Futures

Managing design outcomes

Designing for the future is what design is in a nut shell. We revisit and re evaluate designs as inspiration for a new design. Katka’s blog confirms how designers tend to revaluate past good or bad design, in this case there were designs such as the cave that could be an alternative to slums; “‘A cave’ is associated with the past left far behind”. Design has the potential to infiltrate change but whether we can manage to get the reponse it was designed for can be a risk. Can design manage the consequence it was designed for? Victor Papanek in ‘Design for the real world’ describes change as; “Acceleration, change, and acceleration of change itself arise from the meeting of structures or systems along their edges”.

Le Corbusier designed the Pruitt-Igoe housing estate in St. Louis. The incentive was to build housing for the homeless. To Le Corbusier astonishment, however, the homeless would rather stay in their current condition. He designed these buildings as a better alternative.
However “Ever since Le Corbusier first suggested the assembly-line house, architects have been pre-occupied with finding a solution to the world’s housing crisis through mass manufacturing. In the 1950’s French architect Jean Prouvé developed modular houses for post-colonial Africa that could be shipped, erected, dismantled, and shipped again like an industrial-scale erector set” Kate Stohr (article on snap house).

In disasters such as the earthquake in San Francisco in 1906 accommodation had to be enforced eventually in consequence of such a long term effect, there were 40,000 refugees in destitute. They were “concerned by the possibility of permanent squatter settlements”. So “at the center of this strategy was the design for a small wooden cottage”. So these were designed with the incentive of “providing temporary shelter but also a path to homeownership for hundreds of San Francisco’s low-wage-earning families who might otherwise have never had the means to purchase a home”. So in the case of Le Corbusier design; was there enough research to foresee whether the homeless would be attracted to his alternative? Kate Stohr also explains that Le Corbusier lived in an era where architects and designers harnessed the potential of industry to produce low-cost buildings.


So reiterating on past successes and failures in this field is a good way to apprehend how the client will respond. “The design team is structured to bring many different disciplines to bear upon the problems that need solving, as well as to search for problems that need to be rethought” claims Victor Papenek. Buckminster Fuller, however, believes that “extinction is a consequence of over-specialisation. As you get more and more over-specialised, you inbreed specialisation. It’s organic. As you do, you outbreed general adaptability, so here have the warning that specialisation is a way to extinction”. So maybe an excess of re design isn’t the way forward?

The world development report explains a possible reason for designs outcomes, which can be in relation to the designs I have disscussed. “The main difference between success and failure is the degree to which poor people themselves are involved in determining the quality and quantity of the services they receive”. Architects have continued to respond to the issue of cheap housing and an example is “Alchemy Architects’ factory-built WeeHouse, a tiny 336 square foot dwelling that costs just
US$49,000 and arrives on a flatbed truck”.



www.samsung.com/Features/BrandMagazine/magazinedigitall/2005_spring/feat_02a.htm
Kate Stohr, 100 years of humanitarian design.
Victor Papenek, Design for the real world.
Katka