Annals of Design: To Light the Darkness
Why Is Superintelligence So Dumb?
Annals of Design: A Better Lunch
The Psychopathology of American Life
Design for Democracy African Style
by Wendy MacNaughton
Arguing With Success
by David Stairs
English and Palinese
by Victor Margolin
Agenda for a 21st Century India Report
by Arvind Lodaya
First Name Basis (Part 2)
by Wes Janz
Riots By Design: Blaming the London Olympics
by Daniel Drennan
Introduction to the Fourth World
by Olon Dotson
Can Non-Europeans Innovate?
by sumandro
Apple-vs-Design
by Carter Scholz
Victor Margolin
In recent weeks, I have been involved in three chaotic attempts to introduce changes in services that I have come to rely on. These include banking, public transit, and healthcare. The website of Obamacare is not the only evidence of innovative change that is malfunctioning. I would venture to say that a good many if not most of the new services that are being rolled out at a dizzying pace have glitches that range from minor to catastrophic.
David Stairs
Ask my Indian friend: Americans are in a coma. What would evoke such an evaluation? Last year, while I was living in Bangalore, an American friend visited and my son and I met her for lunch. While crossing a busy boulevard she grabbed my arm and said, “I’ll trust you to get me across safely. Yesterday I spent 30 minutes trying to cross MG Road.” At that point I almost became a hazard myself, I was laughing so hard.
Cansu Akarsu
During my short career as a designer I have been a true nerd, spending all my free time participating in every workshop and design competition I found from all fields. Life is easy when you are learning, especially when one recognition follows the other, and motivates you to work on anything you love to work on. Still, I realize now that all the competitions, exhibitions, and networking events are far from the real recognition that comes with a village mother sparing the few dollars she earns to buy the product you have designed – this is how one falls in love with social design. Designing in real life and carrying out the process in the field is, on one hand, more frustrating and challenging, and on the other hand it is more meaningful, fun, and provides a unique learning experience.
David Stairs
“Tool hedonism is in ascendance.” —J. Robert Oppenheimer
Imagine a world where waste is more significant than thrift, where advertising trumps taste, and where novelty is the be-all end-all of existence. Not hard, is it? You’re living the dream everyday. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman’s 1985 look at the effects of television on society, entertainment came under scrutiny as a real but questionable substitute for public discourse. Had Postman lived long enough, he might have entitled the sequel Designing Ourselves to Death.
David Stairs
View from atop the Middle Sister in the west central Oregon Cascades reaches 100 miles north to Mt. Hood.
On a recent drive across country I was thinking about what the land must have looked like two hundred years ago. Lewis and Clark described an “Eden” of endless vistas and limitless game, a land practically untouched by human hand since time immemorial. It must have been an amazing sight.
David Stairs
Luco at music camp. I kept the phone.
The campaign began about nine months ago. From the beginning I was the primary target. I never had a chance. It wasn’t even a subtle assault. Mentioned with increasing frequency, insinuated into nearly every conversation, my thirteen year-old son managed to make his desire to have an iPhone known in no uncertain terms.
David Stairs
What can be considered radical anymore?
In their day, Vikings were pretty radical
Used to be this was easy to answer. Back in the ’60s we had Abbie Hoffman and Students for a Democratic Society, and Angela Davis and the Black Panthers. In the ’70’s there was Russel Means and AIM under siege at Wounded Knee. In Germany from the ’70’s to the ’90’s there was the Baader-Meinhof Group. Alas, as much as I admire Glenn Greenwald’s efforts to correctly define the meaning of terrorism, they feel more like Bob Woodward than Patty Hearst. Yet, without waxing nostalgic about countercultural revolution, I can think of one amazingly apposite and lasting example.
David Stairs
I recently came to the end of a three-year creativity cycle. This usually means it’s time to relax, reflect, and reconsider my options. For me, a great way to do a little lateral thinking is my annual painting chore.
David Stairs
Ask a group of student designers, any group, to develop a campaign while working in a large cohort, and they’re likely to react the way my Central Michigan University students did when I first made an unconventional proposal to them back in November 2012. I asked them to consider developing an online fundraiser for a rural African community-based organization. “This is our degree exhibition,” they replied. “How will we get any portfolio work out of this?” they asked in all seriousness. It was a predictable if callow reaction, one young designers are almost programmed to make by years of priming for local competitions through portfolio development courses.
Student brainstorming session
David Stairs
Young boys on the beach in Allepay, Kerala, India
Designers are frequently talking about skills and aesthetics, practice and theory, and these are important topics. But when it comes to politics, man can they get it wrong! I suspect it has more to do with privilege and cultural blindness than purposeful discrimination. And yet…
David Stairs
Winter Park, FL. train station
I’m having this printed on a t-shirt in 100 pt. demi-bold letters:
Over the Christmas holidays I was invited to Florida by an old friend I hadn’t seen since 2005. Never mind that I have purposely avoided the “Sunshine State” my whole life. Each year my young son and I take a culture trip at holiday time. The last couple years have seen us visit first Chicago’s Field Museum and a Blue Man Group performance, then New York and the U.N., Hi-Line, Empire State, and a Broadway show. While staying with our friends in Winter Park we spent an afternoon visiting the Morse Museum’s fantastic L.C. Tiffany collection. When I walked into the chapel Tiffany designed for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair I did a double take, having just seen Mark Wahlberg’s report on a recent Antiques Roadshow program. We also took in a performance by the Cirque du Soleil company resident at Downtown Disney. But one doesn’t travel to Orlando for high culture, as even the least experienced child knows. In a city based upon theme parks, they are a little hard to ignore.
Editor’s note: To celebrate the first anniversary of the Indian Journal we’ve invited our friend Sumandro to share his thoughts on contemporary discussions of the Indian concept “jugaad.”
Sumandro
In a recent essay, Hamid Dabashi has spoken out against the continuation of the obnoxious (colonial) practice of identifying European socio-cultural artifacts as the universal form, while the non-European others get prefixed with ‘ethno’ — such as, referring to European music as ‘music’ and studying non-European music as ‘ethnomusicology.’ The same practice appears in action, and often enjoys uncritical celebration, in the domain of design. We are being told that the Indians have a magic word, jugaad, that means “startling ingenuity in the face of adversity.” The question, however, is why do the Indians need a special word for a phenomena that Europeans (not in the sense of the continent but in vague civilizational terms) simply call innovation? Or, can non-Europeans innovate?
Jua kali lunch box, Kenya
Victor Margolin
Several months ago my wife and I had dinner in a restaurant with another couple. My wife is in her late 60s and I am in my early 70s. The other couple was about twenty years younger than us. In that twenty year difference, however, was a digital divide that defined each couple as living in social universes that were vastly different. The difference does not revolve around an attitude towards technology that is starkly pro or con. My wife and I are both active computer users, we share a cell phone and my wife downloads books onto her iPad. What characterizes the difference is the place that we accord technology in our lives and in our relations with others. Speaking now for myself, I grew up in an era before computers and cell phones when face-to-face contact without any supporting mobile devices was the principal means of contact. Whatever you brought to a conversation had to be part of your internal data bank as there were no supporting machines to provide anything additional. Its true that conversations were less precise than many are today but they had a flow that bound the conversing parties together unobstructed by any attention-diverting devices.
David Stairs
Amid the controversy over Guantanamo interrogation techniques resurrected by Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty I read Mark Owen’s No Easy Day, the ooh-rah first person Seal Team Six account of the assassination of Osama bin Laden on May 1st, 2011. Suddenly, the notion of watching Jessica Chastain burn up the screen with her focused intensity and sultry good looks somehow seemed to lose its attraction.
David Stairs
Cutting Corners
One of the most gratifying experiences is having one’s observations corroborated, especially when they are about another culture. Not one, but two Indian acquaintances responded to my last Indian post, Why India Does Not Need Me, with the same remark: it reminded them of a famous speech by Ivan Illich, “To Hell With Good Intentions.” Now I’ll admit, Illich is one of my heroes and, though I didn’t refer to him in this piece, I have in the past.
David Stairs
As I come to the end of ten months of articles about India, I am a little sad. It has taken an effort, at times, to stick to my original purpose, to observe everyday design in action on the subcontinent. There have been both discoveries and disappointments, but that seems normal— much like life, in fact.
Read the rest of this entry »
David Stairs
“It’s not a blue world anymore, Max.” —Chief Blue Meany speaking to his assistant at the end of Yellow Submarine
The aftermath of the 2012 election got me thinking about color. The typical red/blue dichotomy that the media has devised to represent our apparent “bad blood” has been an all-too-familiar-display since Election Day, to the extent that it must appear to people from other parts of the world that Americans fall in to one of two primary-color races: Blue Meanies or Red Ragers. 
image courtesy of POLITICO
David Stairs
I once saw a mounted policeman in Philadelphia charge down a street at a full gallop chasing a felon. In my neighborhood, South 9th Street, there were even a few remaining stables. This was, of course, a 17th century city that late in the 20th century that still had a mounted police unit. In most places in America, those times are long past.
Temple elephant on Pondicherry street
David Stairs
Workers unloading a truck at night
America, land of gizmos and gadgets, began its history so labor poor that it accepted the evil of slavery for more than three centuries before its Civil War eliminated the scourge.
India is very different.
David Stairs
This article was suggested by Chris Stairs, who is also responsible for some of the photos
Urgent entreaties, Sankey Tank vicinity, Bangalore
Trees and diatoms, two of the things we most need to sequester CO2 and produce oxygen, one macro the other micro, are both under constant pressure from human activity. Global warming, ocean pollution, and deforestation are creating havoc, but do enough people care? And what are the attitudes toward trees in India?
David Stairs
In the tea shambas of the Kanan Devan Hills Company, Munnar
When it comes to tea, the Indian place names roll off one’s tongue: Assam, Darjeerling, Ceylon. Tea is grown in many other places, but it is in India that it became a world-class cash crop, under the avaricious guidance of 19th century English businessmen.
David Stairs
“Oh Mother, today I remember the sindoor on your forehead, the red-bordered sari you used to wear, and your eyes—calm, serene, and deep.”
—spoken by Bimala in Home and the World, by Rabindranath Tagore
On the matter of women’s dress, there are two approaches in India, traditional and westernized. There’s not much to tell about the latter other than that it’s branded designer wear. But of the traditional, two main forms exist, the sari and the salwar kemeez.
David Stairs
Sign for women’s washroom in Hindi, English, Urdu, and Bengali. The water is held by the right, or eating hand.
As goes its plumbing, so goes a nation; in this we do trust. The Romans supposedly poisoned themselves with lead piping, while Africans often don’t use pipes at all, preferring pit toilets and jerry cans. Indians have their own problems with hygiene; public urination is common among men.
David Stairs
Special thanks to ajantriks for help with this article.
Hindu temple, Chowdaiah Road, Bangalore
On the weekend The Avengers opened in Bangalore, one week prior to its release in America, theaters were jammed with middle class Indians flocking to view the latest exploits of some of their favorite heroes. Whatever you may think about the Marvel franchise, now a part of the Disney empire, you’ve got to admit it really delivers action. But why would Indians be so interested in the exploits of heroes, gods, and monsters?
David Stairs
Adolf Hitler once referred to the British as “a nation of shopkeepers.” But the Brits had nothing on the Indians when it comes to small business. One needn’t look too far to notice the importance of commerce to India. It is tantamount to a religion. I remember how focused Indians in East Africa were on business, often to the dismay or resentment of Africans. It goes without saying that, in their own bailiwick, Indians have to hustle to survive, and competition is keen.
