Authenticity in Design: What¿?¿

The notion of authenticity is a motif that seems to be surfacing in this time. Transparancy, authenticity, and trust... things that I can refer my relationships to. This doesn´t seem to surprise me that it is becoming apparant to ¨people¨ that a secure and authentic connection to their designed environments is ever important.

Moreover, recognizing that the design of the table at which you sit needs to be authentic is a difficult idea to understand. By this, I mean that you must see the designer´s true intentions manifested in the design that you use, and those intentions were not distorted for other purposes.

But what are a designer´s intentions? I think a designer´s intentions should be that which one designs for facil use.

Facilitate Better Learning by Breaking The Cycle

Conversations are taking place all around us, and in this Conversation Age, we are looking to learn a thing or two from them. My idea for this chapter came while reading an article in Harvard Business Review by Chris Argyris.

What is the quality of insight gained for the curator of the conversation? Moreover, ask yourself the question, are we addressing the more fundamental impulsions behind the responses from the newly formed community of conversationalists?

As the curator of the conversation, you are seeking to learn from the players involved. But also, you are seeking to further facilitate and massage the conversation forward with hopes to gain maximum insight. The problem arises with curatorial benevolence.

The curator strays from questioning the assumptions and fundamental biases in responses from the players of the conversation. These assumptions and fundamental biases are laid in the early formation of the group involved. A sense of communal identification is borne from active listening, conscious participation, and purposeful speaking. 

This initial process of respectful engagement will inherently lay a foundation that must be shaken for optimal insight. Most importantly, as this identity develops, the curator usually takes a passive role. Passivity is the result of the curator’s fear that he or she will discourage the players from participation.

This passivity is a disservice to net learning. As a sense of community develops, fundamental assumptions are not addressed behind player responses. A cyclical process of learning develops as a result. The sense of communal assumptions (identification) with other conversationalists contributes to closing the circle, further continuing the cyclical process. This continues until the curator steps in to question the communal assumptions, thus breaking the circle, and allowing for deeper insight.

The curator must act as a catalyst at his or her recognition of this cyclical learning. The curator must seek to disturb the harmony when they detect cyclical or homogeneous responses, by questioning fundamental impulsions behind the responses. They are not destroying communal identification, but allowing for a more sustainable and beneficial learning process. Argryis calls this the double loop and single loop phenomenon, I am adapting it here, calling it “a need for cyclical breakout.”

Are Designers the Enemy Of Design?

Nussbaum recently gave a talk at my school, that caused quite the stir. He details how the dynamic and evolution of the design process has brought us to this new form of design, where everyone is a designer and that design by ego is destroying the potential and requisite of today's designs. (Pic: Philip Stark Juicer)

Nussbaum said that "designers suck" and are in need of a paradigm shift for sustainability. I have to agree, but disagree. As a student of Design Management, we are not IN NEED of a paradigm shift, at least I don't see that, but rather, we are undergoing a paradigm shift. To me, when I graduate in a year, I will work in a market where sustainability is presumed to take importance. Maybe bottom line business men will tell me otherwise, but more and more I am reading of how they, too, now realize the impetus in sustainability to grow that bottom line over time.

As we breed this new form of designer, we are making history, in fact, defining the management of the process. Design management is the facilitation of the design process in the interests of all of those at stake. This inculcates sustainability amongst other things, but it is not apparent (reference to apple's counter-sustainable products).

My thoughts? In response, NextD did a whole write up drawing from the brightest minds in design of today and yesterday. There is strong potential in society for sustainability and participatory design. This process and its importance in the administration of business is exemplified by the emergence of Design&Management departments at Parsons, Pratt, Stanford, and Harvard.

This nascent industry embodies the profit-potential held in participatory design while strongly entertaining sustainability as a priority before achieving anything with popular culture. I would know, I am a student who is on the receiving end of courses and lectures of design management training.

I am frankly excited by the emergence of this MANAGEMENT-DESIGN pedagogy, as it transfers power to those who know and appreciate from those who are ignorant... so designers don't suck, business sucks. Good thing though, because as I see it, business models for the day after tomorrow are being learned today, in dschools.

One Shape For All and For All One Shape

Alan McCollum, who turns 63 this year, has a long-standing interest in formal replication, and his work frequently addresses questions of materiality and value. (His installations lead one to rapidly conclude that the lofty promises of modernism aren't likely to be fulfilled anytime soon: here in McCollum's orbit, more = less.) He also possesses the entrepreneurial spirit that has come to characterize a number of contemporary artists who think pluralistically about making work. His shapes, for example, can be used for many different purposes, “not only for fine art and design projects,” notes his gallery’s press release, “but also for various social practices: as gifts, awards, identity markers, emblems, insignias, logos, toys, souvenirs, educational tools and so forth.”

The relationship between shapes and social practices is, at its core, an essential design conceit — from typographic identity to architectural megastructure, giving form to ideas is what designers do. But McCollum’s project goes beyond mere morphology, embracing a kind of über-solution in its very claim. Endlessly permutable, teeming with indefinite potential, McCollum’s strategic genius lies in his appeal to a culture hungry for the quick fix. The Shapes Project promises maximum gain with minimum effort: better living through geometry.

It's not so much the shapes themselves as the idea of the shapes, the very notion of a system of forms that's so captivating. And so unnerving. If I were to identify the one prevailing topical interest that has most surfaced in the last year — among students, in juries, at conferences and exhibitions — it would have to be this obsession with series and systems. How to identify them; how and where to introduce them; the question of whether, once a series is identified, your work is done. It's the illusion of certainty that's so mesmerizing — the idea that not everything is in flux, unfixed and mashed-up and dislocated. Systems by their very nature introduce an armature as well as a roadmap for their own completion. You look at one iteration, then two — then ten — and you get it. Once demystified, you can concentrate on other things — form, perhaps, or beauty. A glorious insect. A Trollope poem. Your lunch.

Or not. Which begs the question: does a system invite psychological repose precisely because it is so clear and comprehensible — or does it lead us to search for precisely its opposite — a kind of exotic deviation from the norm, an abstraction or glimmer of novelty? McCollum stresses that he laboriously created each of these shapes, and resists the notion that this body of work emerged from a kind of robotic (read "vector generated") process. Is artistry compromised if software is involved? Is design?

A Note on Design Pedagogy

Reading a recent article on the theory behind Gropius' Bauhaus and the Applied Art Schools in Breslau and Dusseldorf, led me to finally construct a valid argument to defend both this very blog and the very basis of my current daily works. The theory is best illustrated by the 1907 creation of the Deutscher Werkbund. This association of architects, designers, and industrialists helps illustrate state-sponsored evidence of the need to commercialize artistic talent.

The pedagogical nature of the Bauhaus and congruently Parsons are exhibited in the curricula of both institutions, while formed around the same time, developed independently of each other on two different continents. The need to industrialize raw artistic talent; to bridge the then widening gap between industry and art was expressed in the Deustcher Werkbund, the Bauhaus, and Parsons itself. Academia failed to adequately prepare students for real life expression of their artistic talent, the manifestation of their ideas were doomed to failure without being prepared for real media to express themselves with. Creativity was lost in the swirls of vocal academics who, given their university training, were able to effectively express and accomplish.

This quote helps express what I am trying to say: "True creative work can be done only by the man whose knowledge and mastery of the physical laws of statics, dynamics, optics, acoustics equip him to give life and shape to his inner vision." Therefore we can see the pedagogical importance of the Bauhaus, and currently my education at Parsons. I am being given the vehicle and required training to effectively link my creative talents with industrial processes. I am being given the tools I need to graduate and work and earn a living, rather than squander any creativity in futile attempts of recognition. Practical and theoretical, simultaneously releasing the creative powers contained in the students at this and other design schools. Maybe we can say teaching us how to talk the talk and walk the walk.

Listening to Bob Dylan.

iPhone: Planning vs. Implementation

The new Apple iPhone, the craze of all design industry. After much awaited time, Jobs has taken advantage of delayed market entry to observe and capitalize on past PDA-Phone-Entertainment devices. Nonetheless, let's look at the practicality behind the $500+ device in terms of its implementation.

Most importantly, the iPhone will be available exclusively on the Cingular network. The number of people that will switch to Cingular to take advantage of the newest Apple creation (we can define these people as the die-hard Apple fans, which are none too few) are those that we can say that are the first-adopters of the device. In fact, we can say that there will be a great number of people who will buy the device at any given cost, only because they are so focused on buying the next hottest Apple device. For the rest of us, as much as we like this device, and at its incredible cost, we must now seek to weigh the cost of breaking our contracts and leaving our beloved carriers simply to buy into a trend. Practically, I have Verizon, my friends have Verizon, as much as the iPhone looks appealing, I dont think I will be breaking my contract anytime soon.

On the design front of the device, it has appealing features, but holistically it is the spokesman of the "creative" type. What the iPhone does for us creative types is help provide an alternative to the highly formal blackberry or treo. We are no longer mislabeled by the phone we carry, and we can succumb to our ever-vocal choice in electronics (MacBook, iPod, and iPhone to match). The software on the iPhone nonetheless (yes I have had a unique chance to test drive) is what sells it for me. Intuitive interfaces that are familiar to us from our work and play interactions, the iPhone plays upon the ease, adaptability, and error-free operation that us users of OSX have grown to love and those users of Windows XP have not realized exist in digital interactions.

All in all, I give kudos to Apple and its next-obvious step in innovative production, but their terms are too selfish. Apple knows it has cornered a certain type of market and is seeking to expand that market everyday (see the latest TV ads obviously geared towards older PC-using men). Knowing this, reviewing past failed deals, Apple had demanded way too much in past talks with Verizon and maybe T-Mobile and thus failed in being able to introduce on several carriers (like Treo, Blackberry, etc).

FUTURE RELATED POST: iPhone REVIST

Listening to Paolo Nutini.