How to design in a degrowth society?
Keywords: living conviviality, design as change-driver, reshaping society, empirical examples
Short abstract: The approach of today’s design practise should give prospects for the transformation into a post-growth and sustainable field of work. The shifting from a technocratic to a social construction qualifies designers for this job because he/she is traditionally responsible for the definition of the act of using and its shaping. The academic debates in design are all along critical. The idea of changing the consumption to radical turn off degrowth offers designers the possibility to experiment with reshaping society and products.
Long abstract: Capitalism is based on consumption. In our post-capitalist future you will have to find new systems of corporeal production and their distribution: consumption of products (food) or using of products (technical products) will be organised in two different logics of fabrication. But still we are living in the world of late capitalism. Pierre Bourdieus “Social space and symbolic power” is still between the conflicting priorities of production. The cultural legitimation is given by honour and honour needs time to accumulate it to income. The mass market is legitimated by consumption. The total capital is a point which is mixed of the poles of positioning and disposition in the 'social space': on one side the cultural values are dominant and the financial situation is fragile; on the other side economically it is well-placed but no cultural values. Designers work in this economical and cultural range of corporeal production, which is in capitalism organised by consumption in the mass market or favour of funding by the faith of investors. The governmentality (Michel Foucault) in our current mass market production is based on structures of a technocratic governance (norms, logistic, material requirements) by legal certainty and ensure safety. The modification of shapes by designers disguises the intractability of the production system. It should give the customer the impression of ostensively variance while its operates in the structures of existing system. The skills get legitimated by their educational access and professional specialized involvement in the field of production. The facts of quality management standards, engineering and business administration frame the shaping. The designer has the job to manage this restrictions to its best result. This optimised system of production goods works only through consumption and needs continuous replacement to attract attention in selling points. The expected cash flow maintains the legitimation referring to the resilience of the business and a warranted income for the employees. Some designers start there self-governing activity and have to draw attention to their intervening process. They experimentalize and elaborate the required behavioural dispositions, cultural techniques and social practices of daily live. Self-financing, the investment of time and power to accumulate knowledge, especially the embodied knowledge of sensitisation, sensomotoric and sensuality approach. Frequent usability tests and handling observations advance their developments. In this way designers work currently mostly independent or in loose companionships. They are economical vulnerable in a fragile position of a unsteadily self-sufficient venture. Apart from institutionalised scholarships self-organised designers have to create an ongoing cash income with the permanently risk to fail. Self-governing designers have to manage their business by frequently acquire their services to the market or attract by reputation of work. Andreas Reckwitz analyses a process of social aestheticisation by a 'dispositif of creativity” as a complex requirement of social expectations and personal desire. Consuming, participating and individualisation allow a continual improvement and variation of the personalized lifestylemarket. Designers offer in that way a support for your successful social individialisation to aestheticisation. But how to transform this to a post-growth and sustainable field? If aestheticisation can be recultivated to aesthetics, it can introduce you to political and social cognizance. This conversion offers designers the possibility to extricate themselves from the link of expanding consumption up to fulfilling experiences – a heterotopia. In the academic debates of qualities in and of design the non-capitalistic point of view represents the aspiration and target of the discipline. Idealists like Richard Buckminster Fuller in the early 1900thand later in the critical debates of the 1970/80thVictor Papanek developed the concept of a (ecological and post-capitalistic) good design through
the ground breaking ideas and uncompromising critique of contemporary design culture in “Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change”. Activists like John Thackara and his project “DOORS of perception” are evidences for a change to a political self-understanding of more and more designers.
At the moment the market of share-economy grows extremely and transforms handed down consumption markets to services for using-products. Designers flesh out ways of using and shape the parameters of the interaction and their implementation into tools. This is only a small part of the upcoming social transformation process, but it shows also that services can open a new kinds of dealing with objects. But how to transform the hole production of all-day-living? This renewing of living will require a transformation of the old-based and governmental regulated structures. Therefore it can not be initiated by designers themselves, it must be the self-evident conclusion of society with all governmental consequences. The allocation of a new structure with attractive forms and shapes of lifestyle will result. Will corporate identity shift into common identity? The transformation of property into services will continue and create common properties and using structures. Further a local organised production and distribution of consumption goods has to be developed. To surmount the status of a social movement into a mass market solution governing instructions have to regulate the transformation of economy and society.
But is design the driver of change?
To open a design process for different professions, the design consultancy IDEO and the Stanford University started to create in the 1990th 'Design thinking' as a method for practical creative resolution of issues with the intent of an improved future result. As a method it is open for all kind of disciplines – interdisciplinary teams profit from there various knowledge, experience and skills.
The anthropologist George Marcus started in 2006 the project “Rethinking Ethnography as a Design Process”. With different kinds of research formates try out to shift the ethnography observation to ethnography activation – to analyse complex systems with collaborative ethnographic research. This way of social research uses the city as their laboratory and discuss it in a reflexive way.
The sociologists Les Back and Nirmal Puwar edited with “Live Methods” a study of the process of “doing sociology” e.g. by experiments, collaboration, fiction, social media research, mapping, mash-ups, topologies. They fathom capabilities and possibilities of improvisation and reflection in a practical experience documentation to add stylistic devices on common methods.
Anthropology and sociology as social researchs want to upgrade their methods to a reflexive turn into practise level which allows to work in one of increasingly upcoming interdisciplinary research labs and spaces for free collaborative R&Ds (see: Berliner Senatsverwaltung für Wirtschaft, Technologie und Forschung, Landesinitiative 'Projekt Zukunft': Innovations- und Kreativlabs in Berlin – eine Bestandsaufnahme Räume und Events als Schnittstellen von Innovation und Kreativität, Dezember 2013), social projects or initiatives and artistic or political interventions e.g..
Designers still work in all 'social spaces' of production, but the upcoming collaborative spaces will offer open access to development tools and offer spaces to link people with different skills. To organise society with collaborative projects the focus will shift from a technical to a social dominated production, from productivity to creativity. A fight against the old industrial governmentality and a redefinition of a social governmentality future will approach political proceedings.
The special skills of designers in collaboratives are still their abilities to visualise ideas and turn them into reality and materiality. They know how to create, to discuss, to project and how to produce agreeable and comfortable solutions. Design goes into the practise, too. The permanent dialogue with users and specialists is as possible as strategies of self-sufficiency in collaborative organised structures.
Empirical examples and photos will illustrate this approach.