Design engaged

"What do we want? Radical living."
Photo by Adam Greenfield.

Back from London and Berlin, and re-ensconced in my daily routines, I wanted to resurface long enough to post a few reflections on my experience at Design Engaged and an annotated version of the presentation slides for my talk on Design in the Parliament of Things (pdf).

Those who know me, or who read the blog regularly, recognise that my primary interests in design are its practices and politics, and although I enjoyed all the presentations, I found the first morning's talks to be most relevant to my research.

Adam Greenfield depressed us all by recalling that the world is going to shit - and then gave us hope by reminding us that we will always have the local and the everyday as spaces of creativity and possibility.

Matt Ward gave a fantastic presentation on critical utopias of difference, and asked the best questions every time.

Joshua Kauffman discussed Langdon Winner's (in)famous example of politically-motivated design: Robert Moses' bridges designed with a height that prohibited the passage of buses - and therefore of Black or other poor people - into certain areas.

(DE wasn't the proper venue for academic critique, but I should have at least mentioned that, apparently, buses have always travelled along Long Island's parkways and, even though Winner's example is counterfactual, its iconic status has served well as cultural myth or moral tale.)

My presentation drew directly - if only partially - from my dissertation's use of Latour's Dingpolitik and Stengers' Cosmopolitiques. For further reading along these lines (and for the sources of the quotes I used) I highly recommend the interviews in Hope: New Philosophies for Change and the essays in Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy.

For my part, I believe that any critical scholar I fears that her my critiques will be taken for personal criticisms or antagonisms, that her my questions of clarification will be taken as having some sort of unpleasant agenda, or that her my concerns will simply be dismissed as pretentious or too obtuse. So I'm really pleased that Matt Webb's notes and Adam's comments do a good job of presenting my position. Gatherings like this are valuable test-grounds for moving ideas out of the academy and getting a sense of what other practitioners are thinking.

(I also have to thank Matt Webb and Matt Ward for patiently listening to me talk through these ideas before and after we got to Berlin. Now I still owe Webb a haiku on slowness, and if I could just get Mike and Eric to supervisualise the superpowers - both good and evil - that designers and academics wield, and make sure that no one ever visualises the gastromancer...)


"Burn Cops."
Photo by Matt Ward.

But also along the lines of such "small-p" politics, Michele Chang challenged us to imagine what might constitute public design, or the design of public spaces, and Louise Klinker reimagined file-sharing with her Crimewire project. Ulla-Maaria Mutanen and Jyri Engeström began to push towards a "big-p" Politics with ThingLinks, or "free product codes" that can be used to transform local crafts into products for the global market. I think this is a really interesting idea, although I remain unsure about the associated desire for commodification and tacit acceptance of the current playing field - it reminds me of something not dissimilar to passing.

(It was great getting to talk with Ulla-Maaria because I really enjoy her blog - although when we were talking about our love of soup, I forgot to mention that my favourite bits of her Crafter Manifesto are the points about materials and recipes.)

Otherwise, with all the force of wonder and joy, Matt Webb told us why he thinks global addressing smells bad, Jack Schulze stunned the room by demonstrating that liquid metal and other forms of materiality are where it's at, Chris Heathcote reminded us how important it is to play with our toys, and the fab designers from Stamen showed the first website I have ever seen that completely embodied the ways I think in my head. Timo Arnall and Nurri Kim also reinvigorated my love for the everyday and the mundane, although I wish we had had more time to discuss Timo's Touch project and the relationship between material culture and iconography.

Malcolm McCullough talked about things "ambient but not uniform" - riffing on ideas from Digital Ground. He has a fine sense of humour and an engaging speaking style, but I wasn't sure what to take away from his presentation. Just as with Bill Mitchell's arguments in Me++, I found Digital Ground rather common-sensically sensitive to human concerns, but unfortunately lacking critical discussion of the social and cultural power relations involved and their implications.

Ben Cerveny wrapped up the presentation component of the gathering with a really interesting discussion of play - or what he called Hyperdimensional Hopscotch. But once again, I wasn't quite sure what to take away from his talk. Sadly, I also wasn't feeling my best during his presentation, and wasn't able to ask him about the political and ethical dimensions of his argument. I've often found Ben's use of biological or systems metaphors to naturalise and normalise certain social and material relations, which has the effect of creating rather apolitical matters-of-fact rather than the charged matters-of-concern that would be more in keeping with his call for "making this now, together". (As an aside, Deleuze and Guattari also mobilise bio metaphors, and I am beginning to think that this appeal to authority is unnecessary at best, and disingenuous at worst.)

And as usual, the best bits of the event were talking and laughing with old and new friends. Special thanks go to Andrew Otwell for assembling so many brilliant people - including so many cool girls - and for getting us to do and make things together. Thanks to Mike Kuniavsky for making it so that I (and several others) could spend an afternoon wandering around Schoeneberg and drinking cappuccino with Erik Spiekermann and Susanna Dulkinys of United Designers. Thanks also to Christiane Woodley, David Erwin and others for such excellent conversation (although my mum would have liked it if David could have taken a decent picture of me as well ;)). And last, but not least, thanks to the fine folks at Spreeblick for the venue and the wicked conference buffets from which I happily ate too much every day.


"Stay Rude - Stay Rebel."
Photo by Matt Ward.