am still investigating this site and will soon go to the exhibit but it resonates with themes of global responsibility.
The idea is that some countries and regions are doing things correctly but their methods are isolated by national and geographic boundaries. Other "global" effects are wrong and harmful but supported by transnational capitalist interests. Here is another example of positive work being done around the world: 
An exciting new concept for renewable energy resourcing has taken its first steps towards becoming reality. A 25,000 acre sheep farm in Australia has been purchased by EnviroMission Limited (www.enviromission.com) who want to use the land to build a solar tower twice as high as Toronto's CN tower.
The proposed solar tower will use the principles of solar and wind energy projects. At the base of the tower is a 25,000 acre solar collector which heats air and passes it up through the hollow centre of the kilometer-high tower. As the air rises, it reaches speeds of 35 mph, driving wind turbines inside the tower to generate electricity.
The tower will be able to operate wtih no wind, 24 hours a day - and can potentially generate enough energy to power 200,000 homes. Most of all, it stands to keep 830,000 tons of greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere every year.
Enviromission is already involved in establishing agreements with a Chinese company to follow similar energy strategies.
Buckminister Fuller had some great ideas on this as well.
In the late 1940's, the world was coping with the ravages of world war and nationalism. Buckminster Fuller, the American inventor, educator, and visionary, conceived a tool to help address these critical problems: the World Game.™ [ 24 March 2005: Message edited by: Boinker ] [ 24 March 2005: Message edited by: DrConway ]
From: The Junction | Registered: May 2001
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bittersweet
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 2474
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posted 24 March 2005 11:58 AM
The exhibit is a familiar fanfare, of the kind so long discredited, a list of the ways the world's problems will all be solved or maybe sometimes complicated but mainly just solved, by technology (oh, and by designers, please!)--if we would all just massively embrace it (and them). You find ingenious and hopeful ideas there, certainly, but you also confront massive confusion as the cheerleading ra-ra's along from one pretty, gosh-gee surface to another. Even the passport-sized faces of the murdered women from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside are included, and however poignant the little byte of text about them, the feeling and meaning's as fleeting and lacklustre as everything else in the context of slapdash, assembly-line "exhibitry" at its best (and its worst). Look! The Human Genome Project! Look! Solar flares! Look! Murdered women! Look! Recyclable chairs! What Massive Change is, is both the perfect display and product of sound-byte popular culture. With no sense of a grounding, intellectual rigor, no political or, hell, any other kind of analysis, it's just a puffed up, feel-good science fair. But if it made gobs of money for the VAG, maybe that's value enough. [ 24 March 2005: Message edited by: bittersweet ]
From: land of the midnight lotus | Registered: Apr 2002
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bittersweet
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 2474
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posted 25 March 2005 01:09 PM
I should mention that the feel-good innovation in bright packaging was the blue-ribbon lure, but the real star being promoted--mainly by inference, and very occasionally in a direct manner--was plain ol' "free market" capitalism. No mention that many of the world's problems on display were, if not created, at least exacerbated by ideology, not a lack of technology and/or design. The solution being proposed was increasing the combination of 1) an ideology ("free market" capitalism), naturally including things like "free trade," etc., and 2) design/technology. The world of the future as a giddy technocracy founded on and funded by the same old, unquestioned ideology as exists today, which of course creates ever more problems for heroic designers/technologists/capitalists to solve, in an endless loop. Nice work if you can get it.
From: land of the midnight lotus | Registered: Apr 2002
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Boinker
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 664
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posted 25 March 2005 07:24 PM
I don't know I haven't seen the show yet but many leftist thinkers suprisingly were opposed to state sponsorship of "revolutionary" ideas. Buckminister Fuller's Old Man River City was sold on the idea that only by private funding would the design concept remain uncompromised by politics.This idea is not as naive as it sounds. A machine to live in... I would like to see more on environmental "pods" - things that each household could buy - that would solve a litany of green living problems. Government could do it but it is difficult to see how we are going to avoid business community involvement at some point. Negativity is good to a point after which it too is as oppressive and stulifying as any gonzo positivist futurism. [ 25 March 2005: Message edited by: Boinker ]
From: The Junction | Registered: May 2001
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bittersweet
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 2474
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posted 25 March 2005 11:19 PM
I'm all for being sensible and not extremely critical. However, when confronted by an extreme, it's challenging to avoid criticising it extremely. So: lots of the ideas presented in Massive Change are wonderful. There's value in the exhibit, no question. But my impression was that it was hyping--that is, taking an extreme position on--an unacknowledged belief system. My criticism is strictly related to that extreme, which is seductive because it IS unacknowledged, yet implied everywhere in the exhibit. "Gonzo positivist futurism" is, by definition, an extreme. Fern Hill used the word "pretentious," and I think that's a good way to describe extreme positions. Pretention is indecent. It urges you to believe it's telling the truth. With some issues, it could be argued that the ultimate problem has quite a bit to do with that unacknowledged ideology, and that the different technical aspects are proximate problems. You're not going to solve a lot of these problems for very long if you don't deal with the ultimate cause. As difficult as it is to "think outside the box" to design a technical breakthrough, try changing an ingrained ideology. There isn't the same intense emotional component to embracing new machines as there is embracing a new or at least refined system of social organization. Especially if it means replacing or refining one that's capable of producing these wonderful breakthrough machines, which are so attractive they divert us from the fact that, say, fewer and fewer people continue to be privileged at the expense of more and more. Sometimes design/technology really does produce "massive change," but I think it often only appears to, while diverting attention from ultimate sources. The massive change is thus temporary, or helpful, but not absolute. At any rate, I think it's irresponsible to uncritically hype design and/or technology as instruments of positive change as if there were not other equally or more important considerations. When you design a wheelchair that climbs stairs, you're solving a physical problem that isn't caused by ideology. When technology enables a protest in the Philippines because of the use of the internet and cell phones, it's a positive outcome, and the inequality that prompted the protest is perhaps squelched temporarily, but it's gonna keep happening because you've only solved the proximate problem of poor communication between protesters. In lots of cases, technology/design can't get at the ultimate cause, even while that cause is itself invoked as the ultimate solution because of its ability to produce the technology. In too many situations, this closed loop precludes any lasting solution. [ 26 March 2005: Message edited by: bittersweet ]
From: land of the midnight lotus | Registered: Apr 2002
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Boinker
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 664
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posted 27 March 2005 08:55 AM
quote:
When you design a wheelchair that climbs stairs, you're solving a physical problem that isn't caused by ideology. When technology enables a protest in the Philippines because of the use of the internet and cell phones, it's a positive outcome, and the inequality that prompted the protest is perhaps squelched temporarily, but it's gonna keep happening because you've only solved the proximate problem of poor communication between protesters. In lots of cases, technology/design can't get at the ultimate cause, even while that cause is itself invoked as the ultimate solution because of its ability to produce the technology. In too many situations, this closed loop precludes any lasting solution.
These ideas are exactly why I think this exhibit is a good one. Protests are worthwhile but it seems to me they are built on the assumption that the people you are sending the message to really are concerned or feel in the least bit threatened by public opinion. An ideological struggle fails in many cases because it is a very artificial and cumbersome way to describe the behaviour of people. Most people do not operate on an ideology they operate on a community basis. When the NDP call me up for a local riding meeting they want to discuss local issues. If I say that we need to get a majority thinking with the tools of left wing ideology (whatever they may be) then they smile politely and go on to the next person. The entire concept of ideology - a working plan for the revolution developed by an elitist vanguard - is surely a total fantasy in the 21st century. The thing about vital beliefs, like Christianity, or "free eneterprise", are that they are adaptable. When facts and reality contradict their basic tenets the high priests invent rationalizations to accomodate the new realities. Design states that if we can design a safer, cleaner, more energy efficient world then belief systems will adapt and contribute to it. In effect the design thesis argues that a "revolution" is already occuring because things are changing so massively. Christianity and most of the other religions have failed to essentially modify human behaviour for the better. The secular political world has also failed because it really assumes all kinds of things about people that don't appear to be true. What humanity has to do is take direct control of its own destiny on the planet. If we don't we will most likely become extinct. [ 27 March 2005: Message edited by: Boinker ]
From: The Junction | Registered: May 2001
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Boinker
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 664
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posted 27 March 2005 11:46 PM
Christopher Hume's article is typical bourgoise negativism. What about the great designs of the world? Are there none?Willam Morris a wall paper designer? Please! Hume misses the point entirely. Design is about ideas. Ideas shape the world of human beings. But we are now working toward a big idea about how to think about designing things. Attributing Saddam Hussein's supergun to a canadian designer or SUVs to American ones is absurdly the opposite of what MAU is saying. Design is being given a challenge of awareness. This was Buckminister Fuller's idea as well. He had great rapport with many soviet era scientists and designers who were looking for elegant "big designs". The Bahaus was a school of design that was enormously influential and incoporated industrial as oppsed to the naturalist and organic themes of Art Nouveau, which was the offspring of Morris design thinking. What we are talking about is a kind of Global ergonomics.
From: The Junction | Registered: May 2001
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forum observer
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 7605
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posted 29 March 2005 05:11 PM
What we are talking about is a kind of Global ergonomics.That's quite a tall order to massive change in our comforts systems?  I think interdependancy valuations have stifled the question of what would happen if we did not have electricty running or gas to power our heating needs? It is not so dum a question to ask, okay, what shall we do here without the current infrastructure that allows good educated and comforted minds, to artistically devote themselves to a point of view, and then realize, that such comforts would have been dissallowed had we needed to find more time and ways to stay warm. At least good quality times anyway. The younger ones have a lot to learn here. Country bumpkins understand well the work that goes to sustenance and survival? City dwellers(corralled populations in views) breed a new kind of individual that has become far removed form the needs for such survivals(is it all money driven for them)? We see where such adversity to conditions would have let the pot boil over for some good ideas about what we should do next? Discomfort, can be a driving force for many of us. So looking for new innovations forced through Kyoto protocal and Germany economy motivated, would have seen some results here to wind turbine generators? Non!
From: It is appropriate that plectics refers to entanglement or the lack thereof, | Registered: Dec 2004
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bittersweet
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 2474
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posted 29 March 2005 09:20 PM
quote:
Originally posted by Boinker:Christopher Hume's article is typical bourgoise negativism.
What does that mean? quote:
What about the great designs of the world? Are there none?
Enormous straw man, there. Not even close to what was written, or implied. quote:
Willam Morris a wall paper designer? Please!
I can appreciate now why you liked the exhibit: you loathe context as much as Mau. Again, you've not taken the writer's meaning, which was supplied by an entire paragraph of context. quote:
Hume misses the point entirely. Design is about ideas. Ideas shape the world of human beings. But we are now working toward a big idea about how to think about designing things.
The context of Hume's criticism is that Mau's "big idea" is naive because it fails to take into consideration other relevant, and often far more powerful, forces beyond design, in any age, including ours. He gets Mau's point, and disagrees with it for the reasons you've left out. quote:
Attributing Saddam Hussein's supergun to a canadian designer or SUVs to American ones is absurdly the opposite of what MAU is saying.
Okay, whoa. That's not even close to the meaning of what Hume wrote. Again, the context is all about larger forces than design influencing the degree of its impact on the world. Stifling it, speeding it up, warping it, etc. The exhibit takes none of this into consideration. There'd be no problem with that if Mau had just been showcasing cool designs and their potential. But no--he has a grand thesis to go with it, and it's patently dumb. quote:
This was Buckminister Fuller's idea as well. He had great rapport with many soviet era scientists and designers who were looking for elegant "big designs".
And Soviet era thinking worked ever so well, didn't it? You've chosen an excellent example supporting the criticism that Mau's "thesis" is flawed, and moreover, dangerous. Of course designers whose top value is efficiency (or, to use your word, "ergonomics") would be attracted to repressive political systems: they reduce or eliminate many of the factors that would normally make trouble for "massive change." And you know, it STILL didn't work. quote:
The Bahaus was a school of design that was enormously influential...
Name any school of design and you can notice other factors of equal or vastly more power that were competing for influence. quote:
What we are talking about is a kind of Global ergonomics.
A global "study of the efficiency of persons in their working environment?"(OED) In that case, I'll go farther than Hume: I think such big ideas about "efficiency" are not only naive, they're dangerous. Efficiency is fine, but it's not a value that vast numbers of people have ever gotten worked up about, unless of course they were made to.
From: land of the midnight lotus | Registered: Apr 2002
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wage zombie
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 7673
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posted 29 March 2005 09:41 PM
quote:
Originally posted by Boinker:
Design states that if we can design a safer, cleaner, more energy efficient world then belief systems will adapt and contribute to it.
Do you have any evidence for that? It seems like something to be taken on faith. I agree that we should aim for a safer, cleaner, more energy efficient world, but I don't believe this will change the way we treat each other. quote:
Christianity and most of the other religions have failed to essentially modify human behaviour for the better.The secular political world has also failed because it really assumes all kinds of things about people that don't appear to be true.
So theistic religions have failerd to modify human behaviour for the better. And secular religions (I'm thinking marxism & liberal humanism) have failed to modify human behaviour for the better. So at this point has any ideology been able to modify human behaviour for the better? And if not, how long do we keep believing that such a thing is possible?
From: sunshine coast BC | Registered: Dec 2004
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