The Incredible Rabbit

I have spent a long time trying to decide how I feel about projects such as the GFP bunny and GenTerra and even longer trying to formulate a reasoned response to them. On one hand I am completely behind their intentions to educate in the area of genetic technologies and propagate considered debate. As Haraway explains in Cloning Mutts, Saving Tigers “the crucial ethical issues now in human cloning are the biological matters” and these “are given short shrift in public discussions”.1 I agree absolutely that generally the public are ill-informed about the technicalities of transgenics and cloning technologies and this does lower the level of public debate to accusations of playing God. However I would question whether these projects do succeed in their intentions. Speaking about genetic technology Eduardo Kac, the creator of the GFP bunny makes the eminently laudable suggestion that “Rather than embracing a blind rejection of the technology, which is undoubtedly already a part of the new bioscape, citizens of open societies must make an effort to study the multiple views on the subject”.2 But does a mutant glowing green rabbit help people to take a measured reasoned approach to this new technology or just provide further sensationalist ammunition for tabloid newspapers? GenTerra aims to engage directly in rational debate with the public through its website (now) and through interactive performances (initially). However a quick tour of its website finds it opaque and confusing (with text so small my eyes hurt after five minutes). It seems the intention of engaging with non-specialists has been lost on the way with a preponderence of heavy technical text, which is exactly the problem I would hope a project like GenTerra would have solved.
Donna Haraway, “Cloning Mutts, Saving Tigers” When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press,2008), 137
Eduardo Kac
http://www.ekac.org/gfpbunny.html#gfpbunnyanchor

Artificial/Natural

"Wild Boars" - 2004

"T-Rex" - 2004

I am writing this post about the video called Duck in the City in my previous post, somewhere down there. The photographs above are by Mandy Lee Jandrell.

As i see it there are 4 key elements in the video;

• Me: Holder of the camera, controller of where the focus lies.
• The environment/context: Regent's Canal and the Ecology Pavilion pond.
• The artificial duck
• The actual ducks/birds

This context isn't natural because it was manmade, but nature - the actual ducks/birds - still reside and thrive in it. As such, perhaps it is not that it isn't natural but that it isn't organic.

The artificial duck is also manmade, but we wouldn't call it natural or organic. That is unless one takes the view that humans are such a part of nature that even our technological creations can be deemed part of nature.

Obviously, the actual ducks/birds would be deemed part of nature, and organic. But perhaps given that the city is no longer a natural habitat for them (or is it that wherever nature resides is inherently a natural habitat?), and it has taken human intervention to provide an appropriate environment, they are part of the manmade chain whilst still being organic.

Therein lies the intertwining of nature and humanity.

Buying Your Way Into Heaven

It’s bewildering that anti-consumerist ideologies such as the Green movement, paradoxically manifest themselves within the consumerist matrix.


Classmate Charlotte’s assertion that consumerism – specifically to western populations – is the obsession that gives people the reason for living, I doubt is something that can be attributed solely to westerners.


Consumerism is not a western, cultural infection, but an inherent human activity. Throughout time people consumed, creating the civilization we live in today. The current 'western', Madison Avenue version, is an extreme show of opulence, made capable by technological advancement and Man's elevation from mere survival to the fulfillment of needs. This 'obsession', with similar cultural and financial capability, would be practiced by all of humanity. It is a collective expression of our progress as a civilization; an inbuilt part of being human.


The Green movement suffers from a strange paradox; promote Green living and the reduction of an ones consumption, by creating brands and products that albeit adhere to ecological production standards, still create and promote consumption. This conflict, 'Buying Green' inherently undermining Green ideology, only serves to reduce the ability for the Green movement to succeed in it's intentions.

“There is a very common mind-set right now which holds that all that we’re going to need to do to avert the large-scale planetary catastrophes upon us is make slightly different shopping decisions,” said Alex Steffen, the executive editor of Worldchanging.com, a Web site devoted to sustainability issues in an issue of The New York Times.

The genuine solution, he suggests, is not to Buy Green, but to significantly reduce one’s consumption of goods and resources.

The "Art" of Survival

“In one sense, all artists seek to change the world. To make things, even to propose ideas, is intrinsically a hopeful act. The most cynical artist, describing the least attractive alternative to the unmediated world, harbours at least a feeble hope that his dark view will prompt some transformation – whether of conciousness or of substance – that will save us all.”1.

It was Vilem Flusser who referred to 'art' as the “soft” side of culture, that it deals only with the “aesthetic” and “evaluative.” It was in design that he believed we would actually create something of substance that could begin to shape the world; “design increasingly becomes the centre of attention, with the question of design replacing that of the idea.”2. Could we then, through design, change the world?
There are exhibitions that press upon this idea, such as Design for the Other 90%, whose products are designed to aid those who lack what many would refer to as 'basic supplies.' Products like the Big Boda Load Carrying Bicycle or the Life Straw.
But there are also projects that, whilst covering topics of similar value, are not as successful in delivering their message. Projects like Krzysztof Wodiczko's “Homeless Vehicles” project. A project that was was “neither a temporary nor a permanent solution to the housing problem”3, but more to articulate the escalating amount of homeless; less of a solution for “the other 90%,” and more a highlight for “the original 10%.”

“The designer used to have the production of useful objects at the forefront of his mind,”4. Writes Flusser. And perhaps he is right. In order to change the world, maybe it is time to design things that deal with the problem at hand as opposed to merely highlighting the existence of one.



1. Charles Desmarais. “Director's Foreword,” Ecovention (Contemporary Arts Center, 2002). Vilém Flusser. “The Ethics of Industrial Design?” About the Word Design: 20 (Great Britain: Reaktion Books, 1999).
2. Vilém Flusser. “The Ethics of Industrial Design?” About the Word Design: 20 (Great Britain: Reaktion Books, 1999).
3. krzysztof wodiczko: the homeless vehicle project, http://www.designboom.com/eng/archi/wodiczko.html
4. Vilém Flusser. “The Ethics of Industrial Design?” The Shape of Things: 66 (Great Britain: Reaktion Books, 1999).

Urbanised Squirrels Attack

I recently took a walk in Greenwich Park to take pictures. I had bought some Chinese food at the market and was looking for a nice spot to have a picnic. While strolling through the park I found a very isolated and bleak area, the grass was yellow and dead and the trees had no leaves. I picked up the camera to take pictures when I saw a few squirrels. 

I approached a squirrel perched on a tree and lifted my camera. Usually squirrels will scatter off when something is pointed directly at them but this one looked back at me curiously. Two more showed up and appeared to climb up a tree next to me to get a better look. A fourth one now started to sneak towards me carefully and just when I was about to take a picture it suddenly jumped on me and crawled up all the way to my thigh before I managed to shake it off. Suddenly the two squirrels in the tree jumped down towards me as well. In order to get a better look at what was going on I turned and went a few steps back, only to realize that I was being followed by five very determined squirrels.

I left the area, avoiding trees and walking through open fields in order to avoid any other curious squirrels. They followed me through the open field for what must have been well over 300 meters, stopping when I turned to look and continuing when I turned back to walk. I had never experienced such aggressive behaviour from small critters, and I started thinking about how they're environment must have affected them for behaving the way they did.

Curious about the experience, I began to research the urbanization of critters and how living in a crowded, man-made environment affects them. According to researcher Tommy Parker of the University of Missouri-Columbia (http://blogs.nature.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/969 - visited on March 25th 2009) squirrels behave very much like humans in crowded areas, getting pushy and aggressive, as opposed to they're defensive nature. It is not normal for a squirrel to attack a creature over twenty times its own size but this is what living in a man-made environment has made them. Century old instincts can therefore be overridden in mere years, making a critter which lives off collecting and storing food a predator, attacking and hunting other creatures. 

I don't know the context of this video, but behaviour like this is in no way natural for a squirrel under any circumstances: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41ADeaQ_N-M

In Mountain View, California, squirrel attacks have become frequent enough for the authorities to put up warning signs, cautioning park visitors to stay away from squirrels due to their aggressive nature. http://cbs5.com/pets/sqirrels.cuesta.park.2.447602.html

I find this shift in natural hierarchy very interesting. How small defensive critters have become a threat to humans under certain circumstances, who by mere physical capability and difference in size could easily defend themselves. However it would be completely unacceptable to do such a thing in our day and age. At the same time, the new conditioning habitat creating the aggressive behaviour in the first place is man-made, suggesting an interesting paradox - humans have conditioned tiny creatures to become aggressive predators in an urban environment and at the same time have conditioned themselves not to harm these small creatures, leaving themselves open to attack. 

Artificial/Natural

As part of the Artificial/Natural debate, I intend to discuss relations between humans and animals, in the theatre of parks and manmade 'nature' areas. This discussion will mainly unfold in my final 2000 word essay, but I'm beginning with a video here. 

Where better to explore human/animal relations than London, a city full of green spaces and plenty of humans?

The video follows my exploration in Bow, along the Regent's canal and a pond beside it, a stone's throw from Roman Road. The pond sits outside of a building called the Ecology Pavilion, in Mile End park.

Unsure whether I could rely on Nature to provide the wildlife, I took along my Artificial duck for the journey.

The Original 10%?

Further to Alex Green's post “Useful?”

“The word “design” is defined and based on how an object or concept balances three attributes: aesthetics, function, and cost. The “best” designs are usually equated with the highest costs, so that the designers’ names attain an aura of privilege or distinction--and thereby bestow commensurate prestige on the user.”1

Funding is a main issue in any situation, especially in today's economic climate. For all the problems in the world, there will always be a solution, but the larger the problem, the higher the cost of the solution. Where a solution can be thought of to tackle a problem, it will always fall upon what funds can be received in order to implement the designed solution. A prime example of this problem would be the Q-drum. Designed to tackle the difficulty of transporting water over long distances in countries like Africa, the Q-drum was an ideal solution.


But this “low cost, rollable water container for developing countries,” as it is described on it's website, provides only half a solution, whilst at the same time presenting a secondary problem. On the page detailing the pricing of the Q-drums, it explicitly states "The people that need them need can't afford them & must rely on people who can afford them but don't need them." The problem created then, is that the item designed for “the other 90%,” then comes under the scrutiny of the original 10% who, as stated, have three distinct concerns.


And as was quoted of Dr. Paul Polak, “Nothing less than a revolution in design is needed to reach the other 90%.”2 If the product is anything short of a media superstar, chances are the product, no matter how perfectly functional it is, will probably never even see it past the design phase.


1. Barbara Bloemink, ‘Foreword,’ Design for the Other 90% (Cooper-Hewitt, NYC 2007).

2. Dr Paul Polak, http://www.qdrum.co.za/index.php/home

Design for animals

Nowadays people don’t just design things for human, they design things for animals too. There are all sort of different products designed for different animals, but mainly for those animals that most people would choose to pet, such as dogs, cats and birds. Animal has definitely become an important part of our society. We care about animal much more than people did in the past centuries. Some products that were for human used only has now designed into an animal used version as well. Different charities developed like the RSPB, are working to secure a healthy environment for the animals and save them from any problems. I do agree that we should care for animals, but some of the designs for them are very unnecessary and useless. A project was made about designing the safety outfit for small animals. Things like dust mask and safety hat were designed in a much smaller size so that they could fit them. I think there was a nice idea behind it, but was it a good way to save and help the animals? Also because the designs were for small animals only, then what about the big ones, this has leaded me to an idea of we only care about certain animals that we want to care. Designing for animals is good, but sometimes it is too much.

(This entry is by winnie, I am using the other’s account as I had some problems with logging into mine)

ARTIFICIAL, NATURALLY

Artificial beach in Miyazaki, Japan, the world's largest artificial beach.

”If Nature is not made by or for human beings, then it remains foreign, forever remote and hostile”(B. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, p. 31)
Yes yes Nature was not created by human beings indeed.
We started out thinking that the world was flat, that we were the centre of the universe and that the universe was created by someone we called God.
Luckily scientists proved us wrong.
The fact that nature was not created by us, seemed to make us think that it was made for us instead. Because of the nature of humans, we have for a long time exploited the resources of the earth.
However, during the past 10-20 years a trend in western society has evolved that we should all go organic and a certain romance around the concept of nature has arisen.
We bring the outdoor indoors in interiors, advertising things labelled as ”natural” and sustainable thinking has seems to be equivalent with good morals.

A romanticised relation to nature can also be seen in the art and design world e.g. Artists like Olafur Eliasson and Mariele Neudecker works with a recreation of nature or nature phenomenon.

Mariele Neudecker, Heaven, The Sky, 2008
Artificial recreations of nature made of mixed media incl. water, resin, salt, mercury lamps.

Mariele Neudecker, I Dont Know How I Resisted, 1998
mixed media incl. water, acrylic medium, salt, fibreglass.

Olafur Eliasson, New York Waterfall, 2004

Latour, B.(1991)"We Have Never Been Modern", La Découverte
www.olafureliasson.net
www.marieleneudecker.co.uk

Real life 'Slumdog' slum to be demolished

" Five years after the regional government announced its intention to redevelop Dharavi, the vast Mumbai slum where parts of "Slumdog Millionaire" were filmed, developers are finally submitting their blueprints for the project.

Nineteen consortiums from around the world are vying to redevelop the 500-plus acres of land occupied by Dharavi and the bulldozers could move in within six months."

This news bulliton from CNN gave me mixed feelings about the approach that will be taken in the redevlopement of the Mumbai slums. Firstly, The redevelopment of slums is vitally important to the people living there and for poverty stricken areas to survive. This particular area of slums is so vast it reaches 3 different railway stops, which is great for connectivity and will aid people in the slums to work in other areas of the city.

The plan is to demolish the site within 6 months, but my concern is the devlopment stage. Where will people live whilst bullzoers destroy their livelyhoods and communities. Depite the harsh livng conditions, families, nieghbours, workers and friends have all developed a unique society in Mumbai. Is the answer to devloping slums into an adequete living space demolish all of it at once?

15,000 workers in the area even protested the development proposals in 2007. The development is not even made for everyone as workers who live in their workshops and residents who moved after 1999 are not eligible to have a living space. These poeple will have to move to other slums as a result.

PCM

“The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd.”

Now Andre’s not saying go and do just that, the act represents the subconscious mind, the juxtaposing of ideas, the creation of fantastic imagery to aid creativity. Surrealism sought to disperse the 'rationalism' that created World War 1, the rational belief that reason and logic are the primary sources of knowledge that should be relied upon in searching for and testing the truth of things. Surrealism offered an alternative to rationalism; it shaped the future and continues to shape creativity to this day. The Dada movement was similarly nihilistic; rejecting established social conventions and beliefs sharing Surrealism’s bitterness towards militarism and WW1. Like the Surrealist manifesto, Dada had Salvador Dali’s, paranoid critical method, which served the artificial reproduction of a paranoiacs view on the world, seeing the world in a new light, creating unsuspecting connections, analogies and patterns. 

“Paranoid-Critical Method is both the product of and the remedy against that anxiety: it promises that, through conceptual recycling, the worn, consumed contents of the world can be recharged or enriched like uranium, and that ever-new generations of false facts and fabricated evidences can be generated simply through the act of interpretation.”

Similar to Surrealism the Paranoid-Critical Method proposes to destroy, what we already think we know, to re-classify everything, to make a fresh start, 

“like banging a piece into a jigsaw puzzle so that it sticks, if not fits.”

The Surrealist Manifesto and the Paranoid-Critical Method made undoubtedly changed future creativity, today there is no great war, no great depression, we live in an age of meaningless consumerism, a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, paranoia and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more, an unsustainable addiction to economic growth. Where is our liberator, constructing future creativity?

TARGET YOU

Target You was one of the short clips that we have watched in the lecture. The part that we have watched was about the civilian preparation for possible enemy attack such as atomic attack. In 1951, as the panic over the Soviet Union and their Bomb escalated, the U.S. government struck a deal with private film distributors to produce short subject civil defence motion pictures for public release. The whole film was meant to be an educational film, but does it really help people to feel prepared? I thought the black and white screen with graphical moving images made it seems less tense and more relaxed. It was a different way of looking at risk. On the other hand, personally I found that the voice of the man speaking in the film was kind of annoying and disturbing. Some contents in it were not so true, for example, it said about preparing three days food in the storage so that you can survive if anything emergency happens, but is three days food really enough? There were quite lots of questions that could be brought up by people which could make them feel even more panic after watching the film. Though I think it is good that the government has done something to help people to get prepared, but it is also very difficult to decide how they should go with it and was everything necessary.

(This entry is by winnie, I am using the other’s account as I had some problems with logging into mine)

AESTHETICA

”Beauty is truth, truth is beauty” –so said the romantic poet John Keats.
But what is beauty and truth? Our perceptions of these concepts are never something that can fully be understood because they are ever changing.

This is a comment on the everlasting discussion about aesthetics in art and design and a story about my early experiences in art school, which helped me gain some kind of understanding of the fluent meanings of aesthetics.

Throughout periods in time we have applied various meanings to the word reflecting the thoughts that were significant to that particular period in time.
In the early 1900s Dada stated their anti-aesthetics. “A point that I want very much to establish is that the choice of these ‘ready-mades’ was never dictated by aesthetic delectation.” Marcel Duchamp (1961)


Some critics thinks that Dadaism is the prelude to postmodernism, “Dada is the groundwork to abstract art and sound poetry, a starting point for performance art, a prelude to postmodernism, an influence on pop art, a celebration of anti-art to be later embraced for anarcho-political uses in the 1960s and the movement that lay the foundation for Surrealism.”( Marc Lowenthal, translator's introduction to Francis Picabia's I Am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose, And Provocation).

Within art and design today, aesthetics are also seen as something second rate and or rather banal.
In 2006 I went to art school in London. Here aesthetic art was certainly not well seen. There was a particular guy who was very aware of his image as a non-believer in aesthetic; he was off course also a great supporter of the Dada.
He kept stating how all art should not exist to please the eye and so on. What was very hard to avoid noticing was how extremely image conscious he was. Always dressed in grey or black and was actually the most well dressed person on the course.

Today design and the design process it is fashionable to be ethically if not globally aware, working with concepts and being “responsible”.
What is so obvious about trying to devalue aesthetics both in art and design, whether its Dadaism or Post-Modernism is that non-aesthetic is in itself a form of aesthetics.
The guy wearing black and grey chose a non-aesthetic style, but that in itself is an aesthetic style.
Being sustainable and environmentally aware designing from these concepts can also be seen as a form of aesthetic expression.
All art and design relates to aesthetic because it is man made. It is here and the question is how to use it, not neglect or reject it. After all how can we experience art or design without our senses?

Latour, B.(1991)"We Have Never Been Modern", La Découverte
Kul-Want, C.(2007)"Introducing Aesthetics", Icon Books
www.brooklynrail.org/2006/07/art/dada2

Packaged money.

It is clear that we over package objects and that we should not consume what we do not need, however we are stuck in a conflicting cycle of ecological vs economical needs or wants.  From the perspective of society and not from the individual it is not the objects that we design which are the problem but the money, which we use to consume the things that is.  Therefore, until we stop the want for more money our consumption methods are unlikely to change.  As you would assume the hunger for money in our society is unlikely to be suppressed anytime soon, as it is what drives the society itself.  As a result, perhaps packaging change campaigns towards changing our consumption is not the most successful way to approach our problem.  We need to re-design our consumption before we can ask society to change how we consume.  

Graphic designers role in forming sustainable design futures

There are two very different actions of a graphic designer that both affect the ethical and sustainable issues of the health of our environment and our society in polar opposite ways.

The are the graphic and print designs' polluters and its informers or communicators of the environmental and social issues that are produced by the graphic designers as well as politicians. According to the Printers National Environmental Center the former are known to cause "81 million tons" of paper waste annually in USA and the "pulp and paper industry is the third largest buyer of elemental chlorine". The process of the chlorine to make the paper whiter is used all the time and is tied with the "proven cancer - causing chemical" - dioxin. 

And the latter graphic designers are linked with the distribution of environmental as well as ethical messages: weather they convey print designs' sustainability issues or the social messages addressed to the political organs who also play a role in sustaining our environment(pictures 1, 2).

I believe that both sides of this graphic communication are strongly connected. The paper waste that comes out of the printers and graphic designers hands is being constantly burned producing immense smoke clouds which then are recorded as a strong piece of graphic communication to inform our society of environmental changes. However, i believe that these same changes can be formed by graphic designers themselves to create better design futures.

Not only could the printing process be cleaned up but graphic designers could also communicate the problems of sustaining paper waste and the toxic products of print.

Such solutions as the use of soy inks, recycled paper, cutting of chlorine content and the introduction of washable stock and safe press-clean-up procedures could help us sustain the environment. In addition, graphic communication could aid the construction of public opinion by informing us about the ethical and sustainable issues that designers, politicians and regular citizens are responsible for creating as well as sustaining as a part of a better design future.

www.greenprinteronline.com/blog/?p=28

http://powerofdesign.aiga.org/conetnt.cfm/szenasy

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=3918

The Bright Capitalist Future is Here to Stay (personal geography)

The rubbish which Bulgarian people produced in their Communist past was little. They were cherishing and reusing the rare, usually imported plastic bag again and again, the food left-overs were used to feed the domestic animals or in a compost, in order to buy a drink you needed to exchange glass bottles. The shoppers provided their own packaging – net bags, trolleys, aluminium containers. There were special recycling depots called “Secondary Resources”, where one could submit old paper, metal, glass in exchange for some money. These were resources needed, recycled and reused. With the fall of the wall, hunger stroke for a while, but then the political system got sort of democratised and imports flooded, and plastic bags of all colours penetrated the everyday. Capitalism arrived, promising development = consumer comforts. Done with the totalitarian abstention! Now, people, you can speak Out and (hopefully soon) buy MORE. So from a country with an established recycling structure – like the depots mentioned above (they shut down), Bulgaria was swept by plastic rubbish. Somehow the Bulgarian could not do without the foam trays and cling filmed tomatoes, as they would have done before. Now, more business is generated – more packaging is made, new recycling plants are being built, sophisticated systems imported from countries which have been enjoying the nylon cucumber wrap for much longer. Bulgarian farmers were then sent to courses to learn about Organic produce. The courses were held in the same shop selling new synthetic fertilizers. People from the developed countries came to build organic goat farms, next door to the village facility of the same type which had been rearing goat on grass, bush and salt for centuries in huts made of earth and stone. The Developers needed expensive, elaborate imported mechanisms and structures. Then with the entry in the EU these mechanisms became essential for all… What the arrival of consumer capitalism did, was to eradicate the existent sustainable structures, revamp it, and resell it back as a hip trend. Developing Bulgaria is going where developed Capitalist Countries are coming from. Can we only weep?
Restore, rearrange, reassemble, revamp, renovate, revise, recover, redesign, return - the Parthenon marbles - redo, respect, rent: verbs that start with re-, produce Junkspace.

Rem Koolhaas, Junkspace

"A Brighter Future?"

More and more cities have been replacing the regular lights in light poles with LED's for more efficient energy saving way before the technology proved to work.

However efficient this switch may appear, it is a big investment that could trigger less lit streets and the cut down on light poles in other areas of the city. The approach has also already been adopted in parking garages in North carolina and Haitian villages in Alaska. 

On an environmentally responsible note, the concept proves successful with several points, such as boosting cost savings as the lights can be dimmed to save energy as well as produce street flashes (triggered by a 911 operator) for emergency responders in case of trouble. In addition the lights also have the design and aesthetic advantages as more people tend to appreciate the crystal-like blue light. Recently the LEDs have met the appropriate requirements to be integrated into the city traffic's infrastructure and have been improved to move the light "towards the street and away from the sky",  preventing more car accidents.

With the "soft white color temperature" of the lights the perception of the colors during the day has been changed for the people of Alaska. This introduces a transformation of the quality of light as well as cuts down the energy by 50% ( in Michigan). The general response to lights was that they appear more light and safer. And because the human eye is more active when its dark, we see better in white light. Therefore, the Alaska citizens who are exposed to less than 8 hours of sunlight per day experience colors in a stronger way. This appears as a great compromise on saving energy and cutting costs as well as a new way of redesigning light and its perception to fit the needs of the urban environment that we live in.

Design Futures.

ref, Metropolis magazine 08 Dec, www.metropolismag.com

▶ Consumption- Credit Cards ◀

Consumption- Credit Cards

Consumption is people through the purchase money, tangible or intangible goods or services, and gains the satisfaction of personal desires. Human consumption perhaps comes from those activities (such as people walk past restaurants, provoking loss of appetite). Consumption or purchase involves very complex decision-making and it is all related to personal income, personal preferences, social customs, and even close friends and family of the purchase behavior of consumers have an impact on people. If purchased goods are expensive, but also driven consumers to make goods and comparisons between alternatives, to appear consumer behavior.



Thorstein B Veblen said in his book-The Theory of the Leisure Class-An Economic Study of Institutions, “ Conspicuous Consumption, Vicarious Consumption, Conspicuous Leisure, and Conspicuous Waste. It is amazing what a very large proportion of social activity, higher education, devout observance, and upper-class consumer goods seemed to fit snugly into one or another of these classification.”
The amount of people spending correlates to theirs income level; however, some people rather spend over what they can really afford to impress others. Do we have to do that?


▶ References ◀

☞ Thorstein B Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class-An Economic Study of Institutions, P.62 (2007)
☞ http://hk.news.yahoo.com/article/081217/4/9sd1.html
☞http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3411/3305697395_1f4dc2d9a2.jpg?v=0

*THIS ENTRY IS BY CHRIS WAGGOTT* Fusion power – future design playground?

*DUE TO TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES THIS ENTRY HAS BEEN POSTED ON BEHALF OF CHRIS WAGGOTT*



I recently watched a horizon episode on BBC2 about the research into fusion power as a future source of energy, completely eradicating our reliance on fossil fuels and renewable sources that cant keep up with demand.

“Nuclear fusion is nature's power source. From the Sun to the most distant stars, the energy that lights up the Universe is released by sticking hydrogen nuclei together to make helium.

Since hydrogen is the most abundant element in the Universe, it seems sensible to ask whether we might Endeavour to do the same and power ourselves out of our serious energy crisis by building stars on Earth.” Prof Brian Cox 2009

Throughout the program Prof Brian Cox mentions many times that we need to be seriously thinking about fusion power as a reality now, rather than thinking of it as some far future technology, and this is where I started thinking. With such a change in the way that we produce our energy there will be all the systems, practices, products, services and sub-technologies that will need to come about, all fertile ground for the designer.

Link to the episode.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00hr6bk/Horizon_20082009_Can_We_Make_a_Star_on_Earth/

Christopher Waggott

Design and Futures: Le Corbusier, Man or Mouse?

Le Corbusier in 1946 infiltrated the city of Marseilles and proposed a project named, Unite d’Habitation. The practisien envisioned a utopian ideal that is captured simply in the following abstract,

‘I want to restore the human spirit under conditions of nature…which has been lost.’1

Specifically, he designed a tower block to house 300 residents. In the years to come, such buildings became prey to vandalism, neglect, poverty, and despair. I ask, why? Le Corbusier engineered spaces that were compact and the Unite d’Habitation was ‘extremely intimate’2 in this respect. I question if those spaces, being of a close and personal nature, influence our behaviours and actions?

Popular culture illustrates our human desire to escape, temporarily, from our former self and become something other. Randal Kleiser’s 1992 science fiction film, Honey I Blew Up The Kid, portrays a child who has been blown up in giant proportion, and ancient Greek literature in the way of Homer’s The Odyssey narrates encounters with giants and other creatures alike. Fiction presents us with depictions of the human body that are larger than their true to life counterpart. Liberating the body in this way reflects humanity's desire for freedom of space, freedom of movement, and freedom of action. Le Corbusier endeavoured to restore the human spirit, although by densely populating his concrete giants the occupier’s perception of self shifts. The inhabitant becomes aware of their microscopic existence in comparison to the imposing presence of the Unite d’Habitation. Such places resonate feelings of alienation and anxiety. Disembodied, the human spirit is inescapably put out like a flame turned to smoke. I for one admire the vision of pioneers such as Le Corbusier, but history has revealed that architecture must adapt and evolve to a rapidly shifting economically and technologically charged global climate.

‘Innovative, disembedded technologies…render traditional assumptions about planning and managing the future inappropriate and consequently the language of prediction and control loses its pertinence…notions of predictability…have indeed been overtaken by their own failures to secure any calculable future.’3

1. Charles-Edward Jeanneret, Le Corbusier The Art of Architecture (London: Barbican Art Gallery, 2009).
2. Charles-Edward Jeanneret, Le Corbusier The Art of Architecture (London: Barbican Art Gallery, 2009).
3. Barbara Adam, Ulrich Beck and Joost Van Loon, eds., The Risk Society and Beyond: Critical Issues for Social Theory (London: Sage Publications, 2000), 6.