David Stairs

“The professional tends to specialize and to merge his being uncritically in the mass. The ground rules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serve as a pervasive environment of which he is uncritical and unaware.”1

—Marshall McLuhan The Emperor’s New Clothes

I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve sat fuming at presentations by designers extolling the glories of electronic networking. I’ve always been a believer in the sloppy old face-to-face method of communication, and the tech geeks, from computer lab support staff to “TEDsters” frustrate me with their hand-held pod-cast technoenthusiasm. I use technology, communicate electronically, even socially network to a modest extent, but I’ve never been one to believe that technology, especially “paperless,” would be the salvation of western or any other civilization.

Forty years ago Robert Heilbronner opened a can of worms when he wondered, “Do Machines Make History?” His essay, later reframed and reissued, was an examination of technological determinism. The term technological determinism has been traced to Thorstein Veblen. It is the concept that technology is self-driven, existing outside of social influences. Heilbronner wondered, following Marx, whether “The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.” For Heilbronner, technology was a player, but not the only one.

Most of my students, and it seems many designers, are quite a bit more sanguine about technology. The inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, member of the Singularity Institute and proponent of intelligent machines, impresses them when he suggests the probability of a technological singularity within the next 25 years. This vision, driven by the exponential growth of technology throughout history, proposes that ultra-intelligent artificial life will become self-aware and further accelerate technical progress. In popular culture, a benevolent outcome is proposed by Steven Spielberg’s 2001 movie AI starring Haley Joel Osment.

The nature versus nurture debate has raged endlessly for over a century. Although psychologists consider it a false dichotomy, in popular parlance the conflict seems to continue to have feet, especially whenever discussions about the cultural meme arise. In my last post, I went on record as being on the slow evolution side of biology, but there may be a growing reason to reevaluate such statements beyond the popular idea of accelerating technology.

A recent issue of Time Magazine carried a five page cover story about the rise of the newly minted science of epigenetics. Starting with the genetic research of Dr. Lars Olov Bygren, a specialist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, the article builds a case for the influence of environmental stressors on gene expression that can be heritable, in some cases, through up to 40 generations. Not long ago this would have been considered genetic heresy. It doesn’t take a degree in science to understand that such an idea vindicates the long despised notions of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who famously argued that traits acquired in one’s lifetime could be passed on. Generations of Darwinists have been happy to point to the illegitimacy of this line of thought. I mean, if giraffes got long necks from stretching to reach the tender leaves, what’s to stop one from inheriting obesity from a couch-potato parent? This, however, is roughly what epigenetics is arguing.

The tremendous complexity of the universe is no surprise to scientists, but to designers, many of whom subscribe to the dictum that “less is more,” complexity can be daunting. For example, consider the Venter map of the human genome, completed in 2001: it is the single most detailed graphic image ever developed. In order to view it onscreen it has to be magnified by four orders of magnitude. To think that the potential number of epigenetic “markers” or switches (the molecules that turn a specific gene function on or off) could easily number 100 times as many as the existing number of human genes (25,000) is only to see once again that the more we learn the less we know.

How could this possibly make life easier for designers? One of the things designers are endlessly advocating in favor of is that, anymore, the influence of culture trumps nature. It shows up in the arguments of my tech friends who favor the power of electronic networking, is a common argument of those who suggest that computing technology fundamentally changes human relations, and it even makes an appearance in the AIGA’s latest sustainability project where culture is juxtaposed with the economy, the environment, and social justice.

Epigenetics suggests many possibilities, some of them very dark. If it is possible to inherit asthma from what one’s mother ate during pregnancy, or obesity from the stress of a famine on one’s grandfather, then why not say that constant early exposure to the Internet could result in increased intelligence (or stupidity)? The evidence for this last has yet to be established while proof of some other examples is supported by epidemiological research. There are disturbing warnings in the scientific literature suggesting, for instance, that early television exposure could be implicated in the epidemic of ADHD among adolescents. Could early exposure to electronic technology result in heritable traits? Caution is recommended. But this could be a good thing, too, enabling physicians to better control the as yet unknown origins of certain diseases.

For design theory epigenetics could be the long-sought Rosetta stone, the linchpin that reconciles lightning-quick culture to slowly evolving nature in a way that would warm the cockles of your friendly neighborhood podcaster’s heart. Will it be a matter of rejoining the organic to the man-made, or sundering? Authors like Kurzweil would have it that the separation has already occurred, is irreversible, and does not bode well for the future of organic life. Others will take a more nuanced approach.

As long ago as 1974 E.O.Wilson proposed the rapprochement of gene/culture co-evolution in his writings on sociobiology. Epigenetics takes things further than Wilson, further even than Richard Dawkins is willing to venture. Remember, it was Dawkins who introduced the word “meme” into the English language. In the 2005 30th anniversary edition of The Selfish Gene Dawkins is still on record as saying: “No matter how much knowledge and wisdom you acquire during your life, not one jot will be passed on to your children. Each new generation starts from scratch.”2 Contrarily, epigenetics suggests that trauma, including human induced crises, can be a transmittable learning experience, genetically speaking.

McLuhan would have been fascinated by the possibilities inherent in this debate. As children of McLuhan, designers should be enticed. It would seem to be a potentially fitting solution to a heretofore intractable argument.

1Marshall McLuhan, Essential McLuhan. Basic Books, Toronto, 1995.

2Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009. p.23

David Stairs is editor of Design-Altruism-Project

David Stairs

For most of my adult life I’ve been obsessing about homeostasis, the scientific concept for stable state equilibrium of systems and organisms, currently popularized by the term sustainability. My first two published design essays 1997 & 1999 were about the conflicted state of design criticism in the clash between biophilia and what I then termed “technophilia.” It seemed to me at that time that there was really not a choice between the two. While we tend to think technology is ascendant, biology is true destiny and will prove out in the end. Whether or not it will be an end that benefits humans is the great unknown.

More recently, I’ve marveled as the activity related to sustainability, so long overlooked, has reached fever pitch in some circles. The events in Copenhagen during early December and in online campaigns in support of an accord there have been intense. Yet, on a recent episode of Charlie Rose, economist Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia’s Earth Institute stated that we have failed utterly in our treaty obligations under the 1992 Global Climate Treaty, ratified by Congress in 1994. So, if the U.S government can’t deliver on its treaty commitments, and the UN organizers in Copenhagen are now admitting that maybe they aimed a bit too high, what’s to stop others from trying?

Sustainable initiatives among designers, for example, have recently been approaching a level that can best be described as fashionably PC. In October 2009 I participated in The Designers Accord’s global “summit” on sustainable design education. Around 100 people adversely affected their carbon footprints to travel to San Francisco for two days of rigorously focused head banging in an effort to outline what a sustainable design curriculum might entail. Representatives of sustainability initiatives at Pratt, Forum for the Future, Worldstudio and elsewhere participated as both presenters and group mentors.

One of The Designers Accord summit’s sponsors, Sustainable Minds, actually produces life cycle analysis (LCA) software designed to “enable environmental life cycle assessment and rapid iteration of product concepts in the earliest stages of design.” Invoking “Okala”, a life cycle assessment method for evaluating environmental and health impacts of the products marketed in North America, Sustainable Minds is running workshops that “teach participants how to design whole systems from a life cycle perspective, and how to estimate, model and make design decisions based on environmental impact.”

Almost all of the plenary speakers at the summit were incredibly upbeat about design’s influence on the world. In fact, one of Worldstudio’s initiatives is entitled Design Ignites Change. It took waiting until the final speaker of the weekend to hear a balanced presentation. Philosopher Cameron Tonkinwise of the New School, like the boy observing the emperor’s nudity, deflated the collective euphoria when he pointed out that, if designers truly wanted to be sustainable, they were not doing nearly half enough; even our language is insufficient to the task.

The AIGA and its minions, never far from any source of current cultural hysteria, is very active in its efforts to colonize sustainability. Having recently created a Center for Sustainable Design (unfortunately, a CFSD already exists in the UK), AIGA has gone on to develop The Living Principles for Design. This document compiles “the collective wisdom found in decades of sustainability theories” and attempts to apply them to a “quadruple bottom-line framework for design” that includes culture along with economy, environment, and equity. Most AIGA activities, including their upcoming education summit, response_ability, and many of their regional chapters, are heavily promoting this initiative following its introduction at the national conference in Memphis in October.

Not to be outdone by the AIGA in this land rush to commercially annex sustainability, the good men and women at IDEO, perennial conference attendees and professional media darlings, have developed a blog entitled Living Climate Change, a site that invites participants to “imagine what life will be like in 20 to 30 years.” While this sustainability-leaning version of South Park style quickie animations may not exactly be the solution to our woes, it does invite playfulness and participatory speculation, and may even provide IDEO with some fresh ideas from outside the boardroom, although all the posts to date seem self-promotional.

Oh, and let’s not forget JWT’s initiative. Over there the green group is known as JunkWasteTrash, three things the agency has created plenty of in its history. Perhaps this knowledge has even added guilt to the company’s own anxiety index.

Lest you breathe the word “opportunist” when wondering aloud where all these “thought leaders” were twenty years ago, they’ll be at pains to remind you that, at that time, sustainability was an idea whose moment of critical mass had not yet arrived. Of course, it’s a truism of free market economics that, if the government stays out of things and markets are allowed to develop independently, then free enterprise will find necessary solutions. Last year’s near economic meltdown is an excellent indication of the wisdom of this philosophy, right?

If you’re not entirely comfortable following the assurances of either “the world’s leading design firm” or the blandishments of “the association for design” regarding sustainability, there may be hope for you yet. There isn’t one reference in The Living Principles to Herbert Simon, Rachel Carson, Victor Papanek, Aldo Leopold, or Barry Commoner and, outside McDonough and Braungart’s Hannover Principles, a lot less recognition of the concept of species interdependence than what James Cameron offers in Avatar. Most of the “collective sustainability wisdom of the last fifty years” dates post 1985, and the great majority favors design initiatives.

One of the best initiatives I’ve come across, John Thackara’s recent posts on his Doors blog (including a positive post-Copenhagen take), isn’t even mentioned in The Living Principles. Thackara, who was once a great believer in electronic networking and an avid conference attendee, has proved himself capable of reform. These days he eschews his former faith in the technosphere, and, like Candide, prefers to metaphorically “tend his garden” by reducing his globetrotting conference attendance.

As for IDEO’s donation to the literature, other than authoring a few tomes on human centered design and proselytizing the business community, it seems designers there, as elsewhere, are busily expanding the concept of sustainability beyond what it can, uh, well, sustain. Designers are bound to muddy the distinction between the scientific meme and the cultural one. Since design is increasingly a hybrid of the creative arts and the social sciences, designers are destined to have it both ways, often with confusion and conflict (not to mention “conflict of interest”) ensuing.

As we approach the fortieth anniversary of the first Earth Day, the brazen capitalization of our environmental crisis by those working in design circles seems less like the co-opting of a forty-year-old environmentalist philosophy by a business plan than an admission by the profession that it neither sees the future clearly, nor cares much about anything beyond its own economic survival. While profiteering from sustainability by any profession may seem a lame undertaking, substituting our immediate personal prosperity for Our Common Future, it is yet another instance of business-as-usual for what McLuhan called the “frogmen” of sales rhetoric masquerading as social entrepreneurs and science popularizers.

Furthermore, few if any of these people are qualified to make the determinations being called for of what we really need in the future. For this they turn to TED presentations by scientists like Janine Benyrus and Amory Lovins and fascinate over concepts like biomimicry and systems thinking, as if there’s something new about them. Should we think locally AND act locally, as Thackara seems to be suggesting? Do we need the Iliad more than microwave popcorn? For that matter, should there be a law against printing on paper altogether? Until such a statute is passed, is publishing The New Atlantis more culturally significant than publishing Superman comics? Is Slow Food different from or better than the more traditional organic or macrobiotic food? Is driving an all electric car more ethical than reducing personal freedoms? Until we bring world population under control do any options much matter?

The one thing I’m certain of in this life is that those who boast most loudly about their current high standards, numbers of awards, and level of innovation are probably not the ones we want standing guard along the watchtower. Who better you ask? Well, perhaps some of those pesky activists who, while designers were busy burning from one excess to the next, evolved from treehuggers to WTO demonstrators to carbon tax advocates. Or maybe some of those modest science-types who’ve spent whole careers trying to get the world’s attention focused on this issue.

Least that way, when the call comes up to the ramparts saying there’s a sixty-foot high sculpture by Jeff Koons (the Odyssean master of recycling cultural detritus for gold) standing outside the gates, perhaps the guards will have the good sense to examine it carefully before claiming it to be the next great culture meme and dragging it inside the gates to auction for cap and trade credit.

David Stairs is the editor of Design-Altruism-Project

David Stairs

The author, at his homemade miniature golf range, with his Father’s Plymouth Belvedere in the background.

I was driving across northern Indiana last year when a wide-tracking station wagon blew past me at 85mph. Once upon a time this event would not have warranted notice. But on this particular day it was the only such vehicle on that broad highway, the lone survivor of an illustrious if not heroic age.

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An irresistible object, a homeless man and the future economy of the world

Tasos Calantzis

On a chilly late autumn afternoon the curator of one of Europe’s most prestigious art and design museums clicked through images of a new wooden vase and immediately ordered 8 pieces via e-mail for sale in the museum store. She hadn’t seen the actual product yet but liked the pictures enough to place the order.

Two weeks earlier, the creative director of one of the largest safari lodge companies in the world, which owns some of the most prestigious properties on 3 continents, stopped while going through images of items for new décor in the lodges. “He’s not the kind to get excited about a new item typically, he’s seen so much over the years, he just kind of goes ‘yes’ or ‘no’ but this time he stopped and said “Wow; we’ve got to have those”, says an assistant.

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Raymond Prucher

When I initiated this piece, I had expectations of culling out what was at the core of my own altruistic mission, to help put a face on the people who are today’s enemies of choice, namely Arabs and Persians. So, I turned to the culture-makers—artists, designers, writers and dancers, both native and ex-patriot—to ask them some simple but pointed questions about whom they are and what they are doing.

When the answers came, I felt myself disappointed. Didn’t anyone want to save the world? I mulled it around in my head for a few weeks, wondering if I should publish this, if it was befitting of the mission of Designers Without Borders, if it would make a difference.

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Joyce Epolito

For us, it’s been all about relationship and listening. This year, a group of friends and I had the opportunity to inject design into the context in which we lived. It all started when we met several Burmese (Karen) refugee families in our neighborhood in Chicago (Rogers Park), one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the country. In the beginning we spent time with their children in a community group doing children’s ESL and art while the parents were also taking ESL classes at a local church. As time went on, we were invited into their homes and developed relationships with the whole families. We were very quickly thrust into the day-to-struggles these families were facing as new arrivals to the U.S.

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David Stairs

“The subordinate place of history, theory, and criticism in design education is concomitant with the difficulty most designers have in envisioning forms of practice other than those already given by the culture.”
–Victor Margolin

Turf Wars

When Victor Margolin published those words in 2002 in his Politics of the Artificial I chastised him for being too tentative about change. It seemed to me at that time that the design world was on the verge of embracing socially relevant design, one of the new forms Margolin was advocating for. I had just returned from two years overseas. HOW magazine had published an article about my initiative starting a 501(c)(3) called Designers Without Borders, and there had been a mild ripple of interest, mostly from younger designers ostensibly looking for alternative design practice opportunities.

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Victor Margolin

Mr. Shinkey by Lucien Stairs, age 5

Writing an e-mail to a friend recently, I happened to mention the word ‘pornography’ in my note. The word turned red as I wrote it. Then the words that followed reverted to black as I moved on with my thoughts. This struck me as odd and I intentionally wrote ‘pornography’ again. It popped up red. My curiosity was piqued so I typed a crude word for intercourse and sure enough, it turned red too.

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David Stairs

Guaranty RV sales, Junction City, Oregon

One doesn’t notice it at first, not until you start frequenting environments dominated by parks and resorts. Until then it’s subtle, in the background. But driving through the Targhee National Forest it’s inescapable: the number of RV-related camps and services expands exponentially. In Yellowstone, general elevation +7500′, there are so many RVs it can be pretty slow going. In the RV parking area at Old Faithful there are RVs of all sizes, motors running to keep the AC up.

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