Desma 10 Fall 2018 Design Culture an Introduction Professor Erkki Huhtamo UCLA, Dept. of Design Media Arts
Course website & blogsite: https://desma10fall18.wordpress.com/
Meeting 1, September 28, 2018 What is Design? What is Design Culture?
A common idea about design culture - but it is only small part of it.
Bijan, Beverly Hills: The World s Most Expensive Design Store (video, from YouTube) [a few beautiful too much?]
Westwood Village, September 14, 1929
Geoffrey Holme, Industrial Design and The Future (London: The Studio Limited, 1934)
Understanding Design = Reading Reality
What s Wrong with this Picture?
Understanding Design......Reading Reality
Anamorphosis, or the Art of Distorted Perspective Grégoire Huret: composition of elongated pictures, 1672
What is the strange distorted object in the foreground? Why?
It is an anamorphically distorted human skull, which can be seen correctly by looking at the painting from the side. It is a memento mori motif ( remember your mortality )
Pablo Garcia, Memento Mori tattoo
Pablo Garcia, Memento Mori Selfie Stick
Memento mori as a tattoo pattern. Tattoos are a part of design culture that deserve more attention.
Skull designs in tattoo pattern books. Pattern books are repositories for design.
To Design = To Create and Modify Reality
Design in the widest possible sense... Design is the conscious and intuitive effort to impose meaningful order. Viktor Papanek, 1971
All men are designers. All that we do, almost all the time, is design, for design is basic to all human activity. The planning and patterning of any act toward a desired, foreseeable end constitutes the design process. Any attempt to separate design to make it a thing by itself, works counter to the fact that design is the primary underlying matrix of life." Victor Papanek: Design for the Real World, 1971
Everything depends on Design Vilem Flusser, The Shape of Things. A Philosophy of Design (1999)
Mexican home altars - a domestic form of design?
Bricolage These designs can be characterized as bricolages : compositions designed by combining pre-existing designs.they express their creator s identity and worldview, consciously or unconsciously. For social anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) bricolage meant the logic of the concrete : a material way of communicating meanings. It differs from abstract and conceptual philosophical or scientific thought.
Collective and Anonymous Bricolage Patching the backside of culture, filling in the gaps and cracks of official institutional design... What kinds of meanings does for example this bricolage communicate?
Political bricolage on the street
Music Video as Bricolage: Tears for Fears, Sowing the Seeds of Love (dir. by Jim Blashfield, 1989)
What is Culture? Viktor Papanek s definition comes close to equating design with culture: We create culture by designing things, but we also need culture to be able to design. Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language. (Raymond Williams: Keywords, 1976)
Etymology: the word culture comes from the Latin word cultura: cultivation, tending.
From the cultivation of the field to the cultivation of the mind Sowing the seeds of learning. Metaphoric use: Sowing the Seeds of Love (Tears for Fears)
Sowing the seeds of media culture Radio and television broadcasting was originally an agricultural term, referring to a way of throwing the seeds around.
Three Ways of Understanding the Word Culture (Raymond Williams, Keywords): 1. A general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development. 2. A particular way of life, whether of a people, a period, a group, or humanity in general. 3. The works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity.
Culture has Material and Symbolic Dimensions Material production (studied by archaeology, cultural anthropology, ethnography) - compare with agriculture. Signifying or symbolic systems (studied by history, cultural studies, semiotics) - compare with cultivation of the mind. These two sides are always related: all cultural processes involve both the material and the symbolic.
Design Culture Includes not only the production of useful objects (and here we should add processes, services, and techniques as well), but also their distribution and consumption. Maurizio Vitta
That is not all: Design Culture... includes the planning, production, marketing and consumption of useful things. It is the changing state and environment where this happens. Design culture also includes unrealized plans, dreams, utopias, and fears. Many designs don t get realized, but they are still part of design culture!
Design Culture or Design Cultures? An important challenge for contemporary design philosophy and policy is to create and support design cultures that respect local and global, central and peripheral values and concerns. Corporate design often pretends to be global and universal, but it reflects Western values for profit. It is singular rather than plural; global only in disguise and in the sense of global markets. Is Benetton really doing it?
Culture According to Professor Huhtamo In the widest possible sense, culture is the sum total of all human efforts to create, perceive, learn, signify, to communicate. Culture is a semiotic phenomenon (Semiotics is the study of signs and sign systems as essential to human life). Culture is about learning and passing the acquired knowledge to others: in other words, communication. Humans create culture but also culture creates humans (then: how about animals? Can they have culture?)
Did the hummingbird design its nest? A hummingbird s nest, Los Angeles, Spring 2006
Can animals design or create art? Komar & Melamid s Elephant Art Academies
Suda the Elephant painting at Mae Taeng Elephant Camp (Watch this video on YouTube)
http://www.elephantartgallery.com/ Komar & Melamid s Asian Elephant Art and Conservation Project is at once a serious nonprofit organization that cooperates closely with the World Wildlife Fund and a continuation of themes familiar from the artists previous work. Having lost the jobs because of strict antilogging laws in the late 1980s, Thailand s 3,000 domesticated elephants have been forced to move into the crowded cities where they perform circus tricks, barely earning enough for their handlers (mahouts) to feed them. By establishing three Elephant Art Academies Komar & Melamid have empowered these povertystricken pachyderms to make ends meet by picking up brushes and taking the art world by storm. Hong with his Mahout
Teaching an elephant about the art of Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), the most radical intellectual artist of the twentieth century.
Painting by Lucky - Lucky is a 10 year old female elephant that resides at the Phnom Tamao Wildlife Rescue Center in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
Jackson Pollock s drip or action painting (1950 s). How does Pollock s abstract expressionism differ from an elephant s painting?
Painting by Hong - Hong is an 8 year old female elephant that resides at the Maetamann Elephant Camp in Chiang Mai, Thailand. This work raises suspicions. Elephants have been proven to recognize their own mirror image. But could an elephant draw a likeness (portrait) of another elephant, understanding the meaning of the picture? Is this actually a projection of Hong s mahout s (keeper s) aesthetic taste?
About Elephants and Painting Your mention of elephant painting in class reminded me of a post online that mentioned that most of the elephants in Thailand were being abused at a very young age to learn how to paint. As you have mentioned in class, the laws preventing the Thailand elephants to do manual labor with lumbering made way for the start of elephant painting. Now it has become a way for some in Thailand to gain money. There also has been evidence showing humans commanding the elephants about where to paint, which further supports the idea (at least in this situation) that animals do not design. The elephants are not fully conscious of what they are painting but will follow instructions to avoid punishment. -Qingqing Su
The Relationship between Imitation and Creativity? Book about the project: Komar & Melamid with Mia Fineman, When Elephants Paint (New York: Perennial, 2000).
Projections in the sky - who designed them?
Cloud that looks like Hand of God (Portugal)
God s hand lowering a crown from heavens as a justification for absolute monarchy. This is a topos, a commonplace repeated in history. Henry Peacham: Minerva Britanna, 1612
Hand of God image macro meme
A design product inspired by figures in the clouds
The tendency to anthropomorphize (to see likenesses of living beings in inanimate things) is a universal feature of human culture. http://facesinplaces.blogspot.com/ http://www.boxvox.net/2008/09/ anthropomorphic.html
Pareidolia comes from the Greek words para (faulty, wrong, instead of) and eidolon (image, form or shape) Psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often and image or sound) being perceived as significant. Common examples include seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the moon or the Moon Rabbit, and hearing hidden messages on records when played in reverse. (Wikipedia)
Professor Huhtamo s clothes hook scare
The Shinkansen bullet train, Japan
Original design created a huge pressure wave when it went through tunnels, even windscreens were blown out. Eiji Nakatsu, the re-designer, was a birdwatcher, thought about diving birds which go from one pressure medium to another. Kingfishers do not create a splash, because of their beak. The new models said to travel 10% faster and use 10% less fuel. Jane Fulton-Suri: What Nature Can Teach Us About Design (on YouTube)
Chrysler Airflow side by side with Pullman Car Corporation s M10,000 (for Union Pacific), 1934 Chrysler Airflow (1934) You have only to look at a dolphin, a gull, or a greyhound to appreciate the rightness of the tapering, flowing contour of the new Airflow Chrysler. (advertising text, 1934)
Cars have faces! It is part of industrial design.
Motorcars, they say, are truly mysterious... They have their foibles, they do unexpected things; they seem to have personalities, souls and wills of their own. You have to stroke them, treat them respectfully, never mishandle them nor overtire them. If you follow this advice, this machine made of cast iron and steel, this motor constructed according to precise calculations, will give you not only its due, but double and triple, considerably more and a whole lot better than the calculations of its creator, its father, ever dreamed of. F. T. Marinetti, Leader of the Italian Futurists, Extended Man and the Kingdom of the Machine, 1910 (published 1915)
Making (Car) Faces... Conceptual Art by the Serbian artist Vladimir Nikolic
Human Perception Turns Nature into Culture To make sense of our environment, we perceive and signify it as signs. To be able to form and read these signs we need codes. Semiotics is the science that analyzes culture as a process of giving meaning. It explains the encoding and decoding of signs. Semiotics is a useful instrument for designers, scholars and anyone living in design culture. We will learn about it later.
The Words Design and Sign are Connected Design is related to sign : a sign of the times, a sign of things to come, a sign of membership. The word is derived from the Latin signum, meaning sign, and shares the same ancient root. Thus, etymologically, design means de-sign. Vilem Flusser, About the Word Design, in The Philosophy of Design
The Idea of god as the Supreme Designer God is the great designer of the Universe (freemasonic trope) Oxford English Dictionary, 1649 Compare the notion of Grand Design with the ideology of Intelligent Design.
The Grand Design This book (2010) treats design in the largest possible sense, applying the models of quantum physics to explain the nature and origin of life and reality. Can there be design without a designer? Keywords: model-dependent realism, multiverse (instead of universe ) There is no picture- or theoryindependent concept of reality.
Design is Human capacity to shape without precedent in nature Design, stripped to its essence, can be defined as the human capacity to shape and make our environment in ways without precedent in nature, to serve our needs and give meaning to our lives. John Heskett: Toothpicks and Logos, 2002
According to the philosopher Vilém Flusser, Being a human being is a design against nature" - what did he really mean? Vilém Flusser: The Shape of Things. A Philosophy of Design,1999
About the Word Design (Vilem Flusser) The word occurs in contexts associated with cunning and deceit. A designer is a cunning plotter laying his traps. This is the design that is the basis of all culture: to deceive nature by means of technology, to replace what is natural with what is artificial and build a machine out of which there comes a god who is ourselves. The price we pay for this is the loss of truth and authenticity.
Is this what Flusser meant? The negative impact of design. Design can do good but it can also go wrong. The Gulf of Mexico, 2010
Humans use design to control and exploit nature, with mixed success. Nature hits back: it behaves in unpredictable ways. Is it not really the human being who caused all this? We still cannot design rain or sunshine or earthquake free environments...