Dear Eduardo
great stuff - seems to be missing the final punch lines? The email is truncated?
I agree about the larger ideological concerns, including the need to review how we are controlled and controlling via notions - all notions - including TOOLS and Designer etc. I am reminded of conceptual issues involved with dis-abusing design students of the myth that design and invention are the same thing. I have included here an excerpt from a useful introductory book and TV series - the TV show has not shown in OZ - does anyone know if it is available to buy?
keith russell
OZ newcastle
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Extract from
White Heat: People and Technology
by Carroll Pursell
(Based on the BBC TV Series)
(London: BBC Books, 1994)
From Chapter Two: ?Out of the Loop?
Gyro Gearloose, Walt Disney?s cartoon inventor is popular in Brazil, where he is known as ?Professor? gearloose. The honorific is undeserved but significant. For Brazilians, since he is an inventor, and inventions are the result of scientific research, and scientific research is done in universities, Gyro obviously is a professor. In the American original, however, Gearloose is an ?independent? inventor, so impractical that he must tie his hat on his head or lose it; while his inventions always do something, they never do exactly what he intends. In contrast to Walt Disney?s evil scientist Dr Kronos, who works for an illegal power (the criminal Mr Big), Gearloose often works for legitimate power, the fabulously wealthy capitalist, ?Uncle? Scrooge McDuck.
The American view of Scrooge and the Brazilian perception of Gearloose tell us a great deal about popular beliefs about inventors. First, inventions don?t emerge out of the blue, they are created by someone. Second, inventors need support from somewhere. It is (and always has been) an expensive and complicated process to move from an idea to a product. Third, no object has only one use, and even the inventor is not always the best person to predict the many possible ways in which an invention may be used. Surprises are always to be expected. Fourth, inventors in our own time have acquired a reputation for, at the very least, eccentricity and, at the extreme, a kind of madness. Finally, the perception of the origin of inventions has shifted in this century from being the work of the individual genius to that of the trained expert, usually working in a scientific laboratory which is a part of some larger organization. (p.38)
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