15 Feb 2010 2133H

Perhaps this is a bit mean to say, but

Look.

If all design is merely form giving, then can you really complain about the people who are working at the tail end of the design process, primarily aestheticians — alright — decorators — who are tasked with the job of making something look good, that is, what Viktor Papanek called “shroud design”, rather than actually working upstream, engineering user needs and requirements into functionality as it is experienced? Because then are they not only doing their job, but the better the form giving, the better the job they are doing.

Now, to the degree that almost anyone equipped with the tools and cognizant of the proper signals of style can mimic good design, and that the average person, viz. your client(s), knows as much about design as can be fooled by even a hapless teenager with a pirated copy of Flash and a dogeared copy of Comm Arts, if that is your value proposition, if that is all it takes for you to be beaten out by someone who can do exactly the same work for a lower price, then I say you should be beaten, and beaten repeatedly, until you find some reason for someone to actually pay you for your work.

And if that person is going to go with someone else solely on the basis of price, you know, a kind of race to the bottom, I say, a) you get what you pay for and b) that’s probably not a client that you would want, anyway.

So there.

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13 Feb 2010 1318H

The Ah Ha moment

just arrived. This morning, doggedly pursuing leads on the internet in my pursuit of my new intellectual project, the history of design in East Asia, I ran across this article by Matthew Turner, a professor at Edinburgh Napier University. In this journal he writes (forgive me for quoting wholesale here):

For some time, now, Occam’s razor has been hovering over this tenuous thread of reasoning and, having entered into Discourse’s hall of mirrors, only an investigation on the scale of a Foucault or a Said would be sufficient. Such an investigation must demonstrate that the history of design has developed into a useful buttress of values central to the First World and, to such an extent, that its retrospective application elsewhere is problematic. Of course, what these central values might be is a question open to much speculation. Supposing that the history of design embodies a number of key beliefs about First World development seems reasonable. These beliefs are in economic growth and technological development, in progress through free competition and consumer choice, in aspirations towards the comforts and sophistications of affluence, in the importance of individuality, creativity, and innovation fused with the benefits of standardization and mass production. If a demonstration that design is less a description of a process and more a representation of an ideology (conveniently depoliticized and positive, filling the vacuum left behind by science, which has lost so much of its innocence since the 1950s) could be made, a fruitless search for essences might be avoided. After all, an essence being distilled from practices as varied as engineering, design, and fashion design has never seemed likely.

Would such an investigation yield any positive result? Yes, for it would open a perspective on an immense, unexplored storehouse of knowledge about the developing world in the modern era. While enlarging the understanding of world design, valuable material for other disciplines would be provided and a much needed boost would be given to the growing confidence of designers working outside the First World.

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12 Feb 2010 1948H

Let’s just call design what it is

From my private study, from all the reading I have done and the observations I have made, I think it is now safe to declare design what I really think it is. Design as we know it today really is a western way of looking, thinking, and shaping, that flows from many very long aesthetic traditions in the west, guided by schools of thought most recently in what we call Modernism. In contrast what we call Asian design is not actually Asian at all. Asian design is actually the work of Asian people who have learned to look, think and shape in this way, much like learning how to cook French food. In the same way that there arrived this history of really good Asian cooks who are supreme French or Italian chefs, so too are there a lot of really good Asian designers who design in the western mode. The problem is that somehow in the design profession and in academia that the origins of the discipline have been masked, so that its biases, preferences, and proclivities are declared as universal when in fact they are not. There are historical conditions that shaped this, such as Japan’s reaction to foreign invasion through the various initiatives launched in the Meiji era, then how that affected Korea after Japan learned its imperialist lessons too well from the west, and the less well known but tumultuous responses to foreign incursions and the various indignities suffered by China in the late Qing period, and perhaps likewise we could look at Vietnam and Thailand as to how they reacted to colonialism by the French and on and on and on. Well, that’s my work right there.

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08 Feb 2010 2330H

World’s most helpful dialog

Thank you Borland for your extremely helpful dialog from your very reliable product, CaliberRM. And here’s our winning dialog, which I am now seeing on a regular basis:

caliberdialog

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28 Jan 2010 0022H

Another year, another Apple event

Or was it? I’ve been saying this in various places, but, I think we saw a game changer of an event today. Technologically nothing has changed. But because it addresses emerging markets and unmet user needs, the iPad will change computing as we know it, really make it part of our contemporary everyday experience, almost akin to radio and television no longer being special, but ubiquitous. We all knew, deep inside, that the netbook was really only a band-aid to people’s real needs, which really don’t require the computing power of a laptop, and yet need something more heavyweight than a cellphone or Blackberry. At the same time, they couldn’t build something that would take share away from their phone or laptop business.

We all saw how e-Readers took off this Holiday season and that it may just a matter of time, really, before book discounters could potentially go the way of the big box video rentals, like Blockbuster or Hollywood, and music stores like Tower Records and HMV. Amazon is better insulated against this because they’ve diversified their risk, but you can see it in the big boxes like Best Buy: everything is bits. Hard media is passe. Publishing rights and deals are the new currency in such an economy. I would not be surprised to see not only big time houses do well, but small independent publishing should flourish through the new Apple online bookstore, as podcasting did under iTMS. Amazon has never been able to leverage this as Apple could and hopefully will. Now Apple owns the world’s largest music, movies, and bookstore chain. I get the sense that Amazon’s happy to just sell through Apple, so long as they mind their own business. But there will be a day when Amazon will want more from their partnership, and that will be the end of that.

I have seen some snippy comments about the technology not being so special, in fact, not new technology at all, but those same people said the same things about the Nintendo Wii when it was announced. Again I would say no one is looking at emerging markets, no one is looking at the vast untapped needs out there, no one is looking at how regular, everyday people use computers, now and for the foreseeable future. But this is what divides the design thinkers from those who don’t. The best way to predict the future is to create it, and that’s what Jobs demonstrated today. Again.

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27 Jan 2010 1307H

Wait. Wasn’t that Magic Shelf?

Magic shelf?!

Magic shelf?!

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25 Jan 2010 1304H

NPR interview with designer Mark Coleran

He’s the guy who makes the interface comps you see in movies. Nice interview the other evening, called Hollywood\'s Computers: Telling A Story In A Flash\" on NPR.

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24 Jan 2010 1115H

Example of excise

With apologies to the author, although it’s a brilliant test exercise in coding functionality, this is a perfect example of excise. It seems stuck in beginner mode: if you don’t know the names of months, how many there are, days in a week, hours in a day, minutes in an hour, so on, or what their names, divisions, and units are might this clock be handy. But people quickly move out of beginner mode: then they just want to know what time it is. No comment as to the aesthetic nature of such a clock though, of course, now that the proof of concept exists, then the mechanics of the thing can now be adapted to other uses, such as perhaps, a flip clock or something else like a Kinetic Sculpture or The Source.

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24 Jan 2010 0913H

Recent thoughts on Chinese design

Is it possible to talk about Chinese design when all Chinese designers have been taught about ways of looking, thinking, and form giving by Westerners? That the very value of design comes to Chinese design because of its engagement in the global late capitalist market flows of goods and services? A priori, I draw on the long body of work that tells us that ways of thinking, looking, and shaping are not without their own biases. They have their own histories, and that these ways of knowing give rise to presences that suppress absences and silences in order to legitimize and perpetuate their existence. In other words, design would appear to meet the criteria for what Foucault would have called a discursive formation. So if it is the case that western form-ways have basically colonised Chinese design, what does this mean for the future? Is it possible to disentangle Chinese design from the colonial yoke, so to speak?

I’m thinking no. The genie’s already out of the bottle. In essence, there is no design style that is sui generis “Chinese” per se. Perhaps even the notion of design itself, although it poses as universal, actually is historically conditioned by the West as a kind of discursive formation. At the risk of prematurely speaking, one cannot talk about Chinese design because Chinese designers have not begun to build a national discourse of their own, the narrative of seeing, thinking and shaping for themselves, out of “native”, pre-colonial design history, to solve their own problems using “native” ways of doing so, and not “imported” ways of doing so, such as constructivism, modernism, so on. Largely, when they use such techniques, they’re really only copying from others, doing “what the market tells them” will work, what someone has taught them.

Chinese Design, therefore, properly only refers to the act of form-giving in a more or less Western manner, with pre-colonial or traditional Chinese flourishes, by people who are Chinese or are designing for Chinese and maybe to a degree by foreigners living and working in China. This differs from big-letter Chinese Design because the work seen today does not stem from a purely, uniquely Chinese historical aesthetic tradition, but from the chaotic and tumultuous centuries of engagement with Western ways of form giving, as we see with product and advertising work, i.e. communications design from Hong Kong and Shanghai before the Second World War, and then of course the mainland engagement with the Soviet realist propaganda after 1949, and of course modernism and its discontents take over in Hong Kong after 1949 as well.

I doubt there will be a rejection and revolution in this regard, and I think it is too late for any rejection to be successful so as to “restart” Chinese Design ex nihilo. But, if this were undertaken, a wholesale rejection of western form ways, fashions, trends, and the like, basically, a return to pre-colonial Chinese aesthetics, perhaps then we might be able to talk about Chinese design as its own discourse. Perhaps because colonialism is part of the historical condition, therefore it is inescapable to talk about Chinese design without reference to the colonial masters.

Anyone who talks about Chinese design today cannot however elide or exclude this colonial form of intellectual history as if it does not exist, although it is telling to me why this has not been criticized more loudly. Chinese design cannot also, as I am seeing in a paper from Design Issues, be simply academically explained away by simplistic and outdated colonialist notions about Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism, collective identity, so on: every such simplistic textbookish stereotype can be countered by the rich, direct knowledge gained from actual observation of the real conditions on the ground and the lived experiences of people, their histories, their aspirations and failings.

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20 Jan 2010 1645H

On design thinking and public policy

Given the tremendous quantities of crap not just in products but in experiences that have been rendered unto the public by designers, and the industry’s collective failure to own up to its responsibility for that, design thinking or no, I think it would be not only premature but overly optimistic at best to turn the reins of public policy over to designers. We already do a good enough job screwing up products for people as it is: let’s not expand our scope.

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