Week 1 Journal
The reading by Fallan and Jorgensen is essentially a curated compilation about design from various perspectives and different walks of life. One of the Major topics discussed is that design and designers can be blamed from causing environmental problems but may also be said to have ideas that could solve the problems. (Journal of design history, 2017) Design is a fundamental part of the world, where emerging concepts such as the Anthropocene challenge the difference between the artificial on the one side and what is not made by human hands, on the other. (Journal of design history, 2017) This special issue explores the common ground emerging at the intersection of these two fields, with the aim of establishing mutually beneficial understandings upon which to build a new interdisciplinary research agenda. (Journal of design history, 2017)Overconsumption of design is also a big worry to environmentalists, hence environmentalists have developed a new way of design: design based on looking at how people live and what they need, what they think and behave. Having that, How can design history engage with issues of environmental controversies and sustainable development and thereby move beyond its conventional societal significance?(Journal of design history, 2017)
Materiality VS Ideology
Environmental history is a study of the human interaction with the natural world over time and its approach can be divided into 2 different categories, design as a matter of ideology and as a matter of materiality. Environmental history has expanded into a field of remarkable breadth and depth, challenging between nature and culture as a false dichotomy. In this process, environmental history borrowed from and interacted with other disciplines(geography and the history of technology, ecology and the natural sciences). (Journal of design history, 2017) An example would be a 1992 artwork by Rachel Carsten. In this artwork, she looked into harmful elements that results in non-environmentally friendly object. Environmental object design is beginning to look less diverse, therefore not many want to follow the environmental movement. Another example is in Flight Maps. Jennifer Price points out that for Americans, ‘most everyday encounters with the natural world take place through mass-produced culture.Flight Maps is mainly concerned at the ideological level and with the connections between people and nature. Also, during the 1960s the plastic flamingo and the artifice that it represented, rapidly lost its lustre. As plastic changed its connotation, the artificial became unreal, fake, and less than natural. (Journal of design history, 2017)The pink plastic flamingo became a marker of bad taste and of being disconnected from nature.
Similarly, William Rollins(an environmental historian) reflects on how the SUV can tell us about postmodern environmental issues. In his view, the SUV is a pollution generating object that is dangerous to others, yet often marketed with nature imagery and as a means of getting away from the city and into nature. In the consumerist world, our lives are filled with things. Ideological relationships to nature mediated through consumer culture can be found anywhere, from stuffed animal toys to online pictures of cabins.(Journal of design history, 2017) All interactions with nature shape values and cultural understandings of nature.
Design VS Culture
As the public and scientific discourse about the Anthropocene gains momentum, we can no longer talk about design and culture without also talking about design and nature. In recent years environmental historians have turned their attention to the evolution of animals, and then in particular the purposeful shaping—the design—of other species. (Journal of design history, 2017)This should encourage us to pay close attention to design as a process and to stimulate methodological and historiographical exchanges between environmental history and design history. A quote by design futurist Tony Fry: ‘design history . . . has unwittingly acted to conceal the historical significance and agency of the designed world’, and that ‘it constituted a history outside the epistemological issues, arguments, politics and debates over, in and about history.’(Journal of design history, 2017) At the same time Carolyn Barnes and Simon Jackson have claimed that ‘the increasing breakdown of disciplinary boundaries’ between design history and other fields concerned with the study of visual and material culture ‘is a barrier to perceiving and investigating design’s historical role in ecological degradation’, because this type of interdisciplinary scholarship perpetuates an alleged ‘emphasis on symbolic communication in the analysis of past design works that hides their material impact in the world’. Expanding the argument on the centrality of design, Ramia Mazé elaborates just how profoundly enmeshed design is in all aspects of sustainability and unsustainability, not merely by way of bringing forth products, but by conditioning life practices and shaping society. When design is so fundamental to any conception of sustainable development, it follows that the question of sustainability should form a core concern for design history. (Journal of design history, 2017)
Photographs and stories of endless battlefields marred by charred woodlands, torn-up fields and toxic air have contributed to a broader understanding of how modern, industrialized warfare relates to nature. These illustrates how industrialized warfare exploits and damages natural resources in a manner that only intensifies the environmental effects of civilian industrialized society. More broadly, what the example of World War I demonstrates is that environmental histories of design need to address not only the (destructive) agency of designed artefacts, but must also consider the extensive ecological entanglements of the vast and complex networks of resources, processes and knowledge that underpin the world of objects. (Journal of design history, 2017)
Design VS Science
Environmental history can be said to have emerged partly from the environmentalist movement, but has subsequently become less overtly activist in tone. design history may be said to be heading the opposite direction—at least in the sense that scholars are taking an increasing interest in design activism and the socio-political ramifications of design. (Journal of design history, 2017) A quote by environmental historian Libby Robin states that ‘the question is how people can take responsibility for and respond to their changed world?’ And the answer is not simply scientific and technological, but also social, cultural, political and ecological’. (Journal of design history, 2017)
Bauhaus also becomes an example of design and nature when examined from the perspectives of environmental history and the history of science. An example of existing environmental histories of design is the work of Peder Anker on the little-known relations between modernist design ideology, epitomized by the legacy from Bauhaus, and epistemological developments in the life sciences(biology and ecology). Focusing on the London interlude of key Bauhaus émigrés, including Walter Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy and Marcel Breuer, Anker paints a very different and highly intriguing picture of the theoretical and ideological underpinnings of interwar modernism. (Journal of design history, 2017)The designers and the biologists shared the conviction that mathematically-described geometric figures were the basic building blocks of nature, and thus should also form the basis of the built environment. Environmental histories of design are not bound by any given time frame. With a nod to Karl Marx’s notion of the gendering of nature and Claude Lévi-Strauss’s binary categories of the raw and the cooked, Rezende questions how values are ascribed to nature through design. Her contribution thus provokes much-needed reflections on what constitutes design as well as how design relates to the environment.
The Anthropocene is the human-made world, yet can we say it is designed? One of the most prevalent narratives about nature in the Anthropocene is one of unintended consequences leading to environmental decline. (Journal of design history, 2017) The world is constantly falling apart, but it is also constantly being repaired, reinvented, reconfigured, and reassembled. In thinking about design and environment, we should embrace such perspectives. Scott Knowles similarly encourages us to consider the timescales of disaster, drawing special attention to the way slow disasters happen at the rate of which our technological systems decay. Design extends beyond individual objects, in time and space, entangling both ideology and materials into the Anthropocene. It is up to us to try to untangle this web of design is comparison to the environment, sciences, culture, materiality and Olden Ideologies.(Journal of design history, 2017)
Bibliography:
Journal of design history. (2017). 1st ed. Oxford: Oxford university, p.all.
https://www.learn.ed.ac.uk/bbcswebdav/pid-3419771-dt-content-rid-6710531_1/xid-6710531_1