By Dr Tony Fry (Adjunct Professor)
The Masters of Design Futures program offered by Qeensland College of Art Griffith University, is a major innovation in postgraduate design education. This is so in terms of content, presentation and availability. It has been created because “design, in all its forms, has never confronted challenges of the scale of those now emerging” and “the stakes have never been higher, but neither have the opportunities”.
The program will respond to some of the most pressing problems facing humanity today. Design, in all its guises, cannot of itself solve all these problems, but with transformations it can make a very significant contribution. To realise this potential the program will deliver new knowledge and practices that will enable design to adopt a far more important leadership position.
The content will include exploration of new design practices, the problems they have to address, the strategies required to bring them into use, and the philosophical foundation needed to guide the creation of both new knowledge and action. Central to this philosophy and the total ethos of the program, is the recognition that there is a massive need to design in relation to unfolding circumstances – which is to say that design should be directed at the future as well as the present. This means that the program will engage and expand the idea of ‘sustain-ability’.
The program works with an expanded understanding of design, thus widening the scope of who is viewed as a designer. It is therefore open to a wide range of graduates working in disciplines in, and beyond, design. For recent graduates entry can be via a one semester Graduate Certificate.
While some of the content will be presented in the familiar forms, like lectures, it will also include ‘hothouse’ events that will be intensive learning experiences that confront crucial issues and problems. These events will be challenging, but they will also have elements of fun.
As program leader, I have been at the forefront of new design thinking and practice for many years. As such, I do not work with a rigid division between theory and practice. My track record supports this view. On the one hand, I have written a great deal about design, including several books and taught design in various parts of the world. On the other hand, I have worked across a variety of design disciplines on many major design projects for corporations, government and community organisations; been a member of awards winning design teams; and directed a practice. My experience spans activities in Australia, Europe, Asia, North and South America.
While I will play a large role in the program, there will be many other voices. To give a sense of where I am coming from, and the kind of issues and thinkers the program will work with, a series of statements will be presented. These will be followed by a sample paper and a brief reading list.
Essentially, the program is about the deployment of design to secure futures worth having.
The program, commencing in July 2008, is one year full time (with an additional one semester honours option). It will be a mixture of program work and research.
Statement on | Sustainability | Design | Futures
Sustain-ability
Sustain-ability is a process not a product, a means not an end. It fundamentally expresses the inter-connectedness of everything that sustains us. In this respect it can only be created as a relational complexity. The advancement of the process rests on three preconditions: viable ecologies; peaceful coexistence (nothing is more unsustainable than war – it destroys environments, bodies, communities and spirit); and equity (excess and poverty are equally destructive of collective well-being).
Design
Design, the ability to prefigure what we create, is one of the things that defines us as human beings – all human beings design. For tens of millions of years design was simply embedded in our being and in the exercise of our labour. For a few hundred years it has been a professional practice as a division of knowledge of industrial society. Rather than expand the scope of design, in many ways its economic service relation has narrowed it. The idea of the production of product as an end point of designing is an example of this. In reality, everything we design then goes on designing: the table – the social relations of the meal; the built structure – the form of the city; television – the qualities of popular culture.
Futures
The future of humanity is not assured. A situation of our own making has been created whereby we will only have a future if we make it – our future is in our own hands.
Tony Fry ON ‘GOOD DESIGN’
This is an edited version of a paper given at The Brisbane Ideas Festival in March 2006
What is good design? This is a perennial question that has been asked ever since design became constituted as an object of inquiry and judgement. Certainly, by the late 19th century statements claiming to be definitive answers were being made. The Arts and Craft movement, for example, asserted ‘good design’ was ‘fitness for purpose’. Likewise, organisations like the Deutsche Werkbund and the British Design Council, and institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, were all brought into existence, in part, to answer the question authoritatively. Yet, as will be shown, defining what good design is ever remains elusive, relative, contextual, political and therefore provisional. No matter what is said, who says it, where or when, someone, sometime will surely ask – ‘what is good design?’ While an answer must always be given, it equally must always be critically framed by what is actually critical.
Setting up
To develop what has been said so far, two well known characterisations of good design will be cited. The first is a social perspective, epitomised by the words of Anthony Bertram, a once well known writer on design:-
Good design is not a matter of wealth, much less of the chic, the latest thing. It is not matter of novelty, but of the production of cities and houses and goods which will best satisfy the needs of the people; the need of practical, honest, cheap, lasting and beautiful things to use and see in their everyday lives.
While the language is dated, it’s the kind of sentiment that could have been expressed last week. It was actually made 70 years ago in a BBC broadcast.
Characterisation two is based on the notion that good design is a quality of the thing itself.
Such a characterisation turned on Platonic notions of ‘the good’ – an aesthetically ideal form which through its realisation becomes absolute truth (thereby acquiring a transcendental value uniting the thing with the cosmos). While this process of idealisation is ancient, it lives on, as does Greek thought in general. (Specifically, Greek thought is in fact inscribed in the western mind – we all think, in part, like the Greeks). Certainly we find Platonism resident in many influential modern thinkers and designers – Le Corbusier is a good example.
Le Corbusier most influential book Towards a New Architecture (first published in France in 1923) extols the machine – specifically, the ocean liner, the aeroplane, the automobile – as the ideal form of his age. This is the book in which he famously characterises the house as a machine for living. However, echoing the Greeks, and just prior to coming to this conclusion, he spent forty pages celebrating the Parthenon as the “pure creation of mind” and as a measure of ‘the good’. For Le Corbusier ‘the good’ was an exemplary object – one ruptured from time to serve as a universal measure.
His ambition was to transpose the essence of the ‘eternally good’ onto what was new, rational and functional. His ideal mass-produced house fused with the classical, as the ‘type-form’ for future housing. Thereafter, this housing could be regarded as the agency for the mass replication of the good. Such thinking of idealised form – a form disengaged from any material or social environment – extended well beyond Le Corbusier and architecture. It influenced the entire modern movement in all spheres of design practice.
Moving forward
The ambitious and perhaps iconoclastic position I am going to put forward in a moment is defined against two reference points.
Point one is that in order to go forward we constantly need to step back. In so doing we discover that ethics and moral philosophy have been preoccupied with ‘the good’ for millennia. In one direction they considered happiness as a condition of well-being and so the way to the good – this is the philosophy of the Epicureans. In the other direction it is to be found via perfectionism (which takes us back to Plato).
These directions not only cross each other, but again illustrate that ancient ideas are alive and well in the present, be it in degenerate forms (vis-à-vis the Rolex watch, the BMW car, Rayban sunglasses, Armani suits, Frank Gehry architecture and masses of other things that travel with the promise of perfection bringing happiness — at least to the privileged).
Conversely, there is the notion of happiness realised via common good – this underpinned August Comte’s proto-socialism and the young Karl Marx’s view of communism. It was also central to J.S. Mill’s and Jeremy Bentham’s Utilitarianism with its dictum: ‘for the greatest happiness of the greatest number’ (which now sound more like a slogan for the entertainment industry).
Socialism and Utilitarianism, delivered by ideal forms, deeply infused the modern movement in architecture and design. Members of the movement saw themselves as bringers of a new world. This spirit of idealism was largely extinguished by the horrors of WW2 and replaced by a weak perfectionism (expressed in formalist design principles) of late modernism and the brutalism of ‘truth to materials’. In the past few decades, whatever residual trace of ‘the common good’ remains, has mostly been erased by the eclecticism and cynicism of ‘aesthetic postmodernism’ or has been reduced to ‘user centredness’ – the notional user of course is not ‘the common’ (i.e., society at large), but the functional subject.
Yet, as we shall see, the common good has to return. Before going further, something else needs to be said on design.
While ‘the good’ is tricky to pin down, so is design. Notwithstanding this, the nature of design can be identified. Five short points are offered to support this claim.
- Design as characteristic of human anthropology – we are in part human because we have the ability to prefigure our actions – we imagine before we make. Writ large, this tells us that everybody, at a fundamental level, is a designer. Most significantly, we have created our world by design (be it both good and bad).
- Design is a diverse professional practice in which what is designed and how, and by what means, are in contact flux.
- The material or immaterial objects that the practice of design brings into being far exceeds what is named as design – this is to say that most of what is designed is un-named and anonymous.
- Crucially – all that is designed has an onward designing. Effectively, we are the designed as well as designers – our appearance, the way we live, our taste, how we drive, our work, a great deal of what we think – as they have been designed, design us. The omnipotence of design as such escapes us.
- Mostly unknowingly, we create or destroy futures by design.
Now with these qualifications let me headline what I believe good design to be: it is design for the common good, which at its most basic, is design for sustainment. This somewhat tame statement has a radical bite as will be demonstrated.
Design and the Sustainment
The Sustainment is the ground and evaluative frame of good design.
Although the terms sound very similar, ‘the sustainment’ hasn’t got much in common with sustainability, at least as it is currently advocated in the mainstream (which so often comes down to sustaining the unsustainable). Rather what ‘the sustainment’ names is the opening of a new epoch of human history defined against an essential overcoming of unsustainability. Humanity, as we understand it, has no future without this overcoming.
Unsustainability is not reducible to symptomatic ‘environmental impact’ type problems – like global warming, deforestation and desertification – with which we are now more or less familiar. More so, unsustainability is a loss of memory and a sense of time; it is equally a loss of justice and responsibility. It is a forgetting of the past and the sacrifice of the future to the present.
Unsustainability, the longstanding myopia of humanity, is amplified by the growing numbers of the human population, which is still being deemed to peak at 9.5 billion.
In contrast, the moment of Sustainment is a non-utopian futural time, an age of new knowledge, practice and cultural re-direction. It is a necessity rather than a dream. It cannot be, without global equity achieved via global redistributive social justice, and based on an economy of quality and moderation (wasted waste, excess and poverty are all equally destructive). And of course it cannot be without an ethos of environmental care. For this to happen there has to be an enormous amount of innovation, with a great deal of momentum, loaded with massive economic and cultural potential.
Besides transforming the agenda of all design education and practice, the kind of activity signalled by the above points, demands a massive exercise in changing public culture, morality and aspirations. An important part of this, is the creation of a community of designers able to develop forms of visual communication that devalue people’s investment in systems, products, services and lifestyles that defuture, while at the same time, generating new ambitions and material desires bonded to life-affirming futures.
In Conclusion
While the challenge of Sustainment is mind-boggling, does humanity have another choice?
Sustainment means stopping educating people in error (people do not become unsustainable accidentally; they learn to be that way via their mode of inculcation into sociality and the content of their formal and informal education). In turn, this implies the creation of new cultures in which values and rituals of sustainment are developed.
Sustainment means moving the capitalist economy away from the quantitative paradigm to a qualitative one – in this respect good design as the perfect folds into good design as the common good. Sustainment, the qualitative economy, demands good design so defined.
Good design, design for Sustainment, has to be for all humanity.
Good design is futuring.
Good design is ethics embodied in things material and immaterial as they design our being-in-the-world as world-caring and beings cared for.
Human beings are creators and destroyers, an unavoidable fact of our life which we fail to grasp. Currently, to make our world, we sacrifice the natural; in contrast, good design draws the line of ethical demarcation between what we destroy and what we create.
Is all this impossible? No matter how you feel and think about what has been said here, the answer has to be no. Quite simply, we have nothing without Sustainment.
We should remember that humanity has a history of constantly attaining the impossible (in fact the impossible turns out to be as much perspectival limitation as empirical fact)
Good design is thus not a matter of taste, choice or acclaim. It’s a matter of necessity; a matter of freedom gained by constraining the unsustainable. Good design is (a matter of) Sustainment.
So, in the epoch of Sustainment, which is an epoch that has to come, one can be certain of one question that will be asked – ‘what is good design?
Suggested Reading
This list is short, and so are the items listed.
Arendt, Hannah On Violence New York: Harvest, 1969
Flusser, Vilém The Shape of Things London: Reakton, 1999
Worldwatch Institute State of the World 2006 (China/India Special) New York: Norton
Current issues of Design Philosophy Papers (www.desphilosophy.com) and
Design Philosophy Politics (www.desphilosophypolitics.com)