Lost in Translation

In the film, Lost in Translation, Bob and Charlotte begin their conversation learning what each of them is doing in Tokyo.

Bob: What do you do?

Charlotte: I’m not sure yet, actually. I just graduated last spring.”

Bob: What did you study?

Charlotte: Philosophy.

Bob: Yeah, there’s a good buck in that racket.

Charlotte: (Laughs.) Yeah. Well, so far it’s pro bono.

(33:45)

Edge Effects

In ecology, edge effects are changes in population or community structures that occur at the boundary of two or more habitats. Areas with small habitat fragments exhibit especially pronounced edge effects that may extend throughout the range. As the edge effects increase, the boundary habitat allows for greater biodiversity.

Wikipedia: Edge effects

Design Philosophy

This seems to be the space that I occupy on the edges of design education and practice.

Maria Selting of Unbox Your World podcast has just shared the raw audio of our conversation to get feedback before she publishes the episode, Redesigning Design: Applying UX Principles to Design a Better Future.

“The Bauhaus concept, as it was transplanted to the United States, was fundamentally different from the principles upon which the experimental school had been founded in Weimar in 1919. The guiding principle of the Bauhaus was to unify all aspects of art making—painting, sculpture, handicrafts—as elements of a new kind of art, erasing the division between “high” and decorative art. Explorations of materials, color, and form were important building blocks of the curriculum. The artists and designers of the Bauhaus believed that this new type of art and design would help to create a better society, and they sought commissions to design public buildings and other elements of public life (such as flags and currency). In America, however, the Bauhaus ideas lost their social and political thrust. The emigré teachers in Chicago, Cambridge, and North Carolina who had been committed to progressive architecture and design ideas in Germany were now lionized as upholders of a pure, reductivist style.”

(Stephanie Barron, page 25)

Edge Effects

It was in the Design Science Studio that I learned about edge effects.

Yesterday, I was thinking about how my life embodies the concept of edge effects. That same day, a book was delivered to our door, Design for the Real World by Victor Papanek.

Today, I was reading these words:

Design for the Real World

Design for Survival and Survival through Design: A Summation

Integrated, comprehensive, anticipatory design is the act of planning and shaping carried on across the various disciplines, an act continuously carried on at interfaces between them.

Victor Papanek goes on to say:

It is at the border of different techniques or disciplines that most new discoveries are made and most action is inaugurated. It is when two differing areas of knowledge are brought into contact with one another that… a new science may come into being.

(Page 323)

Exiles and Emigrés

The Bauhaus spread its ideas because it existed at the boundaries, the avant-garde, the edges of what was thought to be possible, especially as a socialist utopian idea found its way to a capitalist industrial-military complex, where the concept of modernism was co-opted and colonized by globalizing economic forces beyond the control of the individual. Design was the virus that propagated around the world through the vehicle of corporate globalization.

That same design ethic is infecting corporations with a conscience, with empathy, with a process that begins with listening to people. Design is the virus that can spread the values of unconditional love throughout the body of neoliberal capitalism.