alexandra daisy ginberg, at the rca: better: navigating imaginaries in design & synthetic biology to question “better”. recommended by shobhan; read over subway rides.
“Better” has become a contemporary version of progress, shed of some of its philosophical baggage. But better is not a universal good or a verified measure: it is imbued with politics and values. And better will not be delivered equally, if at all. “What is better?”, “Whose better?”, and “Who decides?” are questions with great implications for the way we live and hope to live.
The imaginary is used as a critical design tool to examine better,
Plastic uses less energy to transport than glass, it’s safer and stronger and uses less material: by many measures, the plastic bottle is better than glass. It’s so much better that many of us have learnt to drink water from new plastic bottles, every day, simultaneously creating corporate profit and an ecological horror story.
better is not a universal good or a verified measure; it is imbued with politics and values.
while better motivates us, we rarely question which better or whose better is being enacted … Better for some is worse for others.
This “critical design” is my second conceptual frame. Designer Anthony Dunne introduced the term in 1997 as he sought to expand possibilities for the design of electronic objects beyond innovation.
Bill Gaver (2012) argues that standardising practice can shut down possibilities unique to design. Design is unlike science; there is no one, best design, but multiple simultaneous possibilities. He suggests embracing design’s generative and contingent qualities.
Christopher Frayling (1993), cultural historian and educationalist, differentiates between research into design (such as the work of historians), research through design (materials and processes, for example), and research for design, where thinking is “embodied in the artefact”.
designs are influenced by the “conditions of their making”
Richard Howells (2015, p.1) describes human creativity as a utopian impulse: we use design to express our “drive to make a better world”
^ tied with quote by martha graham.
In Europe, the modernists sought high culture in design objects, promoting a moralising orthodoxy around “good” design (Forty 1986), embodied in the mass-produced output of the Deutscher Werkbund collective, or in the dream of the house as a “machine for living in” (Le Corbusier 1931). Honest form and hygienic design would better society; bad design was a culturally degenerate waste of labour and materials.
A very different approach emerged in the US. After the financial crash of 1929, designers including Norman Bel Geddes, Walter Dorwin Teague, Henry Dreyfuss, and Raymond Loewy elevated industrial design from styling to profession, promoting it as a way to fix an economy suffering from what corporations saw as drastic under-consumption (Meikle 2001; Andrews 2009). They adopted the nineteenth-century design practices that the European modernists were reacting against; soon, new and constantly updated goods poured into the marketplace, each purposefully designed to be a little better than their predecessor.
Infusing design with market values and social dreams, the early American industrial designers cemented design’s role in capitalist, material society, while—like the European modernists— promoting a moralising social improvement. They saw themselves as both salesmen and “social engineers designing and controlling a machine-age environment” (Meikle 2001, p.133).
“Sometimes designers have used industry as a way to make their ideas real in the world. But sometimes […] industry has used designers to make its purposes look ideal”. Eventually, over- consumption would become a problem that design helped to make, but couldn’t solve.
Design can work to politically different ideas of better. In the early 1920s, Russian Constructivist artists imagined “socialist objects” that would convey socialist values instead of fuelling capitalism’s commodity fetish.
design is not defined by being mass produced, bought, or sold.
Committee’s The Last Man’s Seat (2013) (figure 1.8) imagines the last individual in the world, free of constraints, generating endless variations on his perfect chair.
The optimum is a design fiction that reinforces a particular imaginary.
when we “design contexts for objects”, they are still “subsequently sold as self-standing” (2013, p.263).
By ignoring context, designers—and consumers— have contributed to socially, economically, and environmentally destructive activities, like prioritising plastic bottled water over water infrastructure.
Design may express politics, but this thesis argues that it is not itself a political agent for change, as Fry (2011, pp.6-7) or Tonkinwise suggest, but a useful tool.
Design “must not just visualise a ‘better world’ but arouse in the public the desire for one” (Dunne 1997, p.74).
While there is no single better, trouble doesn’t mean giving up hope: we must challenge what better means.