outline-wk3.md

Critical Design 2016: Reading Outlines

Week 3: Object

Keith Murphy 2015 Swedish Design: An Ethnography. Cornell UP.

Swedish Design Just things: social democratic ideologies linked to form and function of mundane objects; politicization of the everyday by managing well-being

• simple, minimal objects “care for” users, citizens; values of social responsibility

anthropology of design:

• design as a cultural phenomenon: things, styles, artisans, production, practice, etc.

• design vs art, technology

• preoccupation with making, with form National design: Swedish design as good design, but also as Swedishness

• the “social democratic" morality of everyday goods

• why things, forms matter, which forms

• “What I present in this book is a tracing of how a range of social actors and institutions continuously, asymmetrically, and in most cases without coordination, collectively contribute to the reproduction of a long-standing cultural argument for the political nature of everyday things in Sweden” (5)

• material/ideological divide

• design expertise distributed, not just among elites

  • “durable hybrid of minimalist aesthetics and social democratic ideology” made up of both things and practices of designing

• urban design, space designed for all

• public space but also homes, intimate/private spaces

  • government regulation and standardization for comfort and safety

• “structuring of the lived world” (11) "to craft a just society”

• language is not just a means of representing ideas, things, feelings: “deeply constitutive of the various cultural activities that collectively give shape to lived reality"

• social production of meaning

• language and forms of life beyond language: “interlocked and homologous forms of life” (work, things, rhetoric, political forms, etc.); tracing design

• design history as a dominant or at least widely circulating narrative

Counter discourses: modernism’s moralizing of taste and form

• concept design, critical approach

welfare state —> welfare society, care of the self collective “The moments in which designers “let go” of their objects, releasing them into contexts controlled (directly and indirectly) by others, are critical pivot points mediating the relation between design as a practice and design as a cultural category” (26)

“form giving in action” 27 - language and discourse not just as context of embodied expertise; “creativity between designers”; not individual geniuses

Ch. 1 Design= “designer” goods, design as value added “controlled and cultivated creativity” in planning and creation: engineering, architecture, city planning, software/user experience, graphic design, industrial design, landscape design, etc. [fashion!] “way of making” things with a “practical function” (art implicitly not practical) “directed creativity with meaningful social consequences"

• nondualism: ontological and analytic, human subjects vs nonhuman objects
  • material culture theory: human object assemblages: using objects transforms people and meaning of objects
  • actor-network-theory: agency distributed in sociotechnical systems, agency in objects and networks of objects, esp. in production of knowledge; risk of flattening agency
• importance of objects in cultural world: “people and things are not empirically distinct” Gell & indexicality: indexical signs; rather design as process of “naturalizing signs" “good design” — practical, social, aesthetic
  • taste; morality
  • socialist underpinnings in Sweden? equality, human labor and agency, also liberty, democratic values
  • connected to the “good life” — European politics of middle class respectability?
• final vocabularies (good, true, right, etc.) (43)
• preoccupations: equality, social justice, care; beauty, functionality, simplicity
• “cultural geometry” — modernist aesthetics broadly, “straight lines, clear angles, simple curves”; “minimalist forms provoke minimal social distinctions” aimed at dismantling social inequalities and hierarchies
  • preferences of form
• security and care through economics (simple forms cost less to mass produce); through functionality; through beauty
• social democracy: design and modernism critical
• role of postwar technological advances in design and building: modernist design as simple, functional, mass producible
  • anti-modernist aesthetic, typography, etc. of Nazis (55)
  • functionalism in west germany less about class solidarity through design and more about consumer capitalist ideology from US; consumption & industrialism

Ch. 3 In the Design World

• double role of design pieces as both commodity and symbolic object, aesthetics and business, art and commerce “It is because design objects tend to thrive in such states of instability, of symbolic equivocation, that they are so readily subject to ideological redescription—the suturing of statements to geometrics—quite separate from the wills and desires of their original creators, which in turn contributes to the ongoing cultural enregisterment of Swedish design.” (92) Bakhtin’s hetereoglossia: multiple voices
  • multiplicity of meaning of language in social/cultural context, polysemy but in specific delimited ways
  • design objects: everyday objects, artistic works, and political instruments politics: design as political but not designers’ own work (ethics of care, environmental considerations); social responsibility as micropolitics of everyday life, “like a moral governance of how people interact with the material world"
• disaffiliating with Swedish design, disavowing national swedishness (except World Cup, Eurovision) (96); oriented instead toward "global design trends" and "international design professionals"
  • designers do seek to make meaningful objects: this isn’t seen as political, to make objects beyond bare utilitarianism
• intersection of fine arts, handicraft, and technical fields; “discovering” design career path as a student; pragmatic alternative to art that allows for a decent living
• design analogue to an “art world” (102), cf. Bourdieu’s field of cultural production; social, cultural, historical context of art’s production, various agents and actors involved; value applied to objects not inherent; beauty negotiable
• art world separate from real world — worlds and world making, worlding?
  • how "bare objects of reality are transformed into the symbolic objects of the art world” (103)
• what counts as design determines what are design objects (105); constituted through flows and interactions of design world (Bourdieu plus Latour/ANT)
  • reality situated in everyday life, building blocks for material reality “Learning to exploit this ambiguous position between art and commerce is an absolute requirement for designers, but their peripatetic movements between these domains, between the City of God and the Earthly City, ultimately transfigures the objects they create into heteroglossia artifacts, unmoored from both and thus, semiotically suggestible.” (106)
• design work as deeply aesthetic, craft, more art than assembly line fabrication (118); technical but also aesthetic and creative, beyond problem-solving, “the poetry in the engineering,” giving meaning
  • recognition in art and design worlds: without names on objects, designers seek recognition through exhibitions, explaining design process and philosophy; dual track solution
  • making things vs works
• konceptdesign: pushing boundaries of design vs. art [yet a non-functional designed object is still positioned in relation to other designed objects] What is an object?
• limits of heteroglossia; context (126)
  • Swedish design defined when works are rejected as such (or reject Swedish cultural geometry); often by critics and others who are not designers: “But in consequential moments of evaluation, in the glossing procedures that confer both aesthetic values and political ideologies, design objects endure a second set of forces that push and pull some kinds of objects word Swedish design while simultaneously pushing others away” (127)

Chapter 4

• “normative lines of visibility” (130)
• professional expertise as embodied, distributed within sociomaterial worlds; collaborative
  • also "linguistic formations that structure designing in face-to-face interaction” through which cultural geometry emerges
  • creative action in patterns of talking, though, communication [what’s the relationship between modernist swedish design and “traditional” objects, aesthetics?]
• effects of language on social world beyond meaning; discourse can transform relations; shaping subjects through discourse (144)
• designing through abduction (Peirce) (164)

Conclusion “Swedish design as a politico-material assemblage"

• semiotics of material production that produce materiality, shapes culture
• anthro of design: how designed objects are transformed into culture