Seven Lies - James Lasdun

I first encountered James Lasdun’s writing through a review he’d written in The Observer, in praise of Rawi Hage’s The Cockroach. Prompted by the accolades he poured on Hage's novel I ordered it but was Lasdun's own writing which struck me most immediately. A Google search led to a number of other Guardian articles, two novels and a number of poetry and short story volumes. On finding his second full-length novel The Seven Lies in Foyles I started from there.

Though ostensibly it appears to be an international espionage yarn The Seven Lies is a novel which evades categorisation just as its protagonist Stefan Vogel slips guises. Set primarily in the former East Germany and within a climate of communist paranoia this is a tale which disregards the historical grandeur of its setting and instead opts instead to push the mutation of one soul to the fore.

I don't know if many other people discovered James Lasdun as a columnist like I did. But if so they'll probably expecting the lyrical flourishes of the opening section. What may come as a surprise is the discovery that both through the structural elegance and emotional resonance of this narrative Lasdun's real flair is for storytelling itself. In the opening scene a glass of wine is flung in Vogel's face whilst attending a New York cocktail party. This lustrous scene prompts the telling of a life story which traces a spiraling arch through former East Germany, 1980's Manhattan before arriving back at precisely the same wine drenched tableau.

As the prefacing Martin Luther quote pronounces 'One lie most beget seven more lies if it is to resemble the truth.' Plainly this is a logic which animates Stefan's life. His are not wild lies - but almost prosaic responses to the situations which befall him. Of course each of these deceptions comes with a snag. To stage his first fraud - to being a poet protégé at his mothers left-wing saloon he must suffer the sexual molestation of the apartment janitor and plagiarise Whalt Whitman poems from the family trunk. From this first calculated evasion - deception and trickery become his elected tactic for steering clear of life's barriers. Yet he is just as detached from the morality of these deceits as he is from the surreal nature of the incidents which befall him:


"Exactly how I feel about life itself: I realise: that it has come unaccountably into my possession, somewhat to its own dismay."

The sense of fraternal alienation felt by the Stefan inspire the most vivid, almost autistic series of meditations on nature - the 'intangible pathos' of autumn leaves and the leaf dappled sunlight hitting forest lakes in upstate New York.

This dislocation also yields an amplified subtlety and depth in the portrayal of the other characters in the story. Principally Stefan's mother who nurtures a superiority complex of her families past and tirelessly contrives to invert every misfortune into an artful affirmation of self. This is also reflected in the portrayal of Stephan's wife Inge - who in fretful response to the couples new life in America is compelled to go on charity missions – assisting the poor and crippled of New York City. Eventually she resigns herself to simply cutting stories of homicide and corruption from the newspapers and pasting them into scrap books – as if this simple ritual would counterweigh the cruelty of American life. The novel ends in simple adulation of her, as though cheating the society and following the most demeaning paths were all worthwhile means for securing her devotion.

BLDG Blog Book Launch

Last Tuesday I attended a really interesting talk at The Architectural Association by Geoff Manaugh. He was there to promote his new book BLDG Book - a printed compendium to accompany his acclaimed blog of the same name. BLDG BLOG is focused on exploring architectural discourse from new perspectives and showcasing speculative projects.

Geoff used his presentation to deliver a breathless synopsis of the books main subjects which seemed almost randomly plucked from a grab-bag of architectural relics and speculative modern day concepts. These are not their official titles but some of the main subjects from the talk included:

Layered civilisations and structures
The way architecture is influenced and constrained by the layering of structures and systems. Geoff talked of farmland sewn over burial grounds, an anti-nuclear bunker which was thought to hinder the London IMAX's construction and how Manhattan's grid of skyscrapers needed particular positioning so that they rested on the islands bedrock.

Phantom Closets & Connections
This segued into a conversation about phantom spaces and connections - Spatially starved Manhattanites who dreamt of finding secret rooms extending in a Narnia like fashion from their shoe closets. A freak called William Little aka 'the moleman' who lives in Hackney and has structural endangered houses through digging an extensive network of tunnels and emerging in people’s gardens.

Meteorological Engineering & Nostalgia Weather
There was some interesting stuff about using decommissioned military equipment to change weather systems too - pulling the aurora borealis over Rome to make it a more profitable / idyllic tourist location and even modifying the weather to re-create weather systems from the past - or 'Nostalgia Weather' as Geoff entitled it.



[Image: An illustration by Brendan Callahan, from The BLDGBLOG Book].

My favourite part of the evening was the guest speaker slot from Kevin Slavin - a cross-media games designer from New York based consultancy Area/Code. I should say that Alternative Reality Game design is a discipline I never really held much interest in, Slavin's presentation definitely shook me out of my ambivalence. The background he gave and his reasons for creating augmented reality games it were utterly illuminating.


Bad War -Hans Holbein [Photo credit: Wikipedia]

This began with a dissection of what we mean by the word nostalgia. Slavin talked of the homesickness Swiss_mercenaries having been displaced from their homeland from their homeland in battle and how this gave rise to Heimat (a German concept describing the way in which people are bound by their birth, their childhood, their language and their earliest experiences). Whereas once nostalgia or heimat described the longing for places which we no longer inhabit - now as we live longer it is the rapid transformation of culture which becomes the most disorientating factor. In other words we've moved into an age of spatial rather than temporal dislocation - and it is this form of spatial displacement to which nostalgia has come to imply.

We travel more than 16th century man did, but we know the places where explore and settle in infinitely more detail, electronic mapping technologies have brought the intimate spatial parameters of our environment to us at the press of a button (or the swipe of an iPhone screen). Mapping technologies also nurture a supremely self-centred worldview - in which we always locate ourselves right under the crosshair - at the centre of the map and at the centre of the world.


[Photo credit: Matt Jones]

Area/Code's projects are driven by an ambition to counterpoise these prosaic certainties through purposefully ambiguous experiences which encourage participant’s to re-orientate and rediscover the boundaries of urban life. One such experience - a game called Crossroads takes a simple Pac Man like concept but situates the player in the city streets. Players move their sprites by walking from place to place holding their mobile phones, with points awarded every time they cross an intersection. As they do so they are pursued by Papa Bones - a skull-like avatar who kills them if they cross his path. This situates the city dweller/game player in a surreal situation - sprinting across real lower east side blocks - yet from an illusionary creature.

Perhaps the uncannyness of this situation is emblematic of our future relationship with urban environments. As pervasive technologies become more embedded in our lives surely we will find ourselves forming increasingly personal and idiosyncratic relations to the space around us - gradually moving away from national and civically conferred manners of acting within the environment. In the process we will return more closely to the core meaning of Heimat.

Associated links:
AA School of Architecture
BLDG Blog Book
BLDG Blog
Area/Code

Delusions of a consumer utopia

[Image from Dezeen]

Of all the bright ideas at The Royal College of Art summer show one project shone particularly brightly and remains lodged in my mind.

Thomas Thwaites’ Toaster Project pursues a simple but daunting task: To deconstruct the most ubiquitous and humble of electronic products and recreate it from scratch. That the finished object resembles a caveman’s approximation of its Argos parent is comic in the first instance and then rather humbling when you see the incredible lengths Thwaites went to in producing it. On display alongside the toaster are the range of makeshift tools used in its manufacture. These include an electric leaf-blower and chimney pot iron-smelting furnace, electrolytic tanks used to refine the copper for the wiring and a mould for the plastic casing (hewn from a tree trunk).

At the culmination of the project he’d spend nine months, travelled the length and breath of the UK and spent £1187.54. The backbreaking endeavour involved in replicating a product which can be purchased for £3.49 in Argos powerfully invalidates the apparent convenience and viability of mass manufacture in itself. But the projects primary genius is in how it confronts myth that modern man is somehow more intelligent and proficient than his predecessors – when in reality modern life is entirely dependant on a multitude of products and infrastructural solutions that we outsource to the developing world and have no knowledge to replicate ourselves.

Snapshots of Holland And Belgium

The following hastily snapped images document some of the aesthetic highlights of a 200 mile cycling trip from Hook of Holland to Brussels

An aesthetically pleasing Dutch power station









Two minute ferry ride across the river.





A watchtower - which resembled some kind of futuristic concrete totem pole from a distance.




The sights and sounds of Antwerp.








An obligatory shot of the Atomnium

What Comes After The End?

Every three years the Tate Britain gallery holds a Triennial exhibition celebrating current trends in British art. For 2009 Triennial curator Nicolas Bourriaud proffers the term ‘Altermodernism’ which he defines as follows:

‘Postmodernism was shaped by ideas of multi-culturalism, origins and identity, Altermodern is expressed in the language of a global culture. Altermodern artists channel the many different forms of social and technological networks offered by rapidly increasing lines of communication and travel in a globalised world.’

For me Bourriaud’s distinction between the post and alter-modern is sophistic and the justification for its existence as a genuine movement seems unconvincing. On the evidence of the works at the 2009 Triennial Altermodernism seems more like a continuation of postmodernisms semantic fragmentation than a cogent ideological successor.

The 28 artists exhibited pursue widely divergent lines of inquiry but only a handful seemed to break new conceptual ground. For some the decaying corpus the post modernity seemed to inspire deviation and not a move forwards.



Charles Avery’s work for instance side-steps ideological inertia through regression into the past. Expelled from Central St Martins after only six months Avery spent the decade enacting the fate of a 19th century explorer who maps an imaginary island occupied a people addicted to gin-pickled egg and suffused by Greek myth. Whilst the concept of his work sounds arduous it is in fact redeemed by its visual intricacy and beauty.



Of all work in the Triennial Wallead Beshty and Simon Starling’s works seem most central to the concept of polyglotic, displaced art forecasted by Bourriaud in the exhibition’s manifesto.

Beshty FedEx damaged glass cubes and airport x-ray photographic papers are objects scratched and dented in a synthetic hinterland. There is something simultaneously sublime and audacious in the way he completely sidesteps the command to create art objects. Instead the articles he introduces to the space are conspicuous through their absence of expression – the vapid ghosts of global transit and nothing more.



Simon Starling presents contiguous form of displacement in ‘Three White Desks 2008 – 09.’ The desks which are obviously loose replicas of the same design descend in size – the third left as unvarnished timber. All are based on a photograph of a desk designed by Francis Bacon – but the mounting levels of inaccuracy in each successive replica are a result of the photographs given to three different furniture joiners. The increasing digital compression of each photograph results in a less faithful reproduction of the original.

Graphic Evidence of Mental Illness in NYC

Kenneth Goldsmith has spent the past 24 years painstakingly gathering this collection of street posters from the street of New York - disturbing and touching in equal measure.

Client Shot / Money Shot

Whilst doing a spot of research on viral advertising campaigns on the Campaign website I saw this particular scene from the new Aero advert - wherein the skateboarder takes a bite out of the chocolate bar refered to as a 'client shot.'

I can't decide which is more repulsive - the scene itself or the industry term used to reference it.

A River Ain’t Too Much To Love

The Retread Sessions encourage musicians to ‘re-examine and reconstruct songs outside of the traditional performance locales’. I discovered the project on a tangential path through youTube links nearly a full year after the projects inception. The Retread Films are always rewarding but none more so than two performances by Bill Callahan.

There’s a solemn and plaintive beauty with which Callahan sets up a mike stand overlooking the valley and pitches ‘Vessel In Vain’ and ‘Nothing Rises To Meet Me’ into the empty space around him. I’ve listed Smog in similarly pastoral settings, either through tinny iPod buds or my own cerebral loop tape. So it was moving to find two films that reflected the appeal of Callahan’s art so acutely - A reminder that with a bit of curatorial focus film can lend more than visibility or decoration to a songwriters craft.

The Retread Sessions

the T-Mob

Originally posted on the Sense blog – thought I’d stick up my observations on the T-Mobile campaign here – If only for posterity's sake:

I'm all for brands collaborating and co-creating with real people – freeing their brand to be remixed and re-appropriated. Indeed the most progressive brands have already realised that their future equity / identity will forged through this collaboration. But either through design or ineptitude isn't what T-Mobile have achieved.

Granted modern day flash mobs can be pretty mindless things in themselves and bear little relation to aesthetic and political goals of the Situationist movement. But what really gets my goat is the way the advert rips off the aesthetic of user created content whilst completely failing to creatively engage with it.

Any halfwit adman / brand pimp / planner must recognise that building brand identity is no longer about arbitrarily slapping your logo on everything. But this is precisely the myopia demonstrated in this advert – wherein the brand is completely dislocated from the mob they've staged and the T-Mobile ident is just tacked onto the end of the film. This makes the T-Mobile brand seem utterly irrelevant, desperate and instantly forgettable.

I'm not debating that their hasn't been a positive response to the advert or that it won't achieve massive viral circulation - the fact that they haven't done anything interesting with the flash mobs idea wasn't a barrier to the initial impact of the ad.

But I'm doubtful about how something as generic as a train station full of people dancing to Justin Timberlake would translate into more handset sales or convince people to adopt T-Mobile as a service provider - simply because there's no connection with their brand beyond a slapped on ident.

Above all I think its a wasted opportunity that they couldn't have come up with a more ownable concept which differentiated their service or sparked off a more self-fuelling creative exchange.

permit

Eaten By Google

Nanaimo is a former coal-mining town located on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Despite its small size and population of just 78,000 it has more information mapped onto Google Earth and Google maps than San Francisco.

Nanaimo is so well represented because the cities planning department has been actively feeding Google with a wealth of information on its buildings, property lines, utilities and streets for the past five years. A staggering amount of data is now online and freely available at earth.nanaimo.ca. Every business in the town is mapped along with the lot size for every property in the city. Even the cities cemeteries will soon be mapped, making it possible to find out who is buried in each plot. Nanaimo’s chief technology officer Per Kristensen hopes that embracing Google will fuel tourism (a particular concern in the run up to British Columbia’s 2010 winter Olympics) and allow for economic development of the towns businesses.

(Via Time Magazine)

Branding And The Edge Economy

I’m writing this post to draw attention to an excellent series of articles by Umair Haque. Haques writing charts the history of brand strategy the describes how brands have traditionally served as a tool to articulate brand promises through the constrained aperture of the magazine advert and 30 second TV spot. However now that media technologies and the internet have enabled easy access to information of brand services the role of branding is changing shape.

Consumers are progressively defecting to new modes of communication. Technology has enabled them to communicate with each other they enlist discussion and debate with on another to debate and validate brands and their promises.

These shifting dynamics call for fundamentally different approach to brand strategy of which Google is the most salient example. Through foregoing the immediate revenues which plastering their home page in advertising would generate they instead chose to invest in their uses and provide them with a practical platform. Their brand strategy is defined by talking less and listening more. This approach has enabled Google to become the worlds most recognised in less than a decade and with an advertising expenditure of almost exactly zero.

(Read more at Umair Haque’s weblog)

Low - Drums and Guns

Thinking of Low I almost always recall a scene from 2004's documentary film 'Low in Europe', Alan Sparhawk brandishes a black and white photograph of his band standing alongside grindcore pioneers Napalm Death. The point he makes is that whilst ND pursue the most resolute brand of vitriolic heavy metal excess, Low are their true counterpoint, a trio who have made an art out of distilling rocks structure until all that remains is a plucked guitar string and a winding, velvet harmony. The ND comparison stays with me, it reminds me that what Low pursue is every bit as hardcore, every bit as much an extreme.

Drums and Guns is Low's eight studio album and marks the fourteenth year of the bands existence. Since the release of 2002's Trust their output has remained consistently dazzling and I suppose the obvious criticism people will level at any new release is it's similarity to earlier works. The US version of the record was even said to carry a promo sticker proclaiming 'I'm sick to death of Low'.

D&G is however a clear point of departure. The first track Pretty People rings out like a battle cry "All the soldiers They're all gonna die, All the little babies, They're all gonna die". Sparhawk has always possessed a strange, absinthian eloquence to which few other modern songwriters can even hold a candle. But instead of using it to conjure up the fractured isolation of early works, songs such as Pretty People and Murderer see him reaching for far more confrontational, even political notes.

Stylistically there's also a shift in focus, with the band exploring a far freer more 'cut and paste' approach to electronic instrumentation and sampling. The vocals for Dragonfly are practically built upon a feedback loop alone and Belarus is a beguiling collage of bells, chimes and sampled strings. This synthetic pallet adds a new string to their bow and lends the new record a tangible sensation of displacement. Twined with this ersatz patchwork of sound Alan and Mimi's voices take on a beautifully incorporeal quality, meandering through it like a barren electronic pop hinterland.

At first listen these thirteen songs seem disjointed. There are so many gems here but I just couldn't see how the military march of Sandinista ended up on the same album as Hatchets slightly goofy funk bass line. However the miraculous thing about this record is how over time these disparate elements merge together and reveal an underlying narrative as natural as a tidal flow.

Low’s enduring magic is grounded in the fact that they are able to produce music simultaneously tender and unsettling, whether or not they develop radically from one record to the next is hardly the point when they continue occupy a place which no one else is capable of.

We-think communities.

I'm currently digging into the draft copy of Charles Leadbeater's new book We-think: the power of mass creativity . Leadbeater's argument centres around

'New forms of mass, creative collaboration, and the arrival of a society in which participation will be the key organising idea rather than consumption and work.'

True to his own open source thesis he's made draft copies of the books chapters available for download so that the books content is opened up to debate before it comes to print.

Social commentary through design part 2.

Edd Brown sent me a fantastic email in response to my post on social commentary through design. Edd I hope you don't mind me writing your responce as a proper post, only I've given the issue a lot of thought and I wanted to share them with other people.

First let me say the most important thing I can say (and this applies to all considered comments people might chose to leave on my blog) In absolutely no way do I regard comments as unfounded criticism or insult. The fact that anyone has read and chosen to engage with the issues I raised is in truth some small victory for me. Best of all a little contention or challenge makes me want to raise my game and give an answer.

That aside I may well have misrepresented you opinion because the original comment you left me was very brief, just a sound bite in truth. You gave me some impetus to defend critical design and the importance I see in it. The email I'm responding to now, is a fantastic response, it gives me a much fuller picture of your perspective on design and where you stand.

'I' created this comparison between the design of irrigation pumps for the third world and video cell phones for the first. Perhaps my choice of examples was unfortunate, I wasn't attempting provide a 'moral contrast' between designing the right things (water pumps) and designing the wrong things (mobile phones). What I intended to illustrate was how designing the water pump was almost an exact, measurable science. An objective problem has to be solved, its plain to see if the solution is effective, and indeed whether the designer has done a good job.

The "Hype Cycle of Emerging Trends and Technology". Published each year by the consultants Gartner Research. Provides investors with a 'purchasable mapping' of change brought about by technology. Describes the various phases of maturity, including the "Trough of Disillusionment" and the "Plateau of Productivity".

Design for electronic products and technology happens within a much larger value system, which has formed around the twin influences of consumer culture and electronic technologies. Product designers didn't 'do a bad job' in designing shinny new products, but they are part of a culture which regards complexity, miniaturization and newness as ends in themselves. Combined with the need to generate revenue, I think that they naturally become a bit short sighted in producing products and services, which reap significant, long term human benefits. Its not that big corporations are adverse to producing social beneficial products and services, rather that their still trying to support rather dated business models.

Now it's because of this short sightedness that I think 'critical design' has so much to offer. A really important thing to clarify here is that what's misleading about the term 'Critical Design' is that the word 'Critical' is not used to mean 'critical' as in 'Criticism' – "Hostility or disagreement with the object of criticism." (I think if the work was simply an exercise in 'criticism', that would be pretty deplorable and not really very intelligent either). It means (or should mean for the best pieces of Critical Design) 'Critique' – " A systematic inquiry into the conditions and consequences of a concept or set of concepts, and an attempt to understand its limitations ."


Critical design then; is an academic model of enquiry applied to design. It's not a scientific theory, so you won't find an official 'party line' what issues its supposed to critique, or whether the accused is the design world or society itself. These things are left to the individual will of the designer who employs it as a method. If they're a good-willed, intelligent person, working through the right channels, I think the outcome of their work can be to be positive.

Memphis design: not really critique but aesthetic protest. "An exuberant two-fingered salute to the design establishment after years in which colour and decoration had been been taboo."

It sounds like the term has been tainted for you by a couple of bad examples. I'm not actually familiar with the work of the Campana brothers. But you're description brings Ettore Sotsass' work for Memphis and Superstudio during the mid 1980's to mind. This work might be called 'critical design' in some circles. Taking Memphis for example, they created luridly coloured, deliberately dysfunctional furniture because it was supposed to be a reaction to "the minimal black box furniture of the 1970's". For me that's not really critique, as its really only the expression of an aesthetic preference, I can't really see that it qualifies as particularly savage criticism either (There is, I grant you an element of barefaced self-parody in passing off astronomically priced Italian home wears as some kind of serious commentary.)

But I draw a complete, distinct line between that work and the pieces of critical design which been influenced by and grown out of the RCA's
interaction department during the late 90's onwards. Firstly the context has changed, because we don't only have the aesthetics of products to account for but increasingly the behaviours which electronic products and networks foster in society (or rather those things were issues during the 80's but no one thought of using design as a vehicle to critique them).

Mirroring Tony Dunne speech at the Interaction Design open day last year. I don't think peoples work, leisure, and social networks have been as heavily mediated by technology as they are right now in 2006. Technology affects the richest of the rich, with mobile phones for every six year olds, and puts in place an infrastructure which also affects the poorest of the poor, with intensive call centre training in India.

Cultures or repair and Innovation in India. "Aside from the scale of what's on sale there is a thriving market for device repair services ranging from swapping out components to re-soldering circuit boards to reflashing phones in a language of your choice" (via
future perfect)

I don't believe that technology is some autonomous agent dictating an inevitable set of future changes. But I do think (through not giving its implications a very through consideration) we often let it play that role. So now, I think it's more important than it ever has been before to bring debate about our possible implications of new technologies into the public sphere, and critical design is one vehicle for doing that.

It seems very dismissive (and a bit cynical) to announce that because the man on the street can't design tomorrows technology products for himself, but only make comparative judgements about what's on offer, that any bog standard experience is as good as another. I'm sure if you really think that you'll find you didn't mean to make that point. Just taking desktop computing as an example. It is easy to take for granted how many brilliant minds established the metaphors for interaction we depend upon so heavily today. Watching this interview with
Bill Atkinson really brought this home to me;




Were Bill and Doug Engelbart (inventor of the computer mouse) getting 'holier than thou' about user experience. Or were they making a comparatively alien technology (a processor which spewed out chains of numbers) into a usable everyday tool.

I don't want to get diverted here, but a lot of the issues I raised in my post, such as learning to view the user as a more sophisticated individual, and tailoring design to human behaviour are not ideas most commonly associated with critical design anyway. But they are linked to other emerging practices such as 'Human Focused Design', 'Service Design', 'Interaction Design' and 'Qualitative User Research'.

You complained that there seemed to be a growing trend for designers to spend their time designing critiquing products. I think this is symptomatic of an industry, which is gradually moving away from designing and manufacturing objects, to an industry which sells knowledge. The area of design press column inches taken up critical/speculative work (+ The RCA Summer show ) might be more than ever before. But I don't think this is in anyway proportionate to the percentage of industry involved in this work, it just receives more attention in the media.

Lastly I can predict the main question on your lips. You'll want me to show you evidence of a piece of Critical Design which has changed things, which has influenced people. I'm afraid this is where my argument falls a little flat. There are not many great examples precisely because critical design is still at a really embryonic stage.




I'm going to give you the example of a project called
ARC: design solutions for post crash civilisation by Jon Arden, a graduate from the royal college. The project presents a range of products and services, for a possible future in which an environmental catastrophe has occurred. Rather than labouring to design a range of environmentally products, he's adopted a critical tack and gone straight for a future worst-case scenario. It takes a project like this for people to actually pay attention to an issue like sustainability, we all seem to have become immune to the sight of another environmentally friendly chair/tent/water bottle at student shows, they appeal to those already engaged with the issue, but beyond that they don't really move the debate on, or facilitate change.



I spoke to Jon at the show and he mentioned developing the project further by working with The Horizon Scanning Institute. HSI are a body which directly advises government policy makers around social and technological change. For me this is a really inspiring example of a designer acting autonomously, and targeting their creativity through the right channels.

Once again thank you for reading my blog and taking the time to write. I hope that I've given a decent response to some of the points you raised.

show and walk

Theres not really much to this post, except that I think the above bamboo speakers are rather beautiful, and a very elegant means of providing the audio guides for exhibitions. The Aimulet LA is a batteryless, light-activated handheld audio communication device, with an outer shell made from molded bamboo, designed by the Information Technology Research Institute at Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology.

They are designed to be held up to your ear like a mobile phone. When you stand over special LED emitters set into the ground, they receive the light signals via an array of spherical micro solar cells set into the bottom of the handset. The signals are then translated into audio messages that are played through a tiny speaker in the device.

(via Pink Tentacle)

designing interactions

A huge archive of video interviews, promoting Bill Moggridge's new design interactions book. Its fascinating to hear how the metaphors for desktop computation were first established. Durrell Bishop's interview is brilliant, he talks about the social value of objects and augmenting physical objects with digital information. Bill Verplank describes interaction so elegantly through description and drawing.

"We're drowning in functionality"

In reference to the dizzying array of dials, buttons, and sliders which adorn everything from cars to mobile phones. MIT professor John Maeda declares us to be 'drowning in functionality'. At the request of wired magazine he applied his scrutiny to Sony's DCR-SR100 camcorder.

I love the idea of giving people pictures of products, and asking them to scribble notations all over the paper. The real gem in Maeda's annotations is the bit where he announces;

"I love the 'Easy' button. It's like "oh, this product is hard to use, but we'll fix it by having an Easy button." Well I kept pressing it, hoping it would get easier, it doesn't!"

His rules are outlines in a book entitled The Laws of Simplicity

(via wired)

Social commentary through design.

I received an interesting question in response to my last post. I wanted to share my response as a new entry;

Don't you think it would be more relevant to society to produce efficient, honest, relevant designs rather than self- indulgent, self- promotional work that aims to provide some form of social commentary schtick?

I apologise, because I don't really have time to engage with this issue in the detail I'd like to. Before I share my thoughts on this I better clarify two points;

I'm looking at design, as someone from a product, industrial design background. My education was in this particular discipline, and many of the frustrations touched upon in my last post are directed towards it.

Secondly when I talk about the need for Social Critique or Commentary in design, I'm primarily interested in this being used to address the unquestioned adoption of new technology, and our values in a consumer culture.

I suppose I should ask you a bit more about what you would term 'honesty' in this context?

Good / Ethical design is supposed to do exactly what you stated,

"to produce efficient, honest, relevant designs"

IDEO helped to develop this human-powered water pump that allows African farmers to continue to grow vegetables into the dry season, and sell the excess to pay for food, water, medicine, and school fees for their family.

Here's efficient, honest, relevant design at its best, a Human-powered irrigation pump (designed in collaboration with IDEO for a non profit organisation in Kenya). The problem it solves is a simple one. Engineering skills are applied. Its parts can be assembled without tools. Its cheap, a simple logistical problem is solved. All very positive. Deciding what efficiency, honesty and relevance are pretty straightforward in this context. Design in this example is not at all self-expressive, its pure process, the simple journey from A to B, from problem to objective solution.

The problem is designers are not commonly asked to address such simple, logistical problems anymore. And when we talk about designing for a surplus, consumer culture, the boundaries become comparatively blurred. The designer may serve his marketing and technologist seniors at Samsung/Motorola/Nokia with an exemplary level efficiency, honesty, skill, and end up only in speeding the delivery of a new mobile phone, which ticks a greater number of boxes in feature review list. Technology is THE driver for development. And the person who ends up owning, using this design (crudely termed as the User or Consumer by the industry itself) is perhaps looking for something more than just use or efficiency. In this context design becomes more of a discipline, which attempts to sell fulfilling experiences, than simple functioning solutions.

(left of the picture) Nokia's N-Gage, a mobile phone and high resolution gaming console in one. The bizarre compromise for the user, is that you have to use the thin edge of the phone to make telephone calls.

The particular problem with electronic consumer products is that however limiting, badly conceived, superficial. When these new products reach the shop floor they have a shinny, official status which people don't seemingly have any opportunity to engage with or question the worth of.

And as degree courses become more vocational, the same model filters down into design education. Those slick models you see at Transport and Industrial design degree shows, are a marketed solution, not ideas to be debated and engaged with. They replicate the same model of official corporate design to infinity. The paradoxical thing about technology is that it’s perceived as a very rational scientific force, and yet it’s applied in the most irrational way, commonly driven only by what’s new and what’s possible.

All in all this is a rather confusing context for designers who simply want to design 'better products'. What is a better product?? One, which is honest and efficient, or one, which enhances experience?

Seymour|Powell's 'ello' mobile phone

What could we call "efficient, honest, relevant" in the context of a technology product like a mobile phone? You might cite an example like Seymour|Powell's 'ello mobile'. The goals of the project where to design a handset which enabled inclusive use for all, young and old. Beyond achieving simple usability I actually find its 'less is more philosophy' quite refreshing.

But what the ello phone doesn't do is to explore the way mobile phones are used in a wider social context, or explore the possibilities for developing richer interactions. This is where Exploratory Interaction Design and Critical Design come into play.

Firstly they foster a culture of critique within the design and technology sphere, provoking debate on the role technology plays in our life, rather than painting a false utopian picture of an imaginary product enhanced existence. Secondly they suggest ideas, which in a mainstream industrial design context maybe considered too silly, poetic, playful to have any genuine credibility. In effect they are more closely informed by human behaviour, than the availability of the latest technologies.

To give this post a little more context I'm going to mention two projects I find particularly poignant. Firstly Carlos Jaramillo’s Hudie . Secondly Synnøve Fredericks Doffing Headphone.

(left) Synnøve Fredericks Doffing Headphone,
(right) Carlos Jaramillo's Hudie

These two projects are very different, but they act to critique a similar theme. You might call both objects ‘Social Props’, their not pieces of technology in themselves, but they explore the way we do interact with technology, particularly within public the spaces we share with others, where emerging mobile technologies encourage us to isolate ourselves.

The Doffing Headphone, is a pair of earphones designed for a social context. It offers a very positive, poetic new gesture of technological etiquette, just like the 'doffing' your cap to someone.

Hudie provides a splendidly isolated environment for the mobile games player, and a rather sinister sceptical for everyone else. This sting in the tail is intentional. But step into any tube carriage and you'll see that the situation it critiques has emerged unchecked, people gaze hypnotically at the screens of their Playstation Portables, business men are hunched in the Blackberry Prayer Position. Critical design in this context stops and asks us if were sure, if these are the kind of behaviours we want to be designing? I imagine the designers of Blackberry and the PSP painted a fairly rosy, utopian picture of their use, and that the development process for each was a model of honesty and efficiency.

Are these pieces of work self-promotional? - YES! Surely the natural aim of any designer is self-promotion. But I find it hard to label critical/speculative work as indulgent or self-serving when it aims to critique such widely held concerns about our relationship with technology. If we simply strive hard to design better products, we get stuck in the same old paradigm’s that have already been established. Mobile phones of the future are supposed to be faster, smaller, packed with new features, the possibilities for fostering meaningful interaction get shut down.

I don't think that the existence of this speculative work detracts in any way from the objective, problem-solving design it co-exists with. But what it does do is to cut a little deeper into the consciousness of the design community and the public.