Make it yourself: The state of design, part 2
We ended part one with the following question: ‘How can designers reclaim the means on behalf of their products and the people who use them?’ In other words, how can we see past the allure of the ‘device’ to re-engage with both the systems that bring it to fruition and the systems in which it operates? We will now discuss the promise of maker movements as one possible answer to these questions, as well as some problems or limitations of ‘making’.
This New Yorker article provides an insightful history of the current mania for making, tracing its roots back to the Arts and Crafts movement a century ago. The author lists a couple of key points that explain why and how the earlier effort failed to have a wider impact. He brings in the American women’s rights advocate Mary Dennett’s contention, for example, that Arts and Crafts spent ‘too much time on “rag-rugs, baskets, and … exhibitions of work chiefly by amateurs”, rather than asking the most basic questions about inequality.’ He also argues that the movement failed to present ‘a radical alternative to the alienated labor of the factories. Instead, it provided yet another therapeutic escape from it’, devolving into a hobby for the bourgeoisie. Sound familiar?
While it is true that elements of makerism have settled in the craft beer, custom bike, and sourdough cultivating gentrifications of East London and Brooklyn (not that there’s anything wrong with beer, bikes or bread per se), a less hipster, more revolutionary, tech-orientated approach has also been bubbling away.
Maker spaces, with their invaluable dual access to machines and people with knowledge, have been touted as invigorating local economies and making it possible for small entrepreneurs to compete with MegaCorp. On a recent trip to Hong Kong we visited Cesar Harada’s MakerBay, and it struck us as a great example of what these spaces can be. MakerBay houses several independent start-ups, offers classes training local people how to make, and provides a nice mix of making practices and tools (see point below).
Our opinion is that there is great potential in making, but design needs to play a more expansive and engaged role. Here’s why:
In a previous post we discussed Enzo Mari’s Autoprogettazione. The skills and tools required to make his furniture are relatively simple, but what about the construction of more complex technological products that require electrical or electronic components, or things that demand skills beyond basic wood cutting and nails?
We mentioned the example of Dyson in part one. Tom Lynch’s open-source vacuum cleaner provides an (almost) ideal example of how more complicated products could be made differently. The project explored the idea of building one’s own vacuum cleaner, based on Dyson’s cyclone, using only locally sourced materials and basic making skills. All experiments and knowledge were loaded on the project’s wiki, with the idea that other contributors around the world would add their own local information.
After a few prototypes Lynch produced a fully functioning vacuum for less than £50. The example highlights two key strengths of open source: free sharing of knowledge and access to expert communities. If more designers were to embrace such an approach the proliferation of knowledge would inevitably lead to increasingly complex and diverse objects becoming available. Devices become things.
‘Royal detested this orthodoxy of the intelligent. Visiting his neighbours’ apartments, he would find himself physically repelled by the contours of an award-winning coffee pot, by the well-modulated color schemes, by the good taste and intelligence that, Midas-like, had transformed everything in these apartments into an ideal marriage of function and design. In a sense, these people were the vanguard of a well-to-do and well-educated proletariat of the future, boxed up in these expensive apartments with their elegant furniture, and intelligent sensibilities, and no possibility of escape.’
- J.G. Ballard, High-Rise
Consumers have been programmed for sleek, seamless products far too long to accept the standard (non-designed) DIY aesthetic overnight. The desire for award-winning coffee pots (and phones, juicers, hair dryers, etc.) is strong, and for the time being Ballard is most likely right - there is no possibility of escape. This leaves two options: one easy, one very difficult.
The easy route: Adapt the maker aesthetic to what people want. Introduce a better sense of design that allows maker products to compete with mainstream exemplars of good design such as Apple and Dyson. Lynch’s vacuum cleaner is an example of what maker products often look like - material choices are based on what is available (and what can be manipulated) rather than what is optimal. What would the device look like if it had the touch of Charles and Ray Eames? Or Dieter Rams? Or Enzo Mari?
There aren’t many designed maker objects to be found (please contact us if you know of some). The OpenStructures WaterBoiler is one example of how such things could look. Originally designed by Jesse Howard and Thomas Lommée, it was adapted by Unfold, who replaced the PET bottles with a cut-through bottle (see Tord Boontje’s Transglass project for the potential of cut recycled glass) and used a combination of 3D-printed ceramic, off-the-shelf plumbing material and simple folded steel. If more objects like these were produced by the maker movement, there might be a chance of shifting consumer habits.
The hard route: Adapt consumer desires to a maker aesthetic. Reprogramme people to be less obsessed with brands, or to see value in what is rough, cheap, or practical.
Adam Curtis in Century of the Self describes the rise of public relations in the 20th century and how the United States (and thereafter the world) was transformed as a result. The Wall Street banker Paul Mazur of Lehman Brothers is quoted as saying:
‘We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture, people must be trained to desire. To want new things even before the old have been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality in America. Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.’
The PR people, including Sigmund Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays, were of course incredibly successful - leading to the situation we described in the previous post. But (and it is a big but) if need can be transformed into desire, should it not be possible to reverse the process, to return to a more sustainable, less consumer-driven situation? Even perhaps by exploiting human susceptibility to such manipulation to secure better ends?
Bernays convinced women to smoke in the 1920s through public relations. Now government campaigns are attempting to do the exact opposite, through similar methods (although so far they lack the cunning of Bernays’ tactics). However it is unlikely that any government will wholeheartedly embrace the notion of reversing the desire for consumer products any time soon: it is too closely related to economic growth.
Makerism could begin to make inroads with consumers through signification. Freitag’s tarpaulin bags succeeded in stoking consumer desire because they embodied a clever mix of good design and bold environmentalism. We’re complicated creatures, and becoming more so at a seemingly exponential rate. How something signifies is important to us. Maybe playing with signification is the way to convince people to consume differently.
As a company, Freitag combines good design with environmentalism in a way that offers one possible solution to both sides of the aesthetics issue. Design what people want, but also make people want more responsible design. Could a similar approach work for makerism?
In this Atlantic article John Tierney lists the dilemmas of maker culture, with a specific section on education. His conclusions are based on panel discussions from last year’s Conference on World Affairs in Boulder, Colorado. Some of the advice is sound:
‘the emphasis should be on collaboration (learning with others, working with others - both keys to much of the advancement of the maker culture)’;
‘The consensus on what's important for older kids and adults is concise: coding. All the panelists agreed on that, and clearly that viewpoint is already widespread.’
Coding is essential, but in our view so is knowing how to use a chisel or a lathe. There is at present an over reliance on the digital. 3D printing and laser cutting not only broaden but - if used exclusively - can also drastically reduce the range of possibilities.
Design education teaches students how to choose the appropriate material for a particular purpose. Choices are based on many related factors such as functional behaviour, quantity required, formal qualities, and so on. As we pointed out in this post, the 3D printer shouldn’t be the only tool in the workshop.
In the last post we asked: ‘What is the point of good design when the systems in which it operates are profoundly bad?’
Many designers and design engineers work on products that solve genuine and serious human problems. Robotic surgery is a good example - in this realm, precision robots have clear advantages over their human counterparts. At the same time, surgery robots are prohibitively expensive.
Frank Kolkman’s project OpenSurgery attempted to address this issue by building and sharing the design of a DIY robot. But almost immediately he ran into another crucial problem: ‘as it turns out’, he writes, ‘it is almost impossible to design anything related to robotic surgery without infringing upon someone else’s intellectual property.’ All possible robotic arm configurations were patented by the Da Vinci Surgical System several years ago, even though many are not currently in use. Kolkman writes: ‘where intellectual property law begins to fail … is where large companies are monopolizing over extensive patent portfolios with very broadly defined patents on concepts and mechanisms’. This is a classic example of constraint of infrastructure - in this case the protection of knowledge to the detriment of society.
OpenSurgery works as a critical project in two ways. First, it is an investigation into the rules of patents and potential (legalish) ways to circumvent ‘protection’ - such as sharing files on private peer-to-peer networks or basing the website in a country where the patents are not valid. In this sense it is a practical project that could be implemented. Second, it exposes the existence of ‘patent profiles’ and the behaviour of their owners, thereby becoming a project on the politics of making. It is a powerful exposé of how control can be misused - and what might be done about it.
Some of the issues we describe above are addressed in this Guardian article from 2012, which begins:
‘Too often design education funnels bright, imaginative minds towards places where they are the least useful – into the corporate design teams of commercial companies, or the rarefied world of galleries and one-off production. The people best trained in solving problems are rarely connected to the people who have problems to solve.’
Crap Futures friend Daniel Charny, designer and curator of the excellent ‘Power of Making’, and Sugru’s James Carrigan were the subject of the piece. Their Fixperts scheme exploits the skills of designers - not to sell more glossy products, but to solve problems through bespoke means. They are also very interested in design education ensuring that new generations of designers are privy to the kind of skills necessary to be a ‘fixpert’ and not just a ‘digipert.’
Fixperts isn’t unique - it is part of a trend born out of frustration with the current state of design. Another example is The Restart Project targeted at reducing electronic waste, with its encouraging motto: ‘let’s fix our relationship with electronics’. This project takes an appropriately holistic view, tracing and attempting to improve the journey ‘from design and manufacture, through use and end of life’. Both Fixperts and The Restart Project exemplify this notion of designers (and engineers) reclaiming the means - of wresting back control of our products and the systems in which they operate.
So far the maker movement has consisted of small, fairly insular communities of like-minded, idealistic individuals. What would it look like scaled up to a much larger level? And more importantly how can we help make this happen?
MakerBay Hong Kong; Tom Lynch’s open source vacuum cleaner; Open Structures WaterBoiler by Jesse Howard and Unfold; OpenSurgery by Frank Kolkman.
