How long should things last? Design in the GDR

By the time Giles Slade’s book “Made to Break” appeared a decade ago to recount the story of planned obsolescence in the United States in the twentieth century, the consolidated narration saw it as an industrial practice that spontaneously emerged at the end of the nineteenth century, first as an adaptation to the purchasing needs of the newly urbanised masses, and then as a method of industrial competition. The logical consequence of the consolidated narrative on planned obsolescence would want the design of short-lasting products to be intrinsic to free-market economies and laissez-faire economic policies. Yet, the very assumption that planned obsolescence is a strategy integral to product development in capitalism offers an interesting paradox. If products manufactured in a free-market environment are designed to be short-living, the logical consequence would be that products manufactured in collectivist or planned economies should be longer- lasting, because they were free from the strictures of for-profit-only modes of production and marketing. Or were they? The twentieth century has accidentally provided several laboratories that grant us the opportunity to look for an answer to this paradox. The one perspective presented here is offered by the case of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), where during the 1970s a lively debate on lifespan and patina took place among designers, theorists, and readers around the question how long things should last

Design thinking: unpeeling the sticky notes

Considering the fast rise of the notion of design thinking in the design discourse over the last decade, one might be tempted to dismiss it as a fad. In fact, af­ter a decade of design thinking, even some of its early prophets were renouncing the concept. As early as 2011, Bruce Nussbaum dismissed it as a failed experiment and now favours the term “creative quotient." The emergence of design thinking is a document in its own right that demonstrates a continuous effort in mapping and rationalising the uncertainty that lays at the heart of the design process and, by reflex and paradox, the intrinsic resistance that design problems thanks to their liquidity oppose to the application of methods

The fixing I: Repair as prefigurative politics

This chapter examines a series of instances how repair has been reframed in design discourse over the decade that followed the 2007 financial crisis. This period saw the launch of a number of initiatives including networks, and regular repair events in which expert ‘fixers’ meet members of the public to provide both entertainment, empowerment, and enlightenment. Geographically, these initiatives found a hatching ground in Western Europe and North America, even though they celebrated and re-contextualized language and methods adopted from repair traditions that developed over a longer period and in a less vocal fashion in scarcity economies including Cold-War Eastern Europe, Latin America and South Asia. Their narrative of bettering of the world through repair took new momentum once the cultural milieu of the 2007 crisis in Europe and North America provided the conditions for presenting this practice as providing a sphere of activity that is suspended from the unpredictable and de-personalized arena of market economy. To a greater or lesser extent, repair initiatives also share several rhetorical tropes with those that go under the rubric of design activism in their criticism of repetitive consumption and opposition to a policy environment that favours orthodox application of classical economy principles such as the ability of the market to self-manage itself and the neutrality of the state in economic policy matters. However, they also consistently place a hard emphasis on the opportunity of repair. Repair is presented as a way to unlock resources, and this language of expansionism sometimes seems at odds with a practice that promotes containment

(Trans)letteratura

Secondo i principi della semiotica, disciplina a tutt’oggi ancora molto praticata, la letteratura è caratterizzata da una particolare strutturazione segnica e semantica che la distingue da tutte le altre espressioni artistiche; tuttavia, tale concezione poggia in realtà su una base estetica tradizionale che sola è capace di garantire l’autonomia (e l’eteronomia) del fatto letterario. According to semiotics, which is still very practiced nowadays, literature is characterized by a particular sign and semantic configuration that distinguishes it from all other arts; however, such conception is actually based on a traditional aesthetics that only can guarantee the autonomy (and the heteronomy) of literature

Service design for artificial intelligence

In this paper, we present the first findings of a project testing Artificial Intelligence (AI) in an academic library with the aim to support and redefine library services. The context of the research project is an academic library. Libraries represent an ideal environment for containing potential bias and test prototypes. Several AI supported services are prototyped and tested during a research project. The paper features approaches such as user journey and blueprint to address issues service providers and service users might encounter. The paper identifies a series of factors that need to be taken into account when designing prototypes in which AI features centrally. The paper also charts the implications of AI-enhanced library services in relation to users’s behaviour and expectations and organizations’ workflow

People have the power: appropriate technology and the implications of labour-intensive making

Reliance on fossil fuels has a multiple impact on the ecosystem, from the blight often inflicted on natural landscapes when oil and gas are extracted and shipped around the planet up to the quantity of carbon released in the atmosphere when they are burnt. When fossil fuels are turned into other forms of energy, they power machines that easily outdo humans in productivity, just as the Luddite conservatives lamented in the age of the Industrial Revolution. Appropriate technology (AT) is an approach proposed to escape both energy-intensive lifestyles and unemployment-yielding mechanization. First formally articulated by the economist E. F. Schumacher, AT favoured labour-intensive approaches to production as opposed to capital-intensive ones, and labour-intensive modes of use as opposed to energy-intensive ones. Less mechanization, and more muscle power. Less state-level planning, and more decentralized management of production. This chapter looks at the genealogy of AT and the Intermediate Technology Development Group (ITDG), the organization Schumacher founded in 1966 as an instrument to implement the theory in actual projects. It will then examine some examples of AT artefacts and pieces of machinery designed for the so-called developing world. This review will also allow us to come to a set of conclusions about the implications of this centre-periphery – or more precisely North-South – approach to design for labour-intensive use. Schumacher’s own reading of historical processes such as modernization and industrialization raises the question as to what extent his labour-intensive model can be said to empower the individual, as opposed to confirming the preexisting social, political and economic structures. If social forces shape artefacts and technology, and communities are built around shared technical knowledges, then the material environment a society builds around itself is ultimately a projection of its aspirations

Arcosanti: grow, don't sprawl

The mass of Arcosanti seems to emerge from the Sonoran Desert like one of the many rocky formations that mushroom across the plains. A closer look reveals a concrete topography with a concentrated core slowly stretching into the surrounding space. The emergence in 1970 of this architectural organism and its subsequent growth were not informed by a master plan, but the futurewarded world view of its initiator, the architect Paolo Soleri. Arcosanti was to him no utopia, but an exercise in prefigurative politics and post-anthropocentric design. It was a machinery designed to organise place out of space so as to realise the universal future he expected

Wind-up radio, 1992, UK/South Africa

The Lifeline Energy wind-up radio is an example of interaction between invention, design, and social-minded enterprise. The inventor Trevor Baylis, who conceived it in 1991, had already developed a series of products for disabled people called Orange Aids (1985) when he began work on a human-powered radio. The story of the development of the device is one of fruitful interplay between seemingly antithetical categories such as low-tech and high-tech, developed and developing world, and philanthropy and venture capitalism

Review of: Kathy Brew & Roberto Guerra (dir.), Design is One, col., 86', USA 2012.

Review of documentary on the work of Massimo and Lella with Unimark and Vignelli Studio, directed by Kathy Brew and Roberto Guerra. The review focuses on the effort of the filmmakers to highlight the role of Lella Vignella in a design historical discourse that otherwise focuses on male figures; and on the work of the Vignellis as illustration of the rise of coordinated corporate identity in the 1960s