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
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
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.
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Posted in Feature | Comments Off on Why Is Superintelligence So Dumb?
December 22nd, 2022
David Stairs

Early Bell System ad
In the 1920s, before such things developed a predatory sheen, the advertising world promoted the theme of the man who was on top of the world. Modern, accomplished, wealthy, this contemporary Babbitt looked out the window of his 40th floor office at the world as it lay at his feet, just awaiting his next decision. My how times have changed!
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Posted in Popular Culture | Comments Off on Master of All He Surveys
October 20th, 2022
David Stairs

I was in Detroit last weekend.
Of all the cities in the realm, Detroit has the best claim of “first in freeways.” The first mile of paved road was laid in Detroit in 1909, just in time for the revolution in transport Henry Ford was planning to visit on the nation. This was before a transcontinental highway existed. Four years later the Lincoln Highway became the first coast-to-coast auto road in America. Dedicated in 1913, it ran from New York to San Francisco passing through 14 states.
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Posted in Popular Culture | Comments Off on Hell on Wheels
September 21st, 2022
David Stairs

Did you ever have to “brown bag” your lunch? If so, you know about the things that can go wrong, from torn bag to sogged-out paper from a leaky drink container.
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Posted in Popular Culture | Comments Off on Annals of Design: A Better Lunch
August 21st, 2022
David Stairs

Sigmund Freud in the parallel universe that is America (Photo credit: Library of Congress/Corbis Historical Collection)
Amid all the loose talk about lost American greatness, there seem to be many people worrying about just what has gone so terribly wrong, as if last year’s withdrawal from the quagmire of Afghanistan was evidence of American weakness, and we really ought to go back to war in Ukraine. I’d like to propose that things have not so much changed as that they have just become “more American.”
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Posted in Letters | Comments Off on The Psychopathology of American Life
July 19th, 2022
David Stairs
Title wall of the exhibition 5°F
Gordon Lightfoot had a song on Summer Side of Life entitled “10 Degrees and Getting Colder.” That record is now over 50 years old, and things have changed dramatically since it was released. Primarily, everything on Earth is getting much warmer, even winter.
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Posted in Altruism Memeplex | Comments Off on 5° And Getting Warmer
June 21st, 2022
David Stairs

The only guns this cowboy ever owned
What could be more dimwitted, un-insightful, or self-serving than a strict interpretation of the Second Amendment?
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Posted in Altruism Memeplex | Comments Off on Repeal the Second Amendment
May 25th, 2022
David Stairs

Load your Potato Guns boys ’n girls!
Yogi Berra once said, “It’s like déjà vu all over again.”
Back in the days when Trump was the undisputed Twitter Queen, I never thought we’d be free of his unhinged rantings. It was a surprising relief when he was finally dethroned. But, as in a beehive, when one queen dies another arises in her place, and it didn’t take long for a replacement to come along. Elon Musk was determined to out do Trump. He would not only take over as Queen of Tweets, he would also take financial control of the platform.
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Posted in Popular Culture | Comments Off on Master of Inappropriate Comments
April 20th, 2022
David Stairs

Courtesy of Lucien Stairs
You don’t have to look very far these days to see designers talking about the brave new world of Design AI. Helen Armstrong is out stumping her AI monograph, Big Data, Big Design. Mariana Amatullo is referencing it in the summer 2019 issue of Dialectic. And designers everywhere have become addicted to the Cloud, those banks of energy gulping servers housed in over-cooled desert complexes by Alphabet and Amazon. But what does AI really mean to the future of design?
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Posted in Ideas | Comments Off on Master of Space Gravity
March 22nd, 2022
David Stairs

There are two treats I remember from childhood, and they were both manufactured by Sunshine Bakers: Cheez-Its, and Hydrox. Cheez-Its are still around in many updated variations, now a Kellogg’s brand. Hydrox dropped from sight for awhile, the result of several changes of ownership, only to reemerge in 2015.
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Posted in Popular Culture | Comments Off on Annals of Design: Hydrox vs Oreo
February 21st, 2022
David Stairs

Thomas Carlyle called economics the “dismal science” in response to Malthus’s writings about exponential population growth. Carlyle was a Victorian and did not live in an era dominated by design. It would’ve been interesting to see what he would have made of our times. Frantic? Overwrought? Or maybe just predictable?
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Posted in Ideas | Comments Off on Slogging Toward Relevance
January 21st, 2022
David Stairs

Quannah Chasinghorse by Nathaniel Goldberg; Emily Ratajkowski from Instagram
A recent article in Elle Magazine online by Terese Marie Mailhot (Photographed by Nathaniel Goldberg and Styled By Alex White) introduces us to Quannah Chasinghorse, a nineteen-year-old native American runway model of Hän Gwich’in and Sicangu Oglala Lakota descent. (Corset, $1,295, pants, $2,295, Christopher John Rogers. Earrings, necklace, bracelets, 2021 Tiffany Blue Book Collection.)
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Posted in Popular Culture | Comments Off on Capitalization of the Body
December 20th, 2021
David Stairs

The only good use I’ve ever found for disposable diapers, a 1976 poster. (Note the pins I added. Talk about double-entendre!)
I know I’m supposed to say that prize-winning financially successful ideas are examples of great design, and I wish it was always true but……. let’s get real. In the commercial world we’ve created, there are too many cases that contradict optimism. Take diapers, for instance.
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Posted in Popular Culture | Comments Off on Annals of Dumb Design: Convenience
November 20th, 2021
David Stairs

Dick Clark at the Moulin Rouge by David Stairs
In a land governed by capital, it comes as no surprise that so much value is attached to celebrity. One of the first great modern personalities, Oscar Wilde, said, “Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.” Thus, it would seem the cult of celebrity sets us all up to fail, encouraging us to emulate the false god popularity.
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Posted in Popular Culture | Comments Off on Land of the Free, Home of the Influenced
October 20th, 2021
David Stairs

Every three years I am tasked with guiding a group of senior design students through their capstone year. Once upon a time it was enough to mount a student’s portfolio for public exhibition, and this process can still be seen at end-of-year design exhibitions across the country. Design being a supposedly “problem solving” discipline, students are often coached to take on a design problem to research and develop or expand upon. Such projects address topics large and small, ranging from homeless shelters to user experience apps, and everything in between.
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Posted in Altruism Memeplex | Comments Off on Racism as a Topic for Design Research
September 18th, 2021
David Stairs
As the AIGA gears up for its annual conference, I find myself pondering. In a year of magical thinking, like everyone else the AIGA has reinvented its conference schedule for online delivery. If this is just a matter of the new normal, obviously this cannot be an issue. What, then, makes the organization so damned annoying? Actually, I’ve been struggling to figure this out for years.
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Posted in Ideas | Comments Off on A Poke in the Eye
August 21st, 2021
David Stairs

There are a lot of people criticizing techno-capitalism these days, those so-called social pariahs demonstrating for economic “justice” and “equity.” But surely, these things are not givens in a free enterprise economy. They have generally needed the assistance of government regulation. In a system influenced by corporate lobbyists and deluded by the notion of limitless growth, even environmental degradation is not enough to staunch the lust for short-term gain. In fact, it may even accelerate it.
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Posted in Altruism Memeplex | Comments Off on F*ck the Fortune 500
July 25th, 2021
David Stairs

While China installs a nationwide video surveillance system, people in the West fret about the potential damage to their privacy by CTV cameras. But, apart from high profile failures, like Toronto’s “smart city” project, we’ve actually been normalizing surveillance for decades. Just consider reality television.
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Posted in Popular Culture | Comments Off on Summer’s Peeping Toms
June 25th, 2021
David Stairs
UPDATE:
As of July 23rd, 2021, following Anthony Fauci’s recent congressional testimony, this story is now being reported by the BBC.

A double arginine codon inserted at the S1/S2 furan cleavage site of the SARS CoV-2 virus’s genome
It was once the best of times……. except now we are coming to know the truth about how it became the worst of times……. and it begins with human folly compounded by deceit that results in a catastrophe.
Donald Trump was widely panned for claiming that Covid 19 was a Chinese invention, the “Kung Flu” as he often referred to it. The liberal press painted this as the worst sort of conspiracy theory, the China-bashing an embattled candidate for reelection might peddle to convince his base he was tough on foreign affairs. Only it turns out he was right, even if for the wrong reasons.
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Posted in Feature | Comments Off on How to Design a Pandemic
May 26th, 2021
David Stairs

When Thomas McNeill was made pastor of St. Margaret’s parish in 1948, he inherited little more than a twenty-year-old mission church in a growing suburb north of Syracuse, New York. McNeill had been a Navy chaplain in the Pacific during the war, but his dream was to expand Catholic education, and he would devote the best years of his life to the work.
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Posted in Ideas | Comments Off on On Outliving an Institution
April 24th, 2021
David Stairs
Another day, another mass shooting. We’re led to believe by television that Mayhem is a guy in a suit, played by actor Dean Winters, who causes mass upheaval wherever he goes. If only it were that simple.

Glock semi-automatic pistol designed by Gaston Glock
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Posted in Popular Culture | Comments Off on Designing Mayhem
March 15th, 2021
David Stairs

Tom Tierney’s Rita Hayworth paper doll published by Dover
As I sit by my Thermopane picture window reflecting on the wintry scene outdoors, I am distracted by the arrival of a mated pair of songbirds. A male cardinal hops onto my bird-feeder while his subtle mate shelters in a nearby bush.
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Posted in Popular Culture | Comments Off on Is Fashion Unnatural?
February 11th, 2021
David Stairs

Deep fake of the Queen’s Christmas address; courtesy Channel 4
A man walks into a pizza parlor in Washington, D.C. armed with an automatic rifle determined to free children he believes are victims of a peadophilic sex trafficking “deep state.” People interviewed at a Stop the Steal rally in Atlanta tell interviewers a commission is needed to investigate the Democrat’s efforts to corrupt a widely certified election. A man in Nashville (not Robert Altman’s version) destroys a city block blowing himself up at the same time in protest of AT&T’s roll out of 5G wifi service. In another era one might be tempted to agree that “the time is out of joint,” except this bizarro world is our everyday reality.
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Posted in Popular Culture | Comments Off on Fluoride for Truth Decay