we are needed
maria portnov jonathan ventura
As it stands, we must accommodate technology. It is time to transform the technology to accommodate us. 1
Dieter Rams, a market-oriented minimalist knight heralded design’s conquest by the Apple banner, cleansing our discipline of any unnecessary issues such as values, ideology and social impact, all of which quickly became anathema among designers. Marketing experts strengthened their hold on the discipline. Branding ruled and often people were forgotten. The designer as marketing-oriented problem solver was ubiquitous, save for small outliers waiting for change.
Fellow designers, heed our call lest our beloved discipline becomes irrelevant !
—Donald A Norman, 2009
We are engulfed by rapidly unfolding global changes yet find ourselves late to articulate appropriate solutions: global migration, refugees, local and regional military tensions, the decline of brand value and the rising of ‘the wicked questions of design’ imbued with vast technological changes. We must beware of being blinded by these evocative technologies and return to the bane of our discipline – narrative design. 3 Let us start with a brief historical stroll and end with a suggestion, focusing on the epitaph of our current situation – the urban realm. Romanticism, contrary to its name, was a nineteenth century ailment introduced to our discipline. It focussed on the individual’s ability and right to express himself (male- focused at the time), heralding the single genius creator. Romanticism also brought forth the troubling side of value-oriented design, culminating in such documents as Marinetti’s 1909 Manifesto del Futurismo . The essence of this ailment was narrative
In the future, design and planning must assume the responsibility for transforming what is today barely virtual into something real. In that way design and planning would become the guiding factor of the Revolution; in fact, it would itself be the Revolution. 2 —Tomas Maldonado, 1972
Colleagues, this change must come if we want to remain relevant!
Let us say the designer as problem-solver is gone, long live the designer as social interpreter! Yet, how might this change take place, you ask, most rightfully. Let us focus our attention on contemporary urban surroundings as a case study, then offer our suggestion for a much-needed change. In many current discussions within the urban design discipline we witness a nostalgic lamentation over the loss of simple social interactions and human connections in our daily urban lives, replaced by screens and virtual platforms. The healthy stroll without aim, manifested by the flâneur, has been replaced with incessant glances at one’s personal data device, making social interaction obsolete. The situation is grave. Designers have abrogated the responsibility to manage the co-existence between the two worlds, the digital and the flâneur’s stroll. Instead there is a careless coercion that privileges the virtual over the street. The old definition of our profession looked for problems, then suggesed a (usually technology-appropriate) solution. A new approach is needed, one that sees the designer as a socio-cultural interpreter. That this shift is needed is illustrated by an answer given by Zaha Hadid when asked of the high fatality rate in her soccer stadium in Qatar: ‘I have nothing to do with the workers, I think it’s for the government to take care of. It’s not my duty as an architect to look at it’.
design originated solely to reflect its creator’s own inner world of values.
The end of World War One saw an explosion of value-oriented design – a reaction to the cruelty and madness of nationalism and religious vanity. Be it a return to basic geometries or idealistic markets – values were the measure in design. By the mid- 1960s this had crumbled under new gods of marketing and consumer culture. The critical friction point was a struggle between the two sides of design as a value system. On one side, Max Bill represented the cold logic of industrial design – answering the market’s needs with affordable, functional and aesthetically minimalistic solutions. On the other side, Tomas Maldonado drew a new solar system of values borrowed from other disciplines such as psychology, sociology, anthropology and biology. The battle for the very definition of the designer’s role in society was valiantly fought.
Portnov and Ventura
above: Tel Aviv, 2017
1 Norman, D. A. ‘Compliance and tolerance’. Interaction 16(3): 2009. pp 61–65 2 Maldonado. Tomás. [1972]. Design, Nature and Revolution: Toward a Critical Ecology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019. p 28 3 In the context of our material future we analyse the designer’s role and its relevance to this near (and maybe far) future in the era of technological advancement. We claim that design has little potential to survive without obtaining a value system based on ideology and dealing with social issues (harsh issues as well as small everyday issues). When the software will replace other methods in all areas and will become the main actor, the narrative design which is about the designer–artist and not about inclusive user experience, will stay as aesthetic expression — not enough to justify itself. The other side, market oriented design, which serves consumerism and branding and doesn’t really have ideology to guide it, will eventually be made extinct by technology.
But we lost. 4
We cannot accept this type of answer!
4 ‘But we lost’ Who is ‘we’? Value-oriented designers, but it can also address all the designers that will eventually lose because the discipline will be gone.
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on site review 36: our material future
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