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I think it’s interesting that DIY and laissez-faire are close in underlying ideology—both essentially libertarian, both very American. Perhaps this analogy is an exaggeration, and of course we should do things for ourselves. But blindly espousing DIY assumes that people have an ethics behind the way they act, which has nothing to do with whether you can make a nice deck. Pipe bombs are DIY, as Herda indicates. Klamer points at this problem too—programmatically speaking, a little more communitarian impulse needs to be emphasized, more stress placed on the relationships people can form while sharing information, which is what Lupton hints at with her discussion on knowledge exchange. And the need for better education of the citizenry on a societal level remains a mostly unspoken fundamental, as it often does in this sort of conversation. That, of course, is a job of that state, speaking traditionally at least.
At any rate, the panel has been great overall. Well done.
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Wrap-Up
ModeratorAric Chen
We
began this discussion by asking whether we’re overdesigning or
underdesigning our built environment. While I can’t take credit for
coming up with this topic, it’s one that I’ve often thought about in my
role as a writer for design magazines. Perhaps Sarah put it best at the
outset of the conversation: “While there may be some fatigue for design
as it has been deployed recently, its potential is far more than fodder
for shelter magazines and developers of lifestyle condominiums.”
Of
course, shelter magazines and lifestyle condominiums serve a valuable
purpose, even if only for the voyeur. They are part of a system—and by
system, I don’t necessarily mean an institutional infrastructure
(though they are part of that, too) but rather a plexus that allows
design to be heterogeneously expressed. It is this diversity—of the
extraordinary and the banal, the sensible and the cumbersome, and, yes,
the “good” and the “bad”—that I would argue makes design a vital human
activity. Put simply, the orderliness of Amsterdam, Zurich, and
Stockholm may make for great cities—but so does the chaos of Mumbai,
Mexico City, and New York. Or to borrow an example from earlier in this
discussion, you can’t appreciate a hassle-free toilet-paper dispenser
until you’ve experienced a testy, spring-loaded one. (And someday, we
may even feel nostalgic for the latter.)
For
now, however, the problem seems to be that there are too many
spring-loaded toilet-paper dispensers and not enough of the hassle-free
kind. As Jason Kaufman wrote in his reader comment: “Our world is
overdesigned in name and underdesigned in fact.” So how do we design in
a more productive way? Arjo has compellingly shown us how design, like
economics, must be seen as the complex organism that it is. In her last
post, Ellen describes a more decentralized, less top-down condition by
which “solutions will bubble up from lots of different places and lots
of different people.” In other words, our problems may be messy, but
neither will the ways out of them be tidy or neat. Design, by
definition, relies to a certain extent on clear-cut reasoning: Problem
A leads to Solution B. But we now recognize that both A and B are
usually fuzzier than we think. So in moving forward, perhaps we should
look not to Mies nor to Wright but to Darwin: let’s rely on a diversity
of ideas and approaches, and may the best ones win.
On that note, many thanks to our panelists and visitors to the forum for their participation in this discussion.
COMMENTS
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I think it’s interesting that DIY and laissez-faire are close in underlying ideology—both essentially libertarian, both very American. Perhaps this analogy is an exaggeration, and of course we should do things for ourselves. But blindly espousing DIY assumes that people have an ethics behind the way they act, which has nothing to do with whether you can make a nice deck. Pipe bombs are DIY, as Herda indicates. Klamer points at this problem too—programmatically speaking, a little more communitarian impulse needs to be emphasized, more stress placed on the relationships people can form while sharing information, which is what Lupton hints at with her discussion on knowledge exchange. And the need for better education of the citizenry on a societal level remains a mostly unspoken fundamental, as it often does in this sort of conversation. That, of course, is a job of that state, speaking traditionally at least.
At any rate, the panel has been great overall. Well done.
|
George Bailey wrote:
At any rate, the panel has been great overall. Well done.