metabolo.org - change

Are Designers the Enemy of Design?

gva — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 18:02:31 -0400

Patrick Keenan from The Movement sent me this provocative link, which underscores the arguments Bob Logan and I are making in the Designing for Emergence papers:

From Businessweek.com's
Nussbaum on Design column

March 18, 2007
Are Designers The Enemy Of Design?
Bruce Nussbaum

Here's the speech I gave at Parson's on Thursday that deals with the backlash against design. I've edited it just a bit. It's designed to provoke design management students and show how I've redesigned my job at Business Week from the Voice Of Authority to the Curator of the Conversation on Innovation. We all live life in beta now.
Are Designers The Enemy of Design?

In the name of provocation, let me start by saying that DESIGNERS SUCK. I’m sorry. It’s true. DESIGNERS SUCK. There’s a big backlash against design going on today and it’s because designers suck.

So let me tell you why. Designers suck because they are arrogant. The blogs and websites are full of designers shouting how awful it is that now, thanks to Macs, Web 2.0, even YouTube, EVERYONE is a designer. Core 77 recently ran an article on this backlash and so did we on our Innovation & Design site. Designers are saying that Design is everywhere, done by everyone. So Design is debased, eroded, insulted. The subtext, of course, is that Real design can only be done by great star designers.

This is simply not true. Design Democracy is the wave of the future. Exceptional design may only be done by great star designers. But the design of our music experiences, the design of our MySpace pages, the design of our blogs, the design of our clothes, the design of our online community chats, the design of our Class of ’95 brochures, the design of our screens, the design of the designs on our bodies?"We are all designing more of our lives. And with more and more tools, we, the masses, want to design anything that touches us on the journey, the big journey through life. People want to participate in the design of their lives. They insist on being part of the conversation about their lives....

Article continues... choose URL above for the full piece

“How to Realize a Gallery Exhibition Based on Design-Oriented Content”

gva — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 21:44:25 -0500

I was recently contacted about the Massive Change project by Matt Garmon, a student of OCAD where I'm currently teaching design. Following are his intro letter and interview questions, along with my answers.

"Hi Greg. I am currently in Todd Falkowsky's 3rd year Thesis Prep class at Ontario College of Art & Design. I am working on a case study based on the Massive Change project and was wondering if I could interview you to gain some personal insight into the project.

Specifically, I'm using the Massive Change exhibit as a model for how to effectively organize and realize a gallery exhibition based on design-oriented content. Your expertise and personal experience with this project would definitely help me generate a content-rich study and would be greatly appreciated. Would you be available to answer the following questions?"

1) What was the biggest obstacle/hurdle that the team encountered while working on the project? How did you overcome it?

In writing, curating and designing Massive Change, the biggest challenge was the overall ambition of the project. By this I mean the implications and reach of the critical questions, the sheer number and variety of deliverables, and the magnitude of the stakes. Everyone attached to the project had much at stake, due to the highly public profile and the way it was organized. This was not an accident or miscalculation but a deliberate factor designed to irreversibly intensify and characterize the learning experience for the Institute without Boundaries students.

2) What was the teams greatest strength when resolving conflicts or while problem solving during the project?

This may seem surprising but the team was so interdisciplinary that no one had the "real" answer to any problem. This meant that a new and often surprising answer arose for most questions. In the absence of experts, everyone becomes an authority of one kind or another. Combining these differing notions of authority produced unexpected and resilient solutions.

3) If you could have changed anything about the way the project was structured, what would it be? Why?

The mix of "economies" was an intentional move away from the usual categories of industrial design, graphic design, architecture etc. and as such it was knowingly tentative, incomplete, but closer to the true intermingling of the worlds systems of exchange. IwB member Mark Beever and I improved the categories by adding "Market Economies" near the start of the project, which I think turned out to be one of the most interesting, unexpected and successful categories. However we were reminded (by KaosPilot's director Uffe Elbaek and others) that we should have also included "Human Economies" -- that is to say, a category focusing on the redesign of education, the art and science of human imagination, or as we might call it at the Beal Institute, Strategic Creativity.

4) Can you explain the organizational structure of the project and how it manifested itself on a daily basis?

We were largely driven by opportunistically embracing sub-projects and by the resulting mix of these smaller deadlines alternating with big official deadlines (e.g. for the Vancouver Art Gallery). By sub-projects I mean interstitial commissions like the Digifest virtual reality environment called "Suspension: A A typical day might see a group-based charrette led by myself, a series of presentations of individual design research to Bruce, and a visit from an outside critic collaborator, such as advertising veteran, Marlene Hore.

5) Were there any eureka moments during the process and what were they?

One eureka moment came when Bruce explained that the key characteristic we were searching for was "capacity." This was the meaning of "Massive Change" -- a paradigm-shifting transformation in the magnitude of human capacity to alter the world. These implications drive us to the brink of the quandary: "Now that we can anything, what will we do?"

6) If you could offer any advice to someone wishing to set up a gallery exhibition, regardless of its size what would it be?

An exhibition places real people physically in contact with work and thus offers an unmatched context for eliciting extreme experience. This opportunity should never be squandered by offering a mere encounter with images. What Walter Benjamin called the "aura" of the artwork is actually not the exclusive preserve of art but applies to all objects that are somehow testament to history and to change. Uniqueness is not the only mandatory criterion. Better thing to look for (or to manufacture) is a confrontational poetic quality. This is one thing we sought to do in creating Massive Change.

7) How did you find peoples reactions to a design-centred exhibit in an art gallery especially with the focus on anti-aesthetic?

I'm told the Vancouver Art Gallery the Art gallery of Onatario had some visitors call in and cancel their memberships in protest. It may have happened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago too but I'm not sure. I find this reaction both surprising and heartening. I believe art is in a greater stage of irrelevancy and general crisis than ever before and I'm not alone. See, for example, my comments for the MAK's annual report on the "The Crisis of Art" http://www.metabolo.org/node/183. I'm heartened because it tells me that an institution dedicated to sharing new ideas can still shake its patrons out of slumbering complacency and that it can do so by embracing certain aspects of contemporary culture that are in themselves exciting and troubling. We didn't set out to shock but rather to represent and propagate some exhilarating ideas. If we did exhilarate I'm greatly heartened.

8) How did you generate content for the exhibit?

In general the IwB members contacted scores of authoritative sources of different kinds of material, like data, images, case studies. We also worked from sculptural sketches and build scale models of each room to test the ideas in 3D form. We wrote thematic "frames" to describe the patterns inherent in each case or collection, and wove the different strands together. this whole process was iteratively cycled many times, always testing and refining against our loose but vivid vision of the kind of experience and reaction we sought to arouse.

9) Obviously, the people involved were great assets when generating a show such as this. What attributes would you say to be the most critical to successfully producing this exhibition?

In our recruiting we were very deliberate about seeking and selecting candidates with unbridled curiosity, intellectual and physical stamina to sustain the iterative process, and perhaps most importantly, good cheer, to enable the successful navigation of all these challenges without losing heart or focus. If these were their strengths coming in, I believe each IwB member became what we referred to as "a new breed of designer, one who is, in the words of Buckminster Fuller, a 'synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist, and evolutionary strategist."

Report from Massive Change Global Visionaries Symposium

gva — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 22:19:23 -0500

Just returned from the Massive Change Global Visionaries Symposium in Chicago. As a co-creator of the Massive Change exhibition I wanted to see it in the first US showing. Another aim was to study the public event and possibly seek out some of the speakers for a symposium I'm co-organizing with colleagues at the Beal Institute. The event was eye opening and highly enjoyable.

Overall my favorite speakers were Stewart Brand, futurist and author of the Whole Earth Catalog, The Clock of the Long Now, and How Buildings Learn; Gunter Pauli, founder and director of Zero Emissions Research Initiative of the United Nations University in Tokyo (Zeri.org), founder of Wikipedia Jimmy Wales, and Mary Czerwinski, cognitive psychologist and principal researcher at Microsoft. Brand and Pauli were certainly the most dynamic.

Other speakers were Gregg Easterbrook, senior editor of The New Republic and author of The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse; Dayna Baumeister, cofounder of the Biomimicry Guild; Hazel Henderson, futurist, evolutionary economist, and syndicated columnist; John Todd, biologist and ecological designer, and Reginald Modlin, Director of Environmental Affairs for Daimler Chrysler.

Stewart Brand presented first and he was superb. Soft-spoken and persuasive, he is a master inter-disciplinarian and unromantic humanist. His presentation was the only one with visuals, very polished with dense information demographics, many photos, sound clips, transitions, etc. Not as typographically sophisticated as Al Gore's show but equally dense. Brand focused on the city, its pivotal place in the pantheon of human creativity, its long history and the dynamic economic and demographic forces transforming it worldwide, in every continent and across all income strata. Overall he gave a picture of optimism about the creativity and resourcefulness of human communities to solve problems.

Gunter Pauli, based in Tokyo, described some of his initiatives in designing radically green urban / industrial communities at very large scales. Much of his work is in the developing world, e.g. Gaviotas in Colombia. These communities can leapfrog past current toxic practices and install new infrastructure that uses closed-loop, "waste=food" principles to achieve high employment, zero emissions, ample food production, etc.

Here's a helpful third party commentary [http://www.planeta.com/planeta/02/0209gaviotas.html]:

Pauli, in some ways a younger version of [Paolo] Lugari, has some spot-on things to say. He is most definitely on The Right Track. Kind of a permaculturist-social-justice-guy with a penchant to use fairy tales to illustrate his points....
...ZERI's focus is on taking things that are considered "waste" and finding new uses for them.
...The trick to "zero emissions" is to use the "waste" of one of the five kingdoms as food for another.

In person Pauli is outspoken and imaginative, frequently alluding to his work with children and seeming to celebrate these same qualities in them -- they don't filter their ideas of what's possible. Not an easy personality, but much better than that. Pauli was on stage with Reginald Modlin, Director of Environmental Affairs for Daimler Chrysler, who was cagey, dry, and sycophantic. No surprises and few big ideas from the global manufacturing giant.

Next were Dayna Baumeister and John Todd. One very interesting moment of that talk arose through a question afterward by Stewart Brand regarding GMO's -- actually he scooped me as I was going to ask the same question. Brand pointed out that certain bacteria swap genetic material all the time, and that many scientists who understand biology thoroughly, including stellar minds like E.O. Wilson, are less disturbed by GMO than others who are not trained in biology. Todd gave a thoughtful answer that GMOs are a distraction in that he's more interested in the symphony of ecological relationships, rather than the admittedly interesting soloists or featured organisms.

Jimmy Wales and Mary Czerwinski offered slightly differing views on emerging digital media. Most telling comment in that session came from Wales who imagined that the open, volunteer-driven model of wikipedia would be a temporary architecture that would soon have to be replaced by a more restricted and conventional model. To his surprise, the need to install controls on the model never materialized. In fact he continually has to explain to the media that the organization's controls are less restrictive than they imagine. Simple rules, like requiring individuals to be members for four days before they can edit, have effectively dampened most of the troll-like behaviour in the system.

In the last session Hazel Henderson held court and Gregg Easterbrook held his own. Henderson captivated the audience with ideas such as unmeasured value creation within the "love economy," and the need for broader alternatives to the money-based economic indices, like triple bottom line and the Calvert Henderson index. Both speakers dealt with notions of wealth and politics, and the overall picture was one in which material prosperity has shown steady increases in recent decades. The passing of Milton Freidman was noted and some audience members noted that we've never really tried pure market economics because of massive subsidies for entire industries, including oil and gas.

Everything Originates in Fire

gva — Sat, 19 Aug 2006 20:29:55 -0400

My friend Alex Busby just returned from Chennai, India where he was working on visual effects for a feature film. He related to me a philosophical concept about connectedness that he encountered there.

This view touched on everything from microbiology to the tangible realm including details like the chambers of the heart. One of the central ideas was that fire transforms inanimate substances and compounds into living ones -- it is a catalyst. It is held to be the most primal of the elements.

A ritual using coals and lighting fires from other fires was part of the experience Alex described. I hope to learn more about this. Perhaps it is connect with Ayurvdedic medicine or Vedic thought.

Another current to investigate (according my colleague Bob Logan) is the Greek philosopher Heraclites.

Metabolism: The sum of all biochemical processes involved in life

gva — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 09:54:10 -0400

Definitions of "metabolism" from Answers.com

me·tab·o·lism
n.

1. The chemical processes occurring within a living cell or organism that are necessary for the maintenance of life. In metabolism some substances are broken down to yield energy for vital processes while other substances, necessary for life, are synthesized.

2. The processing of a specific substance within the living body: water metabolism; iodine metabolism.

[From Greek metabole, change, from metaballein, to change : meta-, meta- + ballein, to throw.]

Selected translations for: Metabolism

Dansk (Danish)
n. - metabolisme, stofskifte

Nederlands (Dutch)
metabolisme, stofwisseling

Français (French)
n. - métabolisme

Deutsch (German)
n. - Metabolismus, Stoffwechsel

Italiano (Italian)
metabolismo

Português (Portuguese)
n. - metabolismo (m)

Español (Spanish)
n. - metabolismo

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - ämnesomsättning