5: An interdisciplinary journey and the culture of making

With help of the poetry of Mac Gregor, Judd, the Brooklyn Museum, Meindertsma, Wabi Sabi and Cole, can we engage on an interdisciplinary journey  “towards a sustainable future in which no one is left behind” ? 

For that is the overall aim of the Sustainable Development Goals: in 2030 a sustainable world for all. I will look more into that later. 

It makes sense to look at objects in such a diverse way as we did just now. If an object has a history, a connection and an idea behind it from the maker, the value becomes obvious. Can we add value to things so that they comply to the SDG’s?

We now move from the object towards the process that precedes: the design and production of the thing. One of the first critical thinkers on this subject was Victor Papanek, the revolutionary designer whose writings caused a massive change in perspective on design. He wrote in ‘Design For The Real World’ (1971) : ‘There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a few of them. And possibly only one profession is phonier. Advertising design, in persuading people to buy things they don’t need, with money they don’t have, in order to impress others who don’t care, is probably the phoniest field in existence today. Industrial design, by concocting the tawdry idiocies hawked by advertisers, comes a close second.’

Papanek talks about mass production, waste and misuse of materials.

The design world has made major changes since, and probably also because of, Papanek. Especially the last 10 years there has been a shift in design from ‘making because of making’ to ‘making because it’s needed’. Design education and knowledge exchange (through conferences like ‘What Design Can Do’) have become important players in the field of social change.

In another book by Papanek, ‘The Green Imperative- ecology and ethics in design and architecture’ (1995) he argues that the creation and manufacture of any product falls into 6 separate cycles, each of which has the potential for ecological harm:

1)    the choice of material

2)    the manufacturing process

3)    packaging the product

4)    the finished product

5)    transport
6)    waste

A necessary addition to those 6 stages of the object’s cycle that has increased
attention and importance over the last decade or so is: the circumstances for the workers in which the production took place. Emily Pilloton, in her book ‘Design Revolution’ (2009) adds: “In common use, ‘green’ and ‘sustainable’ are becoming synonymous, and that is problematic for designers and the world. While ‘green’ means environmentally friendly, ‘sustainable’ encompasses all aspects of responsibility and foresight: environmental, social, economic, cultural and humanitarian. It’s about time we let those four catch up.” 
The Italian designer Paolo Ulian, in his exhibition publication ‘Essence and
Excess’ (2013)  argues that we need a new culture of design, in which essence
prevails over excess. He adds the humane sense to the idea of sustainability and
he adamantly rejects throw-away culture. He also  regrets the loss of the culture
of making. “ The elimination of the culture of making, and the related loss of
awareness of what man is capable of self-producing, is the result of a cultural
impoverishment that also involves the school system, in which manual and
artistic activities have been regulated to a secondary role, when compared to the
most important intellectual subjects.”

Allan Chochinov (1000 Words Manifesto, 2007) has a strong vision of where
designers should place themselves. “Designers would do well to remember that
they are not in the artefacts business. They are in the consequence business.
And for design to be a force for positive change, we must always ask what
consequence a design creates. Industrial design equals mass production. Every
move, every decision, every curve we specify is multiplied, sometimes by
thousands, often even by millions. And every one of those every's has a price.”

"FIRST, DO NO HARM"


Now this brings me to the unpleasant issue of mass production. How can we
ever get together the poetry of a beautifully crafted Wabi Sabi object and the
millions of throw-away multi-material objects and gadgets that fill our stores and households. When Bas van Abel went to China to look for a producer for his fairphone, he came across huge halls full of items and  devices of low cost that simply all were the same, just a different brand (Tegenlicht 2016).

Robert Crocker (Designing for Zero Waste, 2012) talks about “ The Stuff we use and enjoy in our lives appear almost magically.( ) The real origins, lifecycle, technical functions in use and end-of-life destination of products and services have been skillfully airbrushed out of the picture. This is the consequence of a transformed relationship with goods. Over 150 years society has gone from a small population of face-to-face consumers and producers to ‘an army of consumers’ dependent on vast, often global mass-production and mass-distribution systems, whose complexity and lengthy supply chains render them opaque to us”.

And Susanne Kuchler writes in ‘The Social Life of Materials’ (2015, p. 274): “Without a deep understanding of the role of the social in materials development and use, how can we define criteria of success and understand and understand how and why some materials fail? How are we to evaluate the ‘usefulness’ of materials and, by the same token, avoid wasting their potential and simply create more waste? Understanding the value of materials through a deeper understanding of social and cultural values associated with them is a core contribution that social science ought to be making.”

Somehow we need to be able to restart the knowledge-button for the process of making and the materials that are needed. The consequences of ideas, processes and decisions.