Design Altruism Project

March 24th, 2023

David Stairs

Designers are such pragmatists.

Look at any form of commercial online instruction platform and you will be underwhelmed by volume of courses meant to help people improve their marketability. Whether you are obsessing over the need to improve your design skills through LinkedIn Learning (formerly Lynda.com, now a subsidiary of Microsoft), or you are afraid you’re going to miss the AI revolution and have taken out a contract with Udacity, the bottom line always seems to be to find ways to help people participate in The Great Sales Pitch Experiment, aka Selling the Earth.

Happily, there are those among us who don’t give a shit about selling stuff, and some of these people are even designers!

One of the earliest practices of this sort has to be Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby. Their texts, Speculative Everything and Hertzian Tales, both from MIT Press, are fundamental to an understanding of utilizing design for something other than commerce.

Dunne and Raby involve themselves in “projects” investigating alternatives to contemporary reality. In Design Noir (Bloomsbury 2021), a reintroduction and extension of Hertzian Tales for a new audience, one can see their experiments with furniture that serves a variety of unusual functions, from self-geopositioning to degaussing. This ain’t IKEA baby, but a way of reframing domesticity for the 21st century.

As with their projects from Speculative Design, like placing a landscape on a moving train, or developing a new set of tools for urban foragers, Dunne and Raby successfully prove that designers have a role to play in basic research that has nothing to do with quality circles or product evaluation.

Another studio working at the fringes of digital/social research is dmstfctn, formerly known as the Demystification Committee. A collaboration of designers in London and Berlin, DMSTFCTN sets itself the goal of “studying the intensities of late capitalism.”

Through a series of film, video, and programming projects, DMSTFCTN’s website provides a menu of their work reaching back six years investigating such topics as combining a beachwear collection with a tax evasion scheme, and a film about the survival of money.

Finally, there is the Swiss/British collective Brave New Alps. BNA’s projects reaching back a decade are focused upon social and environmental issues. I first became aware of them when I came across their Precarity Pilot a couple years back. A series of workshops recognizing the impossible demands of the marketplace on designers, the Precarity Pilot encouraged designers to conceive of a new, healthier economic environment, then build it. More recent projects include a series of labs surrounding alpine communities, and an eco-social design mapping project.

All in all, there is not half-enough discussion among designers of an anti-capitalist alternative for our future life world. I am happy to note the works of these people, and trust they are just the tip of an iceberg that will need to surface if we are to get off what John Zerzan calls a “death trip.”

David Stairs is the founding editor of the Design-Altruism-Project.

Posted in Altruism Memeplex | Comments Off on The Power of Speculation

Annals of Design: To Light the Darkness

February 22nd, 2023

David Stairs

Recently I was working on an article for a design periodical when I hit on the idea to compare an American brand icon to an African DIY counterpart. It was not a fair comparison.

The American product was the Coleman pressurized lantern, the “Sunshine of the Night.” Coleman introduced pressurized kerosene lanterns in 1914, and they and their small stove compatriots followed American servicemen into two World Wars.

Back home at middle-century Coleman lanterns became better known as standard outdoor illumination for generations of campers. These beautiful lamps, over 100 kerosene models and 20 propane models, are made of enameled steel with brass hardware. They are so durable that they are the subject of an International Collectors Club, the ICCC.

By comparison, the African DIY lantern was made from a recycled Nestle milk tin. The dome is made from tabbed sheet metal, with a wire handle attached. Sitting in for the Coleman cylindrical Pyrex hurricane globe are inch-wide strips of plate glass. Unlike the American device, the African lamp is not pressurized. Fuel from the reservoir is wicked to the flame by a piece of rope. This DIY-type of homegrown artifact is common in places where expensive imports are out of reach for most people.

Kerosene, or what many Africans call “paraffin,” is widely used on the continent. Unfortunately, it is also the cause of deadly home fires in many places.

According to a study conducted by the World Bank, it is estimated that in many developing nations, as much as 60% of the population relies on kerosene for lighting. Studies for kerosene heaters are more plentiful than for lighting, but those that do exist suggest that exposure to both microparticulates and carbon monoxide from kerosene lantern usage may exceed minimum healthy allowable levels. Coleman recommends that its lanterns only be used outdoors, so as to prevent a build-up of carbon monoxide.

Unfortunately, almost a third of the world’s population lives without reliable access to electricity, necessitating alternatives. Until we do finally develop affordable, sustainable ways to generate power for everyone, everywhere liquid fuel lighting will continue to be used.

Here in America, we have constant access to power, so there is absolutely no reason to risk using kerosene indoors. While you are enjoying your privileged estate in this world, you should also appreciate the beauty of our exceedingly great Coleman lanterns.

David Stairs is the founding editor of the Design-Altruism-Project.

Posted in African Journal | Comments Off on Annals of Design: To Light the Darkness

Why Is Superintelligence So Dumb?

January 28th, 2023

David Stairs

“I think that it’s fairly likely that it will not take too long of a time for the entire surface of the Earth to become covered with data centers and power stations. Once you have one data center, which runs lots of AIs on it, which are much smarter than humans, it’s a very useful object. It can generate a lot of value. The first thing you ask it is: Can you please go and build another one?” — Ilya Sutskever as quoted by Cade Metz in Genius Makers on pp.299-300. Published by Dutton, © 2021.

This sounds like a description of the planet Coruscant, the Star Wars planet whose surface is completely developed.

Links

UPDATE: